The Parthenon
25th at West End Ave,
Centennial Park,
Nashville, TN 37201
(615) 862-8431
Map

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Visit the Parthenon website: www.parthenon.org

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Exhibitions:

WISH YOU WERE HERE: CULTURAL TOURISM AND THE PARTHENON

ORIGINS OF NASHVILLE’S PARTHENON

WISH YOU WERE HERE: CULTURAL TOURISM AND THE PARTHENON
January 28-May 19, 2012

Nashville’s Parthenon, one of the city’s most beloved buildings, is a must-see for visitors to the city, just as the ancient Parthenon in Athens, Greece, is first on the list for travelers there. Ever since the dawn of photography in the nineteenth century, amateurs and professionals alike have turned their lenses on these two sites to capture their beauty and grandeur.

A new exhibition at the Parthenon will focus on the link between travel and photography through two important holdings in the museum’s collection: a rare 1870 album of photographs of the ancient Acropolis by William J. Stillman, titled The Acropolis of Athens, Illustrated Picturesquely and Architecturally in Photography, and the museum’s collection of over 200 postcards of Nashville’s Parthenon and its setting of Centennial Park, both of which rely on photography and subsequent innovations.

While the album of photographs and the collection of postcards differ in many ways—intended audience, cost of production, and method of distribution, to name a few—they share much in common. Both were created to illustrate a significant landmark and its setting, whether that setting was the Acropolis and Athens or Centennial Park and Nashville. Both were intended to allow people who may not have visited these sites a glimpse into what they looked like and to convey information about them.

In addition, both the book and the collection of postcards have become important historical documents, allowing for comparison between now and then. For over one hundred years, both the Acropolis and Centennial Park have been sites of constant change. At the time of Stillman’s photographs, the enormous project to excavate and renovate the Acropolis monuments had begun only recently; today, many more of the buildings have been restored as fully as possible. Centennial Park has also seen numerous changes, as has Nashville’s Parthenon itself, which, like the ancient building, has seen major renovation.

The exhibition explores these themes, as well as considering the individual objects on view, delving into their fascinating histories and examining what they reveal to us today.

The Parthenon’s copy of The Acropolis of Athens was rediscovered by a curator in the Parthenon’s storage room several years ago. A generous donation by art patrons Hope and Howard Stringer allowed museum staff to take the book to a conservator, whose work stabilized the volume so that it could be displayed. The book is one of only a dozen extant copies in public collections.

The postcards, which span over one hundred years of the Parthenon and Centennial Park’s history, were given to the museum by local collector and historian Ridley Wills II. They reveal the numerous changes that have taken place in the Park since it opened to the public in the early 1900s. The exhibition, therefore, is a timely one, as new changes will come with the implementation of the Centennial Park Master Plan.

ORIGINS OF NASHVILLE’S PARTHENON
New permanent exhibition exploring the history of Nashville’s beloved landmark
OPENS NOVEMBER 8

One of the first questions visitors and newcomers to Nashville have is “Why does Nashville have a replica of the ancient Parthenon?” This building, so beloved by the city, has a fascinating history. It’s hard to imagine Nashville without the Parthenon, but there were many years when its future was uncertain.

A new installation about the Parthenon explores its fascinating origin story, as the Fine Arts Building for the 1897 Tennessee Centennial Exposition, held in what is now Centennial Park to celebrate Tennessee’s hundredth year as a state. The exhibition delves into the Centennial Exposition (similar to a World’s Fair), exploring how Nashville presented itself to a national audience a generation after the Civil War.

After the Exposition ended, the Parthenon was in danger of being torn down. Nashvillians, enamored with the idea of their city’s nickname “The Athens of the South” made permanent in building form, clamored for it to remain. For over twenty years, the plaster and wood Parthenon stood in Centennial Park, until it was rebuilt out of concrete in the 1920s.

In 1931, renovation was complete, and the Parthenon has been open ever since, honoring the city’s legacy as a center of learning—much like ancient Athens—as well as the building’s origins as the Fine Arts Building, with its art galleries on the lower level.

The exhibition features many rare and seldom exhibited objects, artifacts, and souvenirs from the Centennial Exposition and the Parthenon over the past 115 years. Local lawyer, collector, historian, and ninth-generation Nashvillian David Ewing has loaned his entire collection of Exposition and Parthenon memorabilia, amassed over the past twenty years, to the Parthenon for this exhibition.

The exhibition will also feature props from the film Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, part of which was filmed in Centennial Park in 2009. In the movie, the main characters make a trip to Nashville to retrieve a pearl from inside Nashville’s Parthenon. Through a generous loan from the 20th Century Fox Film Corporation, several items from the movie, including a script and a pearl, will be on view for several months.