Episode 68: Susan Edwards

#Nashville is hot. Much larger than Atlanta, its metro population is surging, and this vitality is reflected in multiple ways. In this episode we hear from Susan Edwards, the director of its Frist Art Museum since 2004, and learn about the institution’s origins in an Art Deco post office and its trajectory to become of the South’s most vital museums, along with the city’s philanthropic culture, its stubborn identity as a democratic stronghold in a reliably Republican state, the challenges it met and addressed throughout 2020 to today, and the arc of her career—up to and including recent certification in art crime training. Equipped with a doctorate in art history and a knighthood conferred by the French Republic, she has flourished in a cultural milieu best known for a sister organization called the Grand Old Opry—and brought diversity and distinction to Tennessee without a hint of pretension.