Scent: Connections, Confrontations, Memory

Scent is everywhere; almost everyone can smell. But how cultures and individuals use and depict scent is a testament to shared experience. In spring 2026, the Vanderbilt University Museum of Art explores art that captures the olfactory in Scent: Connection, Confrontation, Memory, an exhibition of the ways smell becomes seen and supported, and how artists from a wide range of cultures have represented its ephemeral but ever-present quality.

Bringing together interactive installation, sculpture, painting, photography, and a new performance commission from Ainu artist Kanako Uzawa, Scent revels in the meanings and infinite possibilities of a very human sense, physically contained and artistically represented.