Join us at UChicago for a panel discussion featuring artist Adrienne Elise Tarver, historian Adam Green, journalist Natalie Moore, and Assistant Curator Jenée-Daria Strand, as they discuss representation, agency, and resistance in relation to Tarver’s Public Art Fund exhibition, She who sits. Tarver’s paintings aim to center an overlooked protagonist and invite audiences to reflect on the accepted roles of Black women in both public and private spaces. Highlighting overlapping areas of interest and research between the panelists, the conversation will address topics of race, gender, visibility, and agency in urban and public spaces.
Reception to follow.
Presented by Arts + Public Life; the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, & Culture; Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity; Reva & David Logan Center for the Arts; Open Practice Committee in the Department of Visual Arts; Public Art Fund; and Smart Museum of Art.
About the Artist
Adrienne Elise Tarver is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY with a practice that spans painting, sculpture, installation, photography, textiles, and video. Her work addresses the complexity and invisibility of Black female identity including the history within domestic spaces, the fantasy of the tropical seductress, and the archetype of the all-knowing spiritual matriarch.
She has exhibited nationally and abroad, including solo shows at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Connecticut; the Academy Art Museum in Maryland; Atlanta Contemporary in Atlanta, Georgia; Dinner Gallery (formerly Victori+Mo) in New York; Ochi Projects in Los Angeles; Wave Hill in the Bronx, NY; BRIC Project Room in Brooklyn; and A-M Gallery in Sydney, Australia and two-person exhibitions at Hollis Taggart in New York; Wedge Curatorial in Toronto, Canada. She recently received the Distinguished Alumni Award from her alma mater, Boston University, and the Nancy Graves Foundation Grant. She has been commissioned for projects through the New York MTA, the Public Art Fund, Google, Art Aspen, and Pulse Art Fair and has been featured in online and print publications including the New York Times, Forbes, Brooklyn Magazine, ArtNews, ArtNet, Blouin ArtInfo, Whitewall Magazine, and Hyperallergic, among others. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and BFA from Boston University.