Buchanan Arts
Address: 1409 Buchanan Street, Nashville, TN 37208
Dates: February 16, 2023
Hours: 2 - 6pm
Website: tnstate.edu/art/gallery.aspx
Please join us at Buchanan Arts on February 16, 2023, from 2:00 to 6:00 PM to help build clay vessels representing cypress knees, part of the Woven Wind project. A cypress knee is a distinctive structure forming above the roots of a cypress tree. Their function is unknown. They are seen on trees growing in swamps. The clay objects will be displayed at the TSU Hiram Van Gordon Gallery from May 15 -June 9, and in Sewanee University Art Gallery in August 2023. All ages and skill levels are welcome. Shop technicians will assist during the process of working with a wheel or manipulating the material.
In Woven Wind project, the cypress roots represent memories, people, gathering of community, and our connection to the land. “The truth may be that cypress knees evolved in response to past environmental pressures that no longer exist, in which case their function may be lost in the depths of time”.[1] Woven Wind is a multi-layered research project drawing from artistic translations of the Lovell- Quitman archive, which includes extensive Quitman Plantation records and photographs of the Civil War era. In a time of social and racial reckoning and division in the U.S., Woven Wind constructs an artistic platform for education, conversation, empathy, and healing. Its artistic team includes artists Vesna Pavlović, Mélisande Short-Colomb, Marlos E’van, Courtney Adair Johnson, musician/artist Rod McGaha, genealogist Jan Hillegas, and historian Woody Register, director of the Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation at the University of the South. Archival research, fieldwork, genealogical findings, and conversations with the descendants in Nashville and Sewanee, TN, and Natchez, MS inform the outcomes of the project. Follow us on Instagram at @thewovenwind.
Woven Wind is supported by Vanderbilt University Scaling Success Grant, Tennessee Arts Commission Arts Access Grant, Mellon Partners for Humanities Education Collaboration Grant, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee State University, Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy Catalyst Grant, and The Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation at the University of the South, Sewanee. The workshop is sponsored by EADJ as part of the 2023 Tennessee Triennial for Contemporary Art: RE-PAIR, Consulting Curator and Ambassador Dr. María Magdalena Campos-Pons.
[1] https://arboretum.harvard.edu/stories/cypress-knees-an-enduring-enigma/
Instructional Artists: Ash Atterberry (Hand Wings Ceramics), John Donovan (Tenure Ceramics/Buchanan Arts), Portia Jones (Vanderbilt Art student), Cesar Pita (Buchanan Arts), Susan DeMay (Artist), Raheleh Filsoofi (Vanderbilt University)
Jan Hillegas, MS civil rights veteran
Jan Hillegas has helped hundreds of families learn about their Mississippi ancestors and also documents other history through New Mississippi, Inc. She co-edited the Mississippi narratives of formerly enslaved people and has compiled preliminary lists of people legally executed and lynched in the state. She remains active in progressive movements and works toward a Jackson resource center for learning from her 56-year archive (conversationsms@hotmail.com), archives of others, and intergenerational conversations. For Woven Wind, she found records linking Monmouth servants to living members of the Toles family and is continuing to search for additional descendants from John A. Quitman's several plantations.
Mélisande Short-Colomb
Mélisande Short-Colomb is a founding member of the GU272 Advocacy Team. She serves on the Georgetown Memory Project’s Board of Advisors and the GU272 Descendants Association. Mélisande is a descendant of two families sold in 1838 by the Society of Jesus to keep Georgetown afloat. She is a recipient of a 2019 Fr. Bunn Award for journalistic excellence for the “GU272 Referendum to Create a New Legacy" commentary. Under the direction of Derek Goldman, Mélisande wrote Here I Am, one-person play that interweaves her personal story of becoming a Georgetown student after discovering she descended from slaves sold for the benefit of Georgetown. A native of New Orleans, Mélisande began her studies at Georgetown in August of 2017 after retiring from a lengthy culinary career. Mélisande will lead workshops with artists and students. The project team connected with Méli during the Georgetown Memory Project workshop, centered on the ethics of connecting with living descendants of people enslaved.
Courtney Adair Johnson
Courtney Adair Johnson is an artist and curator based in Nashville, TN. Her art practice works to create sustainable community through reuse awareness. She is interested in creating new ideas with art to generate awareness of our waste and consumption habits. With her public and academic work, she finds importance in information sharing and working on topics of social justice, history, and cultural and neighborhood preservation. Courtney has led reuse projects with Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Tennessee Craft and Springboard for the Arts (Fergus Falls). She is presently Gallery Director of Tennessee State University Art Department and Co-Builder of McGruder Social Practice Artist Residency (M-SPAR).
Woody Register
Woody Register teaches post-Civil War U.S. history and serves as director of the Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation at Sewanee the University of the South. Register graduated from Sewanee in 1980 and received his doctorate in history in 1991 from Brown University. He came to Sewanee in 1992 and teaches courses on Nineteenth and Twentieth Century American society and culture, gender and slavery’s role in the development of American institutions and society for nearly thirty years. As a colleague. collaborator and friend for over twenty years, Houston Bryan Roberson and his impact as a teacher, scholar, and citizen continues to inspire and guide Woody’s work. Woody’s involvement with the Roberson project was sparked first by his own research into Sewanee’s particular history in connection with slavery, and was then influenced but he international movement among colleges and universities to study the history and impact of their institutions indebtedness to slaver — and slavery’s indebtedness to their institutions.
Vesna Pavlović
Vesna Pavlović joined the Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation, at the University of the South (Sewanee) in 2018. In her initial encounter with the archive, and in partnership with Professor Woody Register, she worked with the students of the History 328: Slavery, Race, and the University class to present the archival records for the Sewanee community. During a community screening at the Sewanee’s historic Convocation Hall in 2018, students read the names of the enslaved found in the university archive, concerned that presenting their findings in any other way would further perpetuate objectification and trauma. (View screening https://www.vesna-pavlovic.com/the-lovell-family-archive ) Vesna Pavlović (Serbia/USA) obtained her MFA degree in Visual Arts from Columbia University in New York in 2007. She is an Associate Professor of Art at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Her projects examine the evolving relationship between memory in contemporary culture and the technologies of photographic image production. Expanding the photographic image beyond its frame, traditional format, and the narrative is central to her artistic strategies. She examines photographic representation of specific political and cultural histories, which include photographic archives and related artifacts.
Marlos E’van
Marlos E’van is a Nashville based artist, E’van interweaves different mediums such as painting, performance, and filmmaking to create worlds in which their art recollects black histories: joy, pain, celebration, sorrow, and complex emotions from reenacted scenes of American histories. A subtle vernacular in expression has caught recognition from such publications such as Hyperallergic and Native Magazine. In addition to their work as an artist, E’van co-founded/co-designs M-SPAR, McGruder Social Practice Artist Residency out of the McGruder Center in North Nashville. Working as an educator in a hard-hit redlined Nashville neighborhood, E’van actively listens to their pupils, gathering stories that also inform E’van’s paintings. Their own life creates first-person narratives in paintings targeting marginalization, stemming from a queer black history rooted in his home state of Mississippi. Marlos E’van’s work is included in multiple Southern collections, has been shown in VA, TN, GA, and NY. They have been awarded the Mellon Foundation for McGruder, and the Metro Arts Thrive grant. Marlos received their B.F.A. from Watkins College of Art, Nashville, TN.
Rod McGaha
A native born Chicagoan, Rod McGaha first showed up on Chicago's jazz scene as a young prodigy, during an era when young lions were making more than just a little roar. Learning under and garnering the attention of legends like Von Freeman and Clark Terry at a young age, MaGaha received an invite from none other than Wynton Marsalis himself, to come to New York to audition for a spot as one of the newest young lions in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, he felt that life was calling him in a different direction, to be a different kind of lion. Rod has played concerts in Egypt, Japan, Germany, South Africa, Poland and Mexico. He has played in bands for Kenny Rogers, Bebe and CeCe Winans, and Shelby Lynne while also blessing the stages of Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center and Chicago's legendary Jazz Showcase, to name a few. Rod is a visual artist and musician.