Press Release: Artist Roster & Curators
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
TENNESSEE TRIENNIAL FOR CONTEMPORARY ART
ARTIST ROSTER
CURATORS AND VENUES
HIGHLIGHT WEEKENDS
RE-PAIR is the concept and core thematic idea to launch the inaugural statewide Tennessee Triennial.
“To heal, suture, and recompose fractured bodies. We propose a new site of encounters, with yet undefined edges, borders, territories. These will be cartographies of the mind as well as geographies of the land.”
“RE-PAIR invites us all to participate deeply as artists, organizers and the public in the invigoration at the intersection of art and sociability. The overarching theme of RE-PAIR solicits an empathetic consideration of context and space, history and commons, deeply woven into the fabric of Tennessee’s roots.”
- Dr. María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Consulting Curator and Ambassador for the 2023 Tennessee Triennial for Contemporary Art: RE-PAIR
Kenturah Davis. planar vessel XIII. 2023. Fugitive ink photogram, debossed text, carbon pencil rubbing on Igarashi kozo paper, shifu (paper thread weft, cotton warp) weaving in artist frame. 41 x 39.625 x 4 in. photo credit: Ruben Diaz.
Tri-Star Arts is pleased to announce the artist roster, curators, and highlight weekend dates for the inaugural Tennessee Triennial for Contemporary Art: RE-PAIR, opening January 27, 2023 and on view through May 7, 2023. The recent changes and movements in the world inform our vision and the galvanizing spirit that centers on the rich history of the arts in Tennessee as a means to engage excellence in contemporary art.
Visual art offers a tool towards a common language fostering dialogue across communities, around the state, the country and internationally. The Tennessee Triennial serves as an experience to help us process this moment and propel us forward. It is a geographically fluid conversation that engages people of all ages and backgrounds.
The Tennessee Triennial has chosen a statewide model that is set apart and unprecedented. Curators from institutions in Memphis, Nashville, Knoxville, and Chattanooga have been invited to respond to the theme of RE-PAIR, authored by Consulting Curator, Dr. María Magdalena Campos-Pons. This horizontal approach allows for each curator to be active in selecting participating artists. The Tennessee Triennial is a collective endeavor that emphasizes Tennessee’s contemporary art community while including national and international perspectives.
This full theme is included below, following this press release.
The participating venues along with their curators and artists are presented below.
2023 Tennessee Triennial Artist Roster
WEST TENNESSEE
MEMPHIS
Memphis Brooks Museum of Art (Curator: Patricia Daigle)
Tommy Kha
Memphis River Parks Partnership (Curator: George Abbott)
Hank Willis Thomas
Tone (Curator: Kylon Wagner)
Talibah Safiya
Bertram Williams Jr.
UrbanArt Commission (Curator: Lauren Kennedy)
Sarah Elizabeth Cornejo
Verushka Dior of The Mane Wildling
Joel Parsons
MIDDLE TENNESSEE
NASHVILLE
Cheekwood (Curator: Eric Birkle)
Elizabeth Turk
Engine for Art, Democracy & Justice (Curatorial advisory committee)
Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara
Jerry Atnip
Javier Castro
Sandra Ceballos
Farrar Cosumato
Michelle Eistrup
Jeannette Ehlers
Adama Delphine Fawundu
Jana Harper
Mark Barrett Hosford
Helina Metaferia
Ernesto Milian
Tahila Mintz
Nell
Claudia Padrón
Vesna Pavlović
Matthew Ritchie
Cristal Chanelle Truscott
Vadis Turner
John Warren
Cosmo Whyte
Antonia Wright
Frist Art Museum (Curator: Mark Scala)
Jeffrey Gibson
Otobong Nkanga
Note: "Jeffrey Gibson: The Body Electric" was organized by SITE Santa Fe and curated by Brandee Caoba. The presentation at the Frist Art Museum is overseen by Katie Delmez.
Fisk University Galleries (Curator: Jamaal Sheats)
Alicia Henry
The Parthenon (Curator: Jennifer Richardson)
Houston Cofield
Desmond Lewis
Lakesha Moore
Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery (Curators: Raheleh Filsoofi with Amanda Hellman and Sophia Liu)
Beizar Aradini
Jasmine Baetz
Nuveen Barwari
Habiba El Sayed
Raheleh Filsoofi
Kimia Ferdowsi Kline
Laleh Mehran
Kris Ramman
EAST TENNESSEE
KNOXVILLE
Big Ears Festival (Curator: Rachel Milford)
Lonnie Holley
Knoxville Museum of Art (Curators: Kelsie Conley and Stephen Wicks)
Willie Cole
Katie Hargrave & Meredith Laura Lynn
Bessie Harvey
Lonnie Holley
Kahlil Robert Irving
Suzanne Jackson
Mary Laube
Annabeth Marks
Rosemary Mayer
Althea Murphy-Price
Betye Saar
Faith Wilding
Tri-Star Arts (Curator: Brian R. Jobe)
Kenturah Davis
Rubens Ghenov
Hank Willis Thomas
CHATTANOOGA
Hunter Museum of American Art (Curator: Nandini Makrandi)
Noel Anderson
Dawoud Bey
Sanford Biggers
Nick Cave
Leonardo Drew
Gajin Fujita
Fabiola Jean-Louis
Deborah Luster
Jeanine Michna-Bales
Abelardo Morrell
Shirin Neshat
Kiki Smith
Stan Squirewell
Hank Willis Thomas
Institute of Contemporary Art at UTC (Curator: Rachel Waldrop)
Stacy Kranitz
Stove Works (Curator: Josiah Golson)
J. Adams
Jequise Beverly
Sean Clark
Jordan Scruggs
The following are unique multi-site venues:
Big Ears Festival (Community Arts Director: Rachel Milford)
Engine for Art, Democracy & Justice (EADJ) (Program Manager: Anais Daly)
For the most current information about EADJ’s artist roster, programming and the full calendar of workshops, discussion panels, classes, performances, projects & film/audio series with additional information on how to pre-order the Tennessee Triennial: RE-PAIR catalog, follow the EADJ blog FRESH PRODUCE. Stay tuned for continued announcements about the upcoming Nashville highlight weekend, March 1- 4, 2023, co-organized by EADJ. EADJ is a program founded by Dr. María Magdalena Campos-Pons.
The Knoxville Museum of Art, Stove Works, Engine for Art, Democracy & Justice, and the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art are partners with the Tennessee Triennial for Contemporary Art through hosting celebration events during highlight weekends.
Stacy Kranitz. Wytheville, Virginia. 2012.
2023 Tennessee Triennial Highlight Weekends
January 26- 28, 2023: Knoxville
February 16- 18, 2023: Chattanooga
March 1- 4, 2023: Nashville
April 27- 29, 2023: Memphis
These weekends will include receptions and celebratory events at select participating venues.
Additionally, we will publicize community venues across Tennessee with exhibitions or special projects that respond to our theme of RE-PAIR.
Memphis Tourism, the Nashville Convention and Visitors Corporation, and Visit Knoxville are partners with the Tennessee Triennial for Contemporary Art through promotion, marketing and financial support.
About the 2023 Consulting Curator and Ambassador:
María Magdalena Campos-Pons is the Cornelius Vanderbilt Endowed Chair Professor of Fine Arts. Campos-Pons interdisciplinary practice has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Canada, among other institutions. She has presented over thirty solo performances commissioned by institutions like the Guggenheim and the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. She also participated in the 49th Venice Biennial, the 55th Venice Biennial, Documenta14, Johannesburg Biennale, Liverpool Biennial, 3rd Biennial of Bahia, Prospect 4 and Havana Biennials. Her works are held in over 50 museums around the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Perez Art Museum, Miami. A survey of her practice was held at IMA in 2007.
Campos-Pons is the founder EADJ Vanderbilt and of Intermittent Rivers / Rios Intermitentes project in Matanzas, Cuba. Campos-Pons is the recipients of numerous awards.
About the Tennessee Triennial Organizer:
Tri-Star Arts serves Tennessee by cultivating and spotlighting the contemporary visual art scenes in each region while fostering a unified statewide art scene. Tri-Star Arts programs promote art dialogue between the different cities in the state, and between the state and the nation.
Tri-Star Arts initiatives include a gallery space and artist studios at the historic Candoro Marble Building, annual Current Art Fund project grants, the forthcoming 2023 Tennessee Triennial, statewide collaborative projects, and the LocateArts.org web resource.
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Press Contact for Tennessee Triennial
Brian R. Jobe, brian@tristararts.org
Executive Director & Co-Founder, Tri-Star Arts
Each participating Tennessee Triennial venue has curated and produced its exhibition and selected artwork and content for their exhibition. Tri-Star Arts is acting as the organizing entity of the Tennessee Triennial for Contemporary Art program and does not endorse any particular artist, content or artwork presented in association with the Tennessee Triennial.
Alicia Henry. Untitled. 2019. mixed media, size variable. photo credit Toni Hafkensheid.
THEME OF RE-PAIR
Presented for the 2023 Inaugural Tennessee Triennial by
Dr. María Magdalena Campos-Pons
Vanderbilt Cornelius Endowed Chair Professor of Fine Arts
Founder of the Engine for Art, Democracy & Justice
RE-PAIR is the concept and core idea to launch the Inaugural statewide Tennessee Triennial, slated for 2023. Exhibition spaces, venues and communities prepare to present the Tennessee Triennial exhibition with the following thematic guidelines.
To heal, suture, and recompose fractured bodies. We propose a new site of encounters, with yet undefined edges, borders, territories. These will be cartographies of the mind as well as geographies of the land.
Ours is a complex time in history. Both excesses and fundamental limitations define the present moment. The planet is frail, societal contracts instable, biology in a spin of uncertainties. Technologies lure and frighten us all at once.
Can we conquer our uneasiness with an attitude that mends the fractures of our time? Can we re-pair, patch and rebuild our fragile spirits, bodies, cities, political institutions and economic relationships?
RE-PAIR asks you to pledge, to reconsider the function of the arts, the meaning of art as a critical force in society and enhancer of human experiences. Can Art galvanize our energies to rebuild our towns with forums, and ideas that bring solutions to isolation, poverty, despair?
RE-PAIR Tennessee Triennial invites us all to participate deeply as artists, organizers and public(s) in the invigoration at the intersection of art and sociability. The overarching theme of Re-pair solicits an empathetic consideration of context and space, history and commons, deeply woven into the fabric of Tennessee’s roots. In order to Re-pair, one must locate what is at fault, in order to heal, one must find the wound. Re-pair is all in love. The Tennessee Triennial is a beautiful opportunity, in this incredible moment, to reciprocate across the state to spotlight our community of artists and public(s) through collaboration and through opening the lines of communication locally and to anyone who has roots across the global south, and across the world. To Re-pair is to straddle Art and Sociability, a feeling, an action, a soft touch.
The statewide Triennial/Biennial model for exhibition is inherently collaborative, horizontally themed and externally communicated. Programs can bridge communities, disciplines, and geographies. The global spotlight should be on the artists of Tennessee, the rich history of arts throughout the state’s history, the hard work and rich array of spaces and organizations and this opportunity to engage a global conversation on art, democracy and our shared experience.
Rubens Ghenov. Shaman Of Our Latent State.