Nigerian Belgian artist Otobong Nkanga creates tapestries, drawings, videos, sculptures, and performances that feature narratives of wounding and healing, making metaphorical links between the landscape and the traumatized human body. Mapping new paths toward recovery, Nkanga’s work conveys the necessity of acknowledging the violence caused by exploiting natural and human resources if we are to overcome the damaging legacy of extraction under colonialism and global capitalism. This curated selection is part of the Tennessee Triennial, a statewide series of exhibitions and performances organized by Tri-Star Arts in coordination with consulting curator María Magdalena Campos-Pons that explores the theme of repair and healing, particularly with regards to the Global South and its colonial history.

Nkanga has exhibited in such venues as Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Centre Pompidou, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Moderna Museet, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Tate Modern, Tate St Ives, and Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa. Her work has been included in such group exhibitions as the 58th Venice Biennale, documenta 14, 13th Biennale de Lyon, 31st Bienal de São Paulo, and 8th Berlin Biennale.

This major exhibition is devoted to one of today’s leading artists, whose multidisciplinary practice combines aspects of traditional Indigenous art and culture with a modernist visual vocabulary. Born in Colorado in 1972, Jeffrey Gibson is of Cherokee heritage and a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw. His vibrant work, which is represented in more than twenty permanent collections across the United States, is a call for Indigenous empowerment as well as queer visibility and environmental sustainability. The Body Electric presents his recent paintings, sculpture, video, and installations, along with a large site-specific mural THE LAND IS SPEAKING | ARE YOU LISTENING. The exhibition’s title is inspired by a song written for the 1980 movie musical Fame, which drew from Walt Whitman’s poem “I Sing the Body Electric” from his 1855 collection Leaves of Grass. The lyrics reverently acknowledge our place in the natural world while honoring the universality of endings and beginnings.

Gibson holds a MA at the Royal College of Art in London and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is currently a visiting artist at Bard College in New York. He is represented in the permanent collections of museums including the Denver Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Portland Museum of Art, High Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Seattle Art Museum, and Smithsonian American Art Museum. Gibson is a 2019 MacArthur Fellow.