Details:
① Artwork:
She who moves currents
This piece is part of the artist’s ongoing series titled “Manifesting Paradise,” in which she creates a speculative framework that reimagines Black female archetypes as figures at rest within abundant landscapes. Bodies and foliage are assembled from hand-painted, cut-paper pieces and affixed to ink-stained panels. Tarver allows pigments to pool and bleed across the paper, selecting low contrast, dark hues that create the perception of sight in the pitch dark—a concept inspired by the writings of Bell Hooks.
Adrienne Elise Tarver uses painting, sculpture, installation, photography, textiles, and video to address the complexity and invisibility of Black female identity. Her iconography is inspired by the mythologized assumptions of the African diaspora, cultural icons, oral and speculative histories centering on domestic space, and archetypes like the tropical seductress and the spiritual matriarch.
Specs:
③ Artist:
Adrienne Elise Tarver is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and cultural worker with a practice that spans painting, sculpture, installation, photography, textiles, and video. Tarver’s work addresses the complexity and invisibility of Black female identity, inspired by the mythologized assumptions of the African diaspora, cultural icons, oral and speculative histories centering on domestic space, and archetypes like the tropical seductress and the spiritual matriarch.
Adrienne Elise Tarver was born in 1985 in New Jersey and lives in Brooklyn, NY. She received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, IL (2011) and a BFA from Boston University in Boston, MA (2007).
Tarver’s work has been exhibited at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, CT; the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center in Atlanta, GA; Wedge Curatorial in Toronto, Canada; Hollis Taggart in New York City, NY; A-M Gallery in Sydney, Australia; and OCHI in Los Angeles, CA and Sun Valley, ID.
Tarver won a Silver Art Projects Artist-in-Residence (2022-2023) and a Nancy Graves Visual Art Grant (2022).
Tarver’s work has been featured in various publications, including The New York Times, Forbes, Brooklyn Magazine, ArtNews, ArtNet, Whitewall Magazine, and Hyperallergic.
