April 5 – July 24, 2022
Opening reception: Friday, April 8, 5:30 pm
Artist talk: Friday, May 13, 6 pm
Adrienne Elise Tarver’s paintings and works on paper feature bold figures and botanical forms, brought to life by
a warm palette rich with dynamic overtones and gradients. The artist’s latest series, Manifesting Paradise, is focused
on the future: a hopeful, beautiful projection in the face of the socioeconomic and cultural injustices Black people face in America. In her flowing mystical compositions, such as the hand, the eye, and the full moon, she reconjures the occult and the unknowable, and in doing so, redefines the future of Black bodies – especially the bodies of Black women – as untouchably beautiful and sacred. Manifesting Paradise encompasses multiple stages of Tarver’s prolific career and reflects a cumulative desire to remove uncertainty from the future. The work instead serves as a celebration of what is to come: a promise of progress, self-fulfillment, and unbridled joy.
Adrienne Elise Tarver is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and cultural worker with a practice that spans painting, sculpture, installation, photography, textiles, and video. Her work addresses the complexity and invisibility of black female identity from the history within domestic spaces to the fantasy of the tropical seductress to 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 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.