Women have long been at the center of Nashville’s vibrant visual arts community. Especially now, during the city’s current period of growth, an outsized number of local women artists are receiving prestigious grants, residencies, and awards; are written about by respected critics; and are showing their work across the globe. Many have also dedicated years, even decades, to teaching or building impactful community organizations.
In Her Place highlights the prominent position of women artists here in Music City and beyond through nearly one hundred artworks spanning painting, sculpture, textile, and installation. Selected works by this intergenerational group of Nashville-based women relate broadly to place—whether conceived of as the view of a garden outside a studio window, the influence of being raised in the American South, a moment in time, or the evocation of an ancestral homeland outside of the United States.
Critiquing the exclusion of women from the art-historical canon, scholar Linda Nochlin famously asked in 1971, “Why have there been no great women artists?” In response to her rhetorical question, we offer this exhibition in our largest gallery space as part of the Frist Art Museum’s twenty-fifth anniversary to celebrate the achievements of women artists right here in Nashville over the last four decades.
Materiality and Memory
Materials used in art often carry associations with time, place, and identity. Those chosen by the artists featured in this section are central to their art-making practices. They creatively repurpose these media, transforming them into representations of personal stories or shared traditions. Jodi Hays, for example, uses old cardboard, textiles, and found objects to consider the associations of those modest materials with class, region, and the history or art. Lakesha Calvin made the large sculpture in the center of this gallery with wooden pallets to pay homage to her father’s labor, while Vadis Turner works with domestic materials such as bedsheets and curtains to disrupt gendered narratives.
Cultural Foundations
As a community passes down traditions, it forms a culture, often rooted in a geographical place. In the works on view in this section, artists examine their relationships to ancestral cultures and how they connect to their lives in Nashville. Tehran-born ceramicist Raheleh Filsoofi makes vessels and prints from clay gathered in Nashville and other US cities. Briena Harmening, who was born and raised in Tennessee, explores aspects of Southern identity through text-based quilts that feature common colloquial expressions. Persian American artist Kimia Ferdowsi Kline blends Eastern ornamentation and symmetry with Western modernist and folk-art traditions to bridge cultures and tell layered stories. María Magdalena Campos-Pons and Yanira Vissepó maintain connections to the Caribbean, where they were both born, by including botanicals native to that region in their work.
Scenes and Dreams
The notion of place can extend beyond our everyday reality. The artists in the next two galleries blend the familiar with the unexpected to create dreamlike worlds that explore a wide range of topics, such as history, domestic life, and the natural environment. Shannon Cartier Lucy turns ordinary scenes into surreal moments; in one work, a girl reads on the couch, unaware that it is on fire. With precisely rendered graphite drawings and paintings, Marilyn Murphy places otherwise recognizable scenes in impossible settings, imbuing them with a sense of the uncanny. Paintings by Emily Weiner and Karen Seapker feature identifiable elements, including Gothic architecture, human hands, and native plant life, but their stylization adds a distinct otherworldliness.
Patterns and Abstraction
Artists featured in this final section embrace abstraction, stripping away representational details to focus on formal exploration. For example, Carol Mode reconstructs the surfaces of her paintings with bright colors, shapes, and lines that interact with the textured brush strokes of their backgrounds. While they share an abstract language of complex geometric patterns, rich tactile surfaces, and vibrant colors, the works in this gallery express a variety of themes. Sisavanh Phouthavong Houghton’s dynamic compositions of saturated colors, undulating lines, and fragmented forms refer to her experiences as a Laotian refugee and to the chaos and disruption of war. Evoking memory and family, the patterns in Kelly S. Williams’s carefully rendered tondos are derived from her late grandmother’s collection of domestic textiles.
