Workshop of the World: Works by Tabitha Arnold — [curator]

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Featuring: Tabitha Arnold

Curated by: Tess Wei

View exhibition catalog here

The List Gallery is pleased to present Workshop of the World, the first major solo exhibition of works by Chattanooga-based artist Tabitha Arnold. Curated by Exhibitions Manager & Associate Curator Tess Wei, the exhibition, accompanying catalog, and related events are funded by the Phillip Bruno Fine Art Fund.

Arnold’s tapestries and works on paper are inspired by contemporary labor movements, as well as her own experiences as a worker, socialist organizer, and artist coming of age during a wave of unionization efforts in the United States. She utilizes a self-taught method of punch-needle embroidery to create medium and large-scale tapestries that draw inspiration from a range of art historical traditions, including Eastern Orthodox icons, Mexican mural paintings, Gee's Bend quilts, and Afghan war rugs.

Arnold’s deep interest in workers’ rights and social and racial justice efforts informs her imagery: assembly lines in factories; people protesting and striking in the streets; police cars flipped and prisons evaded. Arnold lived for nine years in Philadelphia, and cites the city’s political environment—from the Black Lives Matter protests to the unionization efforts occurring across multiple institutions—as a key catalyst for her own radicalization and source of content. In pieces such as This Woman’s Work (2021) and Whose Streets (2020), Arnold weaves in recognizable landmarks, such as Philadelphia’s City Hall, reinforcing the specificity of place in her narratives. Arnold’s use of Workshop of the World, as both the exhibition title and the title of a large-scale diptych displayed in the front gallery, provides another acknowledgement of the city’s importance to her work and research: Philadelphia was called the Workshop of the World during the industrial age due to the region’s impressive industrial infrastructure.

The importance of signs, symbols, and printed text is reiterated in her small-scale works on paper, which include black-and-white ink drawings and colorful gouache paintings. Although Arnold’s drawings reiterate the type of images she uses in her textiles, they also include contemporary protest chants, such as “Whose streets? Our streets!” or “The people united will never be defeated.” Her series of gouache paintings are the original artwork for multiple issues of Dissent Magazine, a non-profit, leftist publication that covers a range of political and cultural topics. While Arnold engages with grave issues, her vibrant visual narratives and dedication to activism offer hope for social justice and a future that is built by and for the people.

Tabitha Arnold was born in 1995 and graduated with a BFA in painting from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2017.  Her textiles have been featured in Hyperallergic, Jacobin Magazine, and Forbes. Her works on paper have also been reproduced on multiple issue covers of Dissent Magazine. She has been awarded residences at MacDowell (Peterborough, NH), The Church (Sag Harbor, NY), Cortex Frontal (Arraiolos, Portugal), and Glen Foerd (Philadelphia, PA). She is also part of the American Craft Council’s 2022 Emerging Artist Cohort. In fall 2023, Arnold will be a resident artist and mount a solo exhibition at the Worker’s Art and Heritage Centre (Hamilton, ON). Her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Cortex Frontal in Portugal. She currently lives and works in her hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee.

To learn more about her work, visit https://tabithaarnold.com

Featuring: Karyn Olivier

Curated by: Andrea Packard and Tess Wei

View exhibition catalog here

The List Gallery is pleased to present Seep, a solo exhibition of mixed media works by the preeminent artist Karyn Olivier. The exhibition, accompanying catalog, and related events are funded by a generous grant from the William J. Cooper Foundation.

For nearly twenty years, Karyn Olivier has been creating sculptures, installations, and photographs that transform familiar objects and public spaces. She often repurposes materials from the waste stream such as fence posts, buoys, used clothing, playground slides, and roofing materials. Her artworks engage viewers with a range of issues, including the plight of international refugees, the legacy of slavery, the role of public monuments, and unsustainable construction practices. Through engaging with history, contemporary events, and architectural contexts and by deftly transforming everyday materials, Olivier creates works that are poignant, thought-provoking, and at times, whimsical.

Karyn Olivier was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago in 1968, and moved to Brooklyn, New York as a child. She graduated with a BA in Psychology from Dartmouth College in 1989, and a MFA in ceramics from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2001. Olivier has exhibited internationally including at the Gwangju and Busan biennials; the World Festival of Black Arts and Culture in Dakar, Senegal; The Studio Museum in Harlem; The Whitney Museum of American Art; and MoMA PS1. Her solo exhibitions have been presented at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, and Laumeier Sculpture Park, St. Louis. Her public art projects include Approach, a 52-foot-high permanent installation at Newark Liberty International Airport. Olivier's numerous awards include the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, the Nancy B. Negley Rome Prize, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, a New York Foundation for the Arts Award, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, the William H. Johnson Prize, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award, a PEW Fellowship, a Creative Capital Foundation grant, and a Harpo Foundation grant. She currently lives and works in Philadelphia and is a professor of sculpture at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University.

Facilitated by: Tess Wei

at Icebox Project Space, Invited: take care of the square footage

idle hands is a project about, for, and made from rest. For this iteration at Icebox Project Space, the public is invited to collectively create through the radical act of stillness. Visitors are offered a seat and a table on which to place their hands for as long as their own time allows. Here, you, we, us create idle hands by taking time to be intentionally unproductive members of society.

This project considers the saying “idle hands are the devil’s playground,” which warns against the inherent risks of idleness wherein boredom inevitably leads to devious actions. Bringing this into our cult of capitalism, the dogma has developed further meaning: to be good people we should always be productive. Our hands must always be occupied to generate value… just to give it away! But not here!

idle hands offers space to rest without guilt. Here, we direct our devotion away from production and value that is dislodged from us. There is no standardized expectation for participation and sometimes the piece may not exist when no one can rest — that is ok. The matter is our own rest, together. Throughout the course of this collective effort, interval-timed photographs will create a public archive to honor those who partake. 

All we need is to meet at the table and slow down. We create when we rest!

Featuring: Melissa Joseph

Curated by: Tess Wei

View exhibition catalog here

Conflicting Truths brings together numerous wall-mounted and sculptural forms that prioritize intimacy in scale, irregular edges, and softness of image. Mining her family’s photographic archive as the starting point for her subjects and scenes, Joseph translates these family snapshots through a range of processes, including: altering textiles through wet- and needle-felting, combining stoneware through inlaying, and forming delicate, linen surfaces through paper-making. What unites all of these processes is the use of friction and pressure to transform highly malleable materials into relatively taut forms: repetitively rubbing strands of wool in a soap-and-water mixture to interlace the fibers; flattening clay bodies of differing colors with a rolling pin to create continuous ceramic surfaces; and pouring and dripping linen pulp onto a screen to form an integrated sheet of paper.

Raised in rural Pennsylvania by her father, a surgeon who emigrated from Kerala, India, and her American mother, the artist’s multicultural background is an integral theme throughout her practice. In basing her subjects and settings on family photographs, some works feature her late father and other relatives of Malayali heritage living in India, while other pieces include various maternal family members and moments from Joseph's own childhood. Through material translations of this personal archive, Joseph forms a new architecture of interpretation wherein her visual language oscillates between soft and firm, natural and industrial, remembered and imagined. In shifting between these materials, methods, and influences, the works in Conflicting Truths articulate Joseph's own family history, while offering space to more broadly consider how identity is formed and reformed by fluctuating relationships to space, memory, and ideas of belonging. 

Curated by: Tess Wei

Featuring: Connie Yu, Lucia Garzón,  Mo Fernanda Nuñez, FORTUNE, Nickie Sigurdsson, Kristina Stallvik, Serena Hocharoen

This exhibition highlights the intersection of makers who engage with cooking and food as sites of cultural production and preservation. Of particular focus, is the way in which these visual and culinary artists engage with printed, digital, and alternative formats to represent processes, recipes, menus, and meals shared.

Food (here broadly, edible matter intended for nourishment, community-making, and storytelling) participates in a constant process of transformation from planting and harvesting to preparing and eating. Therefore, the ways in which edible matter and its related rituals are documented, shared, and (re)interpreted become essential appendages to food, whose physical form is otherwise ephemeral. Through processes ranging from risograph printing to the gradual rehydration of silk handkerchiefs, a thing shared offers snow fungus (Tremella fuciformis), natural remedies, porski (cod), garlic shells, and more.

The works presented in this exhibition have differing intentions, existing as: archives for personal and communal memories; prompts for others to engage in similar creative acts (in the way recipes are more step-by-step suggestions than instruction manuals); invitations to congregate at the table, so to speak; and bodies of research to sustain traditions of food growing, preparing, and partaking.