Cynthia Gadsden

• Active: Nashville (Davidson County)
• Region: Middle
• Mediums: Fiber/Textile, Art History Professor

Cynthia Gadsden

Cynthia Gadsden is an Associate Professor of Art History at Tennessee State University in Nashville, Tennessee, where she teaches courses in Art History, African American Art, and African American Film. As a researcher, she focuses on the interconnection of African American art, history, and culture. Through this lens she explores the lived experience, ways of knowing, and the transfer and transformation of cultural and generational knowledge. Currently, she is working on Strings and Yarns: Needleworkers Forming Community through Creativity, a collaborative digital exhibition exploring the social threads that connect people who knit and crochet.

Also, a visual artist, her creative expressions are additional avenues of her research interests. As an artist, she uses a variety of media, including fiber, printmaking, and painting. Her baskets have appeared in the following exhibitions: IMAGE Faculty Triennial (2023) at the Hiram Van Gordon Art Gallery at Tennessee State University in Nashville, Tennessee and Crafting Blackness: Black Bodies Making Form (2023) at the Slocumb Galleries at East Tennessee State University and the Tipton Gallery in Johnson City, Tennessee. Her work also appeared in A Hidden Legacy: The Art of African American Invention (2022) at the Hiram Van Gordon Art Gallery.

As a curator, she organizes art exhibitions that probe cultural and generational connections through memory and tradition. In 2023, she co-curated Crowning Glory at the Hiram Van Gordon Art Gallery at Tennessee State University. The exhibition explored black hair through the powerful and playful expressions of six women artists from across the African diaspora.

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Crafting Blackness Exhibitions

Black Bodies Making Form

Inside Blackness

MTSU Black Bodies Making Form

Reclaiming

Embracing Blackness