Memorials

The exhibition aims to visually articulate ways artists learn, understand and explain the presence and roles of the Sacred and the Divine through craft practice. We look on how artists who work in exploring the nature and presence of God as both force and the Divine. The exhibition investigates the complex manifestations of how memory structures and shapes the realities of religious experience, filtered through one’s culture, familial and community lens. Curatorial locus span visual narratives of memories, beliefs and experiential catalog materialized into form through the creative processes. Prayers are reflected as investigations and conversations not just through text but are embodied through manipulation of materials of the handmade. The image of God made flesh through materials, and imaginative interplay of creative techniques. We endeavor to present quilted narratives formed through memory of the individual, collective experience and communal understanding in ways tangible. The works resonate the artists’ belief and its relationship to the divine through carved forms, painted surfaces, woven threads and welded steel, visualizing the memories of the sacred and the spiritual into tangible realities.

The exhibition explores not just the icons and symbols associated with religious practices, but organically shifts planes to investigate those in the spiritual realms outside of mainstream dogma. Precolonial, alternative and post colonial spiritual practices are observed and presented on equal footing as the exhibition is not apostolic in nature but ethnographic in concern. Prayers, places of worship, holy objects, protective talismans, ancestral spaces and various purveyors of the Divine are explored as they are articulated in myriads of media and expression both historical and contemporary within the Black communities of Tennessee. The materiality of the spiritual is vital in understanding the Black experience and realities and how these have supported the violent, arduous journeys from the Middle Passage to continuous struggles of
contemporary civil movements.

Artist Listing