Full Description
In Her Place charts a network of artists working at a high caliber with deceptively specific criteria—they are all women, and they all work in Nashville, Tennessee. The plurality of styles, subjects, and media they choose to work in is so diverse that grouping them together proves that, if anything, there are as many differences among these artists as there are similarities.
But isn't that what it is to be Southern? Hasn't life in the American South been a quagmire of contradictions from the very start?
The South has always been defined as much by what it isn't as what it is, in much the same way that women have been defined by how they are not like men. The standard for an American artist—and perhaps for a person in general—seems to be a white, straight, cisgender man of vaguely Northern residence. Anything that deviates from that criteria needs to be justified, pointed out, turned into something exceptional in order to simply be visible. It is refreshing, then, that this exhibition does not wallow in the stagnant waters of Southern stereotypes. The artists of In Her Place are legion. They include a Tehran-born sculptor making vessels out of Tennessee red clay, an artist from Arkansas working with cardboard and references to unsettling histories, and a Nashville-born painter whose images of civil rights-era sit-ins read just as poignantly in 2026 as they would have in 1960.
If anything ties these artists together, it is not their gender or their location. It is their shared ingenuity and the comfort with which they subvert.
Contents
This Must Be the Place: Director's Foreword and Acknowledgments
Seth Feman
Foreword
Katy Hessel
Introduction: Nashville's Magnetism Is Its Mystery
Sai Clayton and Kathryn E. Delmez
Southern Artists and Their Discontents: Why Place Still Matters
Laura Hutson Hunter
Nashville's "Good-Ole-Girl" Network: Art Leaders at the End of the Twentieth Century
Vivien Green Fryd
Tender Loving Care: Notes on Art Work and Care Work
Michelle Millar Fisher
The Power to Imagine: The Artist-Educators of In Her Place
Shaun Giles
Generation Next: Women Art Leaders in Twenty-First-Century Nashville
Joe Nolan
Silence Is a Form of Communication: Voices on the Life and Art of Alicia Henry (1966-2024)
Michael J. Ewing
Plates
Artist Biographies
Sai Clayton, Mac Cooper, Laura Hutson Hunter, and Mouminatou Thiaw
Setting the Stage: A Selected Chronology of the Nashville Art World, 1949-2001
Susan W. Knowles
Photography Credits
Contributors
Lenders to the Exhibition
