Assisting with editing and writing Exhibition Intro:

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 this 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 our twenty-fifth anniversary to celebrate the achievements of women artists right here in Nashville over the last four decades.

In Her Place: Catalogue Writing Bios, Sample

María Magdalena Campos-Pons

b. 1959, La Vega, Matanzas, Cuba

Internationally acclaimed artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s practice centers on photography, painting, sculpture, audiovisual media, and performance. As she adapts these media to explore her Cuban identity and Nigerian and Chinese ancestry, Campos-Pons investigates how history, memory, and gender can inform identity. Her largely autobiographical work, which at times features profound and tragically magnificent imagery, seeks to unveil the spirits of people and places, both past and present. Influenced by the traditions, rituals, and practices of her predecessors, Campos-Pons shares untold histories of the transatlantic slave trade, including those related to the sugar industry for which her Nigerian ancestors were enslaved and brought to Cuba, and honors Santería religious practices.

Campos-Pons graduated from the National Art Schools in Havana and earned an MFA in media arts from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston. From 1993 to 2017, she taught at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, Boston. In 2017, she became the Cornelius Vanderbilt Chair of Fine Arts at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, where she founded the Engine for Art, Democracy, and Justice, a cross-institutional research initiative involving Fisk University, the Frist Art Museum, and Millions of Conversations. In 2023, Campos-Pons received the MacArthur Fellowship, and she was named a United States Artists Fellow in 2024.

Campos-Pons has been featured in solo exhibitions around the globe, including the major survey Behold that was on view at the Brooklyn Museum; the Frist Art Museum, Nashville; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC, as well as in the 2023 Sharjah (UAE) Biennial, documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens in 2014, and the 2013 Venice Biennale. Her work resides in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge; the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Pérez Art Museum Miami; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and many more.

Alicia Henry

b. 1966, Chicago, Illinois; d. 2024, Nashville, Tennessee

Beloved professor and artist Alicia Henry passed away during the planning of this catalogue and accompanying exhibition. Her textile and mixed-media installations seek to understand the innate connections between the individual human form and society. Crafted from felt, linen, leather, or paper board, Henry created amorphous figures whose faces often have distinguishable gaps or whose bodies have missing limbs. The artist considered her figures to be a multitude of individuals, taking inspiration from the interactions humans have with one another and the communities they foster. While acknowledging their presence in the fluid landscape of race, culture, and gender, Henry activated her figures with a genuine joy meant to overcome the isolating nature of a society that critiques standards of beauty, the body, and identity.

Henry received a BFA from the School of Art Institute of Chicago, attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison, ME, and earned an MFA from Yale University School of Art, New Haven. After she received her MFA, she volunteered with the Peace Corps in Ghana for two years, where she was inspired by the creation and functions of African crafts and masks. From 1997 until her death in 2024, Henry was an art professor at Fisk University, one of the oldest Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the country and the oldest of the four in Nashville. She was a recipient of numerous awards, including the Austin Peay State University Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts Tennessee Artist Fellowship, the

Ford Foundation Fellowship; the Guggenheim Fellowship; the Joan Mitchell Fellowship; and the Society 1858 Prize for Contemporary Southern Art. Henry’s work has been in numerous monographic and group exhibitions at venues including the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, Halifax; Cheekwood Estate and Gardens, Nashville; the Frist Art Museum, Nashville; Fruitlands Museum, Harvard, MA; the Hunter Museum of American Art, Chattanooga; the Huntsville Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto; Provincetown Art Association and Museum; the Tennessee, State Museum, Nashville; Tiwani Contemporary, London; Wiregrass Museum of Art, Dothan, AL; and Zeitgeist Gallery, Nashville.