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Exhibitions & Artist Activations

Begonia Labs

 

  

 

James Kuol Makuac:

my heart is strong because I walked on blistered feet

On view September 24–December 20, 2024

Begonia Labs, Engine for Art, Democracy & Justice (EADJ)

my heart is strong because I walked on blistered feet features the vibrant and expressive paintings of James Kuol Makuac (b. South Sudan, 1976; lives in Nashville) whose work reflects a life spent navigating between worlds. For nearly twenty years, Makuac has cultivated a practice of contemporary Sudanese painting that tells impossible stories of human tragedy and simultaneously speaks to survival and hope, grief and joy, surrender and determination.

 

About the Artist 

James Kuol Makuac (b. South Sudan, 1976; lives in Nashville) has nurtured an art practice of contemporary Sudanese painting for the past twenty years. As one The Lost Boys of Sudan, young men who resettled in the U.S. as refugees of war, his vibrant and expressive paintings often bridge the culture of the South Sudanese people and his American life. His work has been shown in local and traveling exhibitions, including Lending Library, Metro Arts Commission and Nashville Public Library, Our Directional Light, Leu Gallery, Belmont University, and Life Before, University School of Nashville. His paintings are in public and private collections such as The Tennessee State Museum, Tyson Foods, and the Nashville Convention Center. Makuac, who speaks several languages, including Dinka, Arabic, Swahili, and Spanish, works as a translator at Tyson Foods. In 2020, he was selected as one of Nashville’s Most Fascinating People by Nashville Lifestyles Magazine.

The Begonia | Catalyst exhibition series celebrates the life and practice of pioneering but under-recognized artists. The exhibition is curated by Grace Aneiza Ali, EADJ Curator with curatorial assistance from Simon Tatum and Danielle Myers.

Partner Exhibitions

Beverly Buchanan, Out of Control, 1991. Scrapbook, Beverly Buchanan papers, 1912–2017, bulk 1970s–90s.

Beverly Buchanan: I Broke the House

On view September 25, 2024–March 1, 2025

Carl Van Vechten Art Gallery, Fisk University

Courtesy of the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

 

Fisk University Galleries is pleased to present Beverly Buchanan: I Broke the House at the Carl Van Vechten Art Gallery on view from September 25, 2024 to March 1, 2025. This exhibition originated at ETH Zurich and offers a comprehensive exploration of Beverly Buchanan’s (1940–2015) diverse body of work. It features sculpture, painting, photography, drawing, writing, and printed material.

I Broke the House brings together a wide range of contemporary voices, artworks, and historical contexts. It critically engages with Buchanan’s exploration of the built environment, addressing themes of race, memory, and resistance. The exhibition emphasizes Buchanan’s ability to challenge traditional exhibition practices by reimagining the spaces that hold her work. Through her focus on eroded surfaces, vernacular dwellings, and marginalized histories, Buchanan provides a poignant commentary on the sociopolitical landscape of her time.

Curated in collaboration with GTA exhibitions at ETH Zurich, the Engine for Art, Democracy, and Justice (EADJ), and Fisk University, this exhibition project builds on the earlier presentation at ETH Zurich in the spring of 2024. That iteration of I Broke the House involved contributions from a range of artists and scholars, including Elena Bally, Jennifer Burris, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Aria Dean, Fredi Fischli, Jack Halberstam, Harvard University GSD students, Alicia Henry, Anna Gritz, Tonja Khabir, Parity Group, Prudence Lopp, Park McArthur, Devin T. Mays, Ana Mendieta, Siddhartha Mitter, Kazuko Miyamoto, Senga Nengudi, Niels Olsen, Sarah Richter, Cameron Rowland, Jamaal Sheats, Adam Szymczyk, and the Tubman African American Museum in Macon.

This collaborative project is an exploratory exercise, as Siddhartha Mitter describes it, in “thinking with” Beverly Buchanan’s practice and legacy. The presentation at Fisk includes objects from the permanent collection and archive. As part of this ongoing project, Haus am Waldsee in Berlin will also host a future exhibition inspired by Buchanan’s work, continuing the dialogue around her impact on contemporary art, particularly her connection to the American South.

https://www.fiskuniversitygalleries.org/current-exhibitions-1

 

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María Magdalena Campos-Pons: Behold

On view September 26, 2024–January 5, 2025

Frist Art Museum

 

María MagdalenaCampos-Pons: Behold includes over three decades of the artist’s work in photography, installation, video, painting, and performance. Hauntingly beautiful and emotionally charged, Behold shows how Campos-Pons’s layered identity as a Cuban woman with ancestral roots in the Yoruba culture of West Africa as well as in Spain and China inform her multimedia, sensorial artworks. Evoking the history of diaspora, displacement, and migration, as well as labor and race, and motherhood and spirituality, Behold invites us to join with the artist in the vital search for meaning and connectivity.

https://fristartmuseum.org/exhibition/maria-magdalena-campos-pons/

 

About the Artist

María Magdalena Campos-Pons is the Cornelius Vanderbilt Endowed Chair Professor of Fine Arts at Vanderbilt University. In addition to her practice as an artist and professor, she has made a significant contribution to the larger art world and to Tennessee through her ongoing program Engine for Art, Democracy & Justice, which brings together scholars, critics, and artists from around the world in virtual seminars and physical artist interventions. She was the consulting curator for the 2023 Tennessee Triennial, a statewide series of exhibitions addressing the theme of “Re-Pair”—art as a means of healing a broken society. In 2023, Campos-Pons was named a MacArthur Fellow in recognition of her groundbreaking synthesis of cultures and mediums in advocating for art’s capacity to heal individuals and society.

This exhibition is organized by the Brooklyn Museum and the J. Paul Getty Museum. The exhibition is curated by Carmen Hermo, former Associate Curator, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum and Mazie Harris, Associate Curator, Department of Photographs, J. Paul Getty Museum with Jenée-Daria Strand, former Curatorial Associate, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum.

 

Previous Exhibitions at Begonia Labs

Watermelon Seeds 

On view from July 12- August 30, 2024. 

Opening reception on Friday, July 12th from 6-8 pm, and a discussion with the artists at the Lab on Friday, August 9th from  6-8 pm.

Begonia Labs, Engine for Art, Democracy & Justice (EADJ)

 

The Engine for Art Democracy and Justice presents Watermelon Seeds, a summer exhibit at Begonia Labs featuring the artworks of AB Bedran, Ali El-Chaer, Beizar Aradini, and David Onri Anderson. These artists were born in Nashville andmany are currently living and working in the city. AB Bedran and Ali El-Chaer are Palestinian, Beizar Aradini is Kurdish, and David Onri Anderson has a Sephardic Jewish background. The artists in this exhibit are bringing together their forms of expression for grief, memory, hope, loss, and renewal with various artistic practices, which include painting, drawing, printmaking, weaving, sculpting, and installation.

 

“The watermelon has become a symbol of solidarity with Palestine, representing the Palestinian flag colors. This show is about the future and hope for a renewal of the people of Palestine as horrifying genocide and war crimes continuously occur through the effects of Israeli Nationalism. The artists in the show share grief for the loss of innocent lives, but they also hold onto hope through creating art. The exhibit becomes a coming together of Palestinians, Kurds, and Jews, all celebrating the people of the Earth from our point of view in Nashville, Tennessee. Our grief is hard to express in words and one moment, thus we create shrines to commemorate the lives of those who have passed and those who are suffering. The artworks express feelings that have been felt for many years and the lasting effects they leave us. Although it may be impossible to fully express, this show is a hopeful gesture to start a conversation and move people. 

This place of Nashville, in all the changes and transitions it has gone through, also feels like a microcosm of the world changing in all its violence and splendor. There is much to grieve as well as much to celebrate, yet the darkness feels more present these days than perhaps it has in a while. In hopes of not being too short-sighted as to what the future may bring, we make art in hopes of creating a new world and a new culture where we can live peacefully amongst each other, without having to all conform to the same political and social identities. We want to be the change we want to see. Art making, call and response, and having difficult conversations is all a part of our mode of carving a new path for a more compassionate culture.”

-David Onri Anderson, curator and participating artist for the Watermelon Seeds exhibition

 

Press coverage of the exhibition.

 

About the Curator: 

David Onri Anderson is a Tennessee-born French-Algerian Jewish artist, musician, and curator. He graduated from Watkins College of Art in Nashville with the Anny Gowa Purchase Award in 2016. He has had solo exhibitions at Patrick Painter Gallery in Los Angeles, CA, Blaa Galleri Copenhagen, DK (upcoming), Harpy Gallery in Rutherford, NJ, David Lusk Gallery in Nashville, TN, and Atlanta Contemporary, amongst others. In 2020 he published a book of drawings with Zürich-based artist book company, Nieves. His work has been reviewed, exhibited, and collected internationally with works in permanent collections including the Soho House in Los Angeles, CA and Nashville, TN, The Joseph Hotel, and the Metro Arts Library in Nashville, TN, amongst others. Anderson is the founder and curator of an artist-run space called Electric Shed Gallery in Nashville, TN (2018-present). His work has been reviewed in Art in America, Artnet, BURNAWAY, DailyLazy, and more.

 

About the Artists: 

A.B. Bedran is an artist and writer based in Nashville, TN. They received their BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art and have been exhibiting and curating since 2018. Their work focuses on identity as it relates to their lived experience as a Queer Palestinian in the diaspora. These topics are explored through collage, textiles, and poetry. They started the 11:11 Collective, a gallery and creative space run from their home. The purpose of the collective is to uplift the voices of queer, BIPOC, and disabled artists.

 

Ali El-Chaer (b. 1995, they/he) is a trans diasporic Palestinian writer, illustrator, and artist, currently living in Nashville, TN. They received their bachelor’s in fine arts at Austin Peay State University in 2018. They have shown in numerous group exhibitions, including Moving, Transfer at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, OH (2024); Watermelon Seeds at Begonia Labs at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN (2024);  We Are Sorry to Inform You That, curated by Adele Jarrar for MNFA gallery in Amman, Jordan (2022); Queer Identity at The Dirty Spread Collective, Bristol, UK (2022); The Divine: Beyond the Bounds of Queerness at the Nepantla Cultural Arts Gallery, Seattle, WA (2022). They were also selected as a resident artist for the Bethany Artist Community in New York in 2024. El-Chaer has gone on to found a community collective, Nour Nashville, catering towards political education, organizing, and outreach in Nashville, TN.

 

Beizar Aradini (b.1991) was born in Mardin, Kurdistan, and immigrated with her family to Nashville, Tennessee in1992. Her work unravels her family’s story as immigrants and examines cultural displacement through craft and fiber arts. Aradini has been featured in many exhibitions nationally and in Bê Welat: The Unexpected Storytellers at nGbk Gallery in Berlin, Germany. Her artwork has also been exhibited at the Frist Art Museum as part of the We Count: First-Time Voters exhibition which received an Award of Excellence from the Tennessee Association of Museums. Her work has been featured in local publications such as Four Women Artists Reflect on Peoples and Places in the Nashville Scene and The Ties That Binds in Native Magazine. In 2021, She was awarded Best in Show in the Best of Tennessee Craft 2021 Biennial at the Tennessee State Museum. She was recently selected as an artist in residency at Arquetopia International Artist Residency and completed an Andean Textile and Weaving workshop during her month-long stay in Urubamba, Peru, an opportunity that was funded in part by a scholarship from Tennessee Craft.


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Petit Carême: Port of Spain, Trinidad through the lens of LeXander Bryant

On view from April 4 – May 23, 2024 

Opening reception on Thursday, April 18 from 6:30-8:30 pm, and a discussion with the artist at the Lab on Thursday, May 2nd from 6-9 pm. 

Begonia Labs, Engine for Art, Democracy & Justice (EADJ)

 

In September 2023, LeXander received support from the Engine of Art Democracy and Justice to travel to Port of Spain, Trinidad. He worked with artist Christopher Cozier on the Home Portal project and visited the Alice Yard contemporary art network. In his new exhibition, Petit Carême, LeXander shares his experience of traveling to Trinidad, which was the first place he has traveled outside of the United States. 

While in Trinidad, LeXander reflected on the similarities and differences between Black culture and aesthetics happening in the lower Caribbean region with those of the American South. His exhibition at Begonia Labs will include photographs and videos that are organized into several subsections reviewing topics like the marketplace, community gatherings, and tropical scenery. Such topics have been documented and presented from the Caribbean region for decades following the influx of the tourist industry; however, LeXander places an interesting outlook on these topics through his viewpoint as a Black Southern photographer. 

The title of the exhibition, Petit Carême, refers to a climate phenomenon that happens in Trinidad during the rainy season, around mid-September to mid-October; the climate phenomenon is a moment in the year with unusually brilliant sunshine that follows the regular rainfall. LeXander chose to adopt this term for the title of his showcase because it aligned with the time of year when his research trip took place in 2023, and it also poetically nods to a mini-break from the normal rhythms of his creative practice happening in Nashville. 

 

About the Artist: 

LeXander Bryant (b. 1989) is a photographer and visual artist based in Nashville, Tennessee, focused on capturing the essence of Black Folks, particularly in the American South. His work centers around the documentation & design of the black experience through stories of triumph, resilience, and cultural identity. LeXander has been featured in both group and solo exhibitions since 2016 and continues to collaborate with other creatives locally and internationally.

Artist’s website:  https://www.orgnzdvisuals.com/about

LeXander also recently founded Archive South — an American southern-based multidisciplinary studio that emphasizesthe importance of artists as storytellers and cultural documentarians. It encourages artists to produce and share their ideas, creations, and reflections, recognizing that these contributions are valuable for capturing and archiving the essence of their experiences. Read more about the project here:  www.archivesouth.com

 

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We’re Still Thinking

On view from April 26 – May 9, 2024 

Opening reception and zine launch party on Friday, April 26 from 6-9 pm 

Begonia Labs, Engine for Art, Democracy & Justice (EADJ)

 

We’re Still Thinking is a Vanderbilt student-led immersion project highlighting Blackness behind and in front of the camera through photoshoots. The project was created by Vanderbilt students Jeanne d’Arc Koffi, Igolo Stephine Ohalete, Les Taylor, and Sydney Featherstone. These students were mentored by a local photographer (LeXander Bryant), advised by the EADJ team on the Vanderbilt campus, and organized many volunteer models to capture a series of photographs.

The pictures collectively share intimate portraits around themes like dorm life on the Vanderbilt campus for queer BIPOC students, dorm life for first-generation Americans, reflections on Black womanhood, and reflections on friendship and coupling. The pictures captured by the student group have been placed into a pop-up exhibit at Begonia Labs, and they have also been published on an online platform and used to create a self-published zine for the students’ portfolios.

 

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Jose Luis Benavides: Video Experiments at Begonia Labs

 

On view February 8–March 8, 2024

Opening reception on Thursday, February 8 from 6:30-8:30 pm.

Begonia Labs, Engine for Art, Democracy & Justice (EADJ)

 

Vanderbilt Faculty, Jose Luis Benavides will have video and mix-media projects on exhibit at Begonia Labs. He will also host a series of conversations and film screenings with partner programs and his creative collaborators during his time at the art laboratory. Benavides has been exploring the relationship and tension between new media (3D animation and 3D printing practice) and old media (archives and research-based practice) alongside themes of social justice, queer temporalities, Latinidad, and immigration through experimental documentary filmmaking and video art techniques. 

The program of events associated with this exhibition is Co-sponsored by Vanderbilt University’s Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies.

 

About the Artist: 

Benavides is a Latinx and queer video artist who has been a programmer of Latinx video art and documentaries since 2018. His grant-funded program Sin Cinta Previa led him to curate Éramos Semilas / We Were Seeds at Stove Works in Chattanooga, TN during the summer of 2023. He serves as faculty at Vanderbilt University, Tennessee State University, and the City Colleges of Chicago. Previously, he has been a teaching artist with the National Museum of Mexican Art, Young Chicago Authors, Chicago Arts Partnership in Education, Nashville Public Library, and Chicago Public Library.

Bringing archival collections to life through moving images and mixed media installations, Benavides engages with a range of personal-to-institutional archives to participate in and preserve cultural memory. Through deep engagements with familial histories, marginalized histories, social movements, histories of the mental health industry, intergenerational and intercultural solidarity work alongside contemporary prison abolition work, his practice serves as a means of redress and healing, facing the tensions and traumas of our past, while working toward safer and communal futures.

He created commissioned work for the Chicago Film Archives (2023), Kindling Arts + Defy Film Festival (2022), and the Illinois Humanities’ Envisioning Justice (2019). His work has been viewed internationally, in Brussels, Hungary, Mexico, Palestine, Spain, and Turkey. He has had solo screenings and exhibitions at the Museum of Surgical Science (2023), Heaven Gallery (2023), The Nightingale Cinema (2022), and Biquini Wax (2019), and his first solo exhibition was at Terremoto magazine’s La Postal (2018).

Link to the artist’s website:  www.joseluisbenavides.com

 

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Crossroads: Lee Jaffe x Jean-Michel Basquiat 

 

On view November 2, 2023–January 15, 2024

Artist conversation on November 2 at 5:30 pm. Opening reception on November  2 from 7 pm.

Begonia Labs, Engine for Art, Democracy & Justice (EADJ)

 

This version of Crossroads is part of the 2022/2023 program, Artistic Activism and the Power of Collective Resistance, curated by Selene Wendt. 

 

This exhibition features a selection of photographs taken by Lee Jaffe of his friend Jean-Michel Basquiat when they traveled abroad in 1983, as featured in the book Crossroads, published by Rizzoli in 2022. Their time spent together resulted in an archive of imagery that captured one of the art world’s true legends through an unfiltered and authentic lens. According to Jaffe,For me, watching him [Jean] paint reminded me of the times I would sit and play harmonica while Bob Marley, with his acoustic guitar, would be writing songs that were eventually to become classics. With Jean and Bob, it seemed like they were channeling inspiration coming from an otherworldly place”. 

This exhibition is Co-sponsored by Vanderbilt University’s Department of African American & Diasporic Studies.

 

About the Artist: 

Lee Jaffe is an artist, photographer, filmmaker, musician, and producer. Jaffe has worked alongside and collaborated with many seminal artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Peter Tosh, Hélio Oiticica, Vito Acconci, Bob Marley, Nancy Spero, and others. Crossroads showcases his photographic documentation of his time with Jean-Michel Basquiat in New York and their travels around the world.

 

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Christopher Cozier in collaboration with LeXander Bryant, Home / Portal 

 

On view September 21–October 22, 2023

Conversation with Cozer and Bryant, moderated by Selene Wendt on September 21 at 5:30 pm.

Begonia Labs, Engine for Art, Democracy & Justice (EADJ)

 

This version of Home/Portal is part of the 2022/2023 program, Artistic Activism and the Power of Collective Resistance, curated by Selene Wendt. 

 

On its most basic level, the red steps reference the red, sometimes green, steps of traditional homes, workers’ housing, or barracks, in places like the Caribbean. More than simply an object to look at, the work is activated by a series of actions that are intended to actively engage the public and create a moment of discourse. Picking up the thread from Cozier’s earlier work All That’s Left (2011), which explored the significance of empty lots in Port of Spain seen as contemporary archeological sites, Home/Portal involves a process of physical relocation that raises interesting questions about the difference between displacement and dispersal.

 

About the Artist: 

Christopher Cozier is a mixed-media artist who lives and works in Trinidad. His drawings, videos, and installations investigate how Caribbean historical and contemporary experiences can inform our understanding of the wider world. He is co-founder and co-director of Alice Yard, an art collective based in Port of Spain that organizes art exhibitions, runs a residency program, and hosts performances, film screenings, dialogues, and lectures. He is a Prince Claus Award laureate (2013), a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grantee (2004), a previous Rauschenberg Foundation artist in-residence (2016), and most recently a recipient of the Jorge M. Pérez prize (2023).

Key group exhibitions include Caribbean Visions: Contemporary Painting and Sculpture (Wadsworth Atheneum, 1995), Infinite Island: Caribbean Contemporary Art (Brooklyn Museum, 2007), Afro Modern: Journeys Through the Black Atlantic (Tate Liverpool, 2010), Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago (Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, 2017), The Sea Is History (Historisk Museum, Oslo, 2019), Experiences of Oil (Stavanger Art Museum, 2022), Fragments of Epic Memory (Art Gallery of Ontario, 2021), Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s to Today (MCA Chicago, 2022), and Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica (Art Institute of Chicago, 2024). Cozier has also exhibited at the 5th and 7th Havana Biennials (1994/2000), was an artist in residence at the 10th Berlin Biennial (2018), exhibited in the 14th Sharjah Biennial (2019), the 11th Liverpool Biennial (2021), and Prospect 6 (2024). With Alice Yard, he participated in Documenta 15 (2022). Active as an art critic since the 1990s, he was a member of the editorial collective of Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism from 1998 to 2010 and was an editorial adviser to BOMB Magazine for their Americas issues in 2003, 2004, and 2005.

Curator of multiple exhibitions, Cozier has served as a curatorial adviser for SITE Santa Fe (2014) and as a member of the selection panels for About Change in Latin America in the Caribbean (World Bank, 2010) and the Kingston Biennial (2017). He was co-curator of Paramaribo Span: Contemporary Art in Suriname (2010) and, with Tatiana Flores, of Wrestling with the Image: Caribbean Interventions (Art Museum of the Americas, 2010). His work is in the collections of MCA Chicago, the Stavanger Art Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

 

LeXander Bryant (b. 1989) is a photographer and visual artist based in Nashville, Tennessee, focused on capturing the essence of Black Folks, particularly in the American South. His work centers around the documentation & design of the black experience through stories of triumph, resilience, and cultural identity. LeXander has been featured in both group and solo exhibitions since 2016 and continues to collaborate with other creatives locally and internationally.

Artist’s website:  https://www.orgnzdvisuals.com/about

LeXander also recently founded Archive South — an American southern-based multidisciplinary studio that emphasizes the importance of artists as storytellers and cultural documentarians. It encourages artists to produce and share their ideas, creations, and reflections, recognizing that these contributions are valuable for capturing and archiving the essence of their experiences. Read more about the project here:  www.archivesouth.com