Tennessee Triennial: RE-PAIR

The inaugural Tennessee Triennial is a unified multi-site, multi-city exhibition that promotes contemporary visual art as a tool to foster constructive dialogue across communities, the state, the country, and internationally. The 2023 theme and core concept of the inaugural Tennessee Triennial is “RE-PAIR,” set forth by Consulting Curator María Magdalena Campos-Pons as the guiding curatorial concept for all exhibiting venues participating in the Tennessee Triennial.

Responding to the Triennial RE-PAIR theme about art designed “To heal, suture, and recompose fractured bodies”, “re-pair, patch, rebuild spirits, bodies, cities, political institutions, economic relationships,” the Knoxville Museum of Art presents works emphasizing the transformative power of art to propose new solutions to recent global discord.

The KMA’s Triennial presentation features a thought-provoking selection of objects created by a diverse, intergenerational slate of 13 international artists from across the U.S.: Willie Cole, Bessie Harvey, Lonnie Holley, Katie Hargrave & Meredith Laura Lynn, Kahlil Robert Irving, Suzanne Jackson, Mary Laube, Annabeth Marks, Rosemary Mayer, Althea Murphy-Price, Betye Saar, and Faith Wilding.

The exhibited works address a broad range of conceptual concerns ranging from the intersection of the personal and the political, to environmental, cultural, and spiritual. They express artists’ deep interest in material as a means of interpreting and amplifying these concerns. They are touched and pressed, deconstructed, constructed and made anew. They embody histories that sensitively embrace contradiction and complication, and that challenge diverse audiences to look both forward and backwards towards “new sites of encounters with yet undefined edges, borders and territories” in search of RE-PAIR.

A major statewide contemporary art event organized by Tri-Star Arts. Consulting Curator: María Magdalena Campos-Pons.

2023 Theme – RE-PAIR

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2023 VENUES

WEST
Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis River Parks Partnership, Tone Memphis, UrbanArt Commission

MIDDLE
Cheekwood, Engine for Art, Democracy and Justice, Fisk University Galleries, Frist Art Museum, Parthenon Museum, Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery

EAST
Big Ears Festival, Hunter Museum of American Art, Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Stove Works, Tri-Star Arts at Candoro Marble Building