Cedric Smith paints the portraits that were never painted at the time. He is not reimagining history, but reinscribing an erasure. The deep reservoirs of knowledge and skill required for equine work are still rarely attributed to the folks who built the equine industry that underpinned all of western civilization. First, our ability to travel, to explore, and to accumulate wealth, and then the privileged thrill of a leisure class that creates games for the sake of furthering status– both required the expertise and effort of African Americans.

Fonder’s newest video installation, Non Sequitur, meditates on cycles of ideas, life, and physical materials. In it, she explores entropy, the cyclical patterns of nature as well as the messiness of a lark, or unexpected turn. The term ‘non sequitur’ translates from Latin to mean “it does not follow.” Embracing this ethos, this installation reflects fractured roving thoughts and mirrors the futile effort to ‘keep it together’. Through the animated duplication of her sculptural works, she invites viewers to reflect on how the sausage is made–within her work and beyond. 

Curated by Micah Mermilliod in partnership with The Do Good Fund, this exhibition celebrates ways of being, the familiar and unexpected alike. Through the lenses of these photographers, history and modernity intersect, and the ordinary becomes extraordinary. While not always traditionally beautiful, the allure, honesty, and unpredictability found in these everyday moments resonates like jazz through humid Southern air.

This exhibition is an anti-retrospective guided by artist Pinky/MM Bass, a pillar of the Southern art scene. Building on a long history of collaboration, Bass is creating work that both enlists and pays homage to the folx that have impacted her work and life over her long career.

This exhibition explores the interconnected waterbodies of the Caribbean Sea, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Gulf as fluid sites of memories and pathways for the Caribbean diasporic people. Artists Keysha Rivera, Trecha Gay Jheneall, and Keiaria Williams use textile works, installations, photography, and mixed media to represent the prevalence of water as a form of remembrance through the process of creation.

Climate Change—the largest environmental challenge of our time—is the result of a vision of progress forged in the nineteenth century when fossil fuels spurred industrialization on a global scale. Picturesque America, published in 1872, captured the beginning of US industrialization in lush illustrations that placed railroads and factories in expansive horizons that symbolized boundless possibility. This exhibition places these nineteenth-century views of progress in dialogue with Allison Grant’s contemporary photographs of the chemical and fossil fuel industries in West Alabama.

Since the mid-1980s, Mobile, AL has been home to a growing punk cultural scene. Transitory in nature, as with any punk scene, the scene in Mobile has cycled over the decades through fleeting phases and times of burgeoning richness. Through a partnership with 309 Punk Project (Pensacola, FL), this exhibition aims to collect, archive, and preserve some of that lightning in a bottle.

In this installation, Jenny Day’s raucous use of materials – blown glass, mirrors, wood, fiber, fur, semi-precious stones, beads, bits and baubles – establishes a sculptural feast of celebratory chaos. Drawing on her deep concern for the planet’s ecological health, Day invites us to see that what we build eventually falls down and what we attempt to discard may return to haunt us.

Memorializing the dead is a sacred act, upon which entire belief systems are structured. Molly Jae Vaughan’s work, begun before most of the online data bases and websites dedicated to Transgender Day of Remembrance were established, raises visibility of the epidemic of violence the trans and gender non-conforming community faces by emphasizing each individual from her chronologically selected list of 42, with complex actions and labor heavy processes. For Vaughan, each individual’s life is worth equal time, whether they were a leader, a star, or simply someone trying to survive on the streets.

Remembering the Avenue is a civic practice exhibition curated through Alabama Contemporary’s Guest Curator Program that enlists the local community in mapping the history, legacy, and possible futures for historic Davis Avenue.

Black River is a series of works by the artist Charles Edward Williams that acts as a composite portrait of the relationship between the artist and his father. Throughout this developing series, Williams uses biblical parables and modern narratives to explore the profound act of forgiveness between father and son.

In this group exhibition of 13 artists curated by Elizabeth S. Hawley, U.S. boundaries are reconceptualized as border waters that emphasize the shorelines of the coterminous U.S. and its island regions; the historical and contemporary significance of waterways ranging from inland rivers to international oceanic passages and their inextricable linkage with colonialist, imperialist U.S. policies; and the ecological inseparability of waterways that ensures changes in one area’s border waters have global effects.

The works in the exhibition contemplate how we overlay significance onto bodies, individuals, and objects based on their external features. The viewer is invited reconsider the surface as more than a mere façade, but as a dynamic realm where meanings are assigned, power is exerted, and our relationship with the world is negotiated.

This is a thematic group exhibition of site-specific installations featuring 6 regional artists. Approaching drawing as a verb (draw: to pull or drag) these artists pull a variety of materials through space, asking us to follow the action, feel the tension, and re-consider the present.

This multi-media installation by Jamie Robertson examines the socio-political and spiritual relationship between Blackness, water, and memory. Through photography and video, the Gulf states of Texas, Mississippi, and Alabama’s individual histories are illuminated through their bodies of water. Below the surface, surrounded by the living presence of Water’s memory, the camera serves as a device for entry into the spiritual realm. Water is personified, its bones counted and picked clean from its past. What remains?

In partnership with the Mobile County Remembrance Project, ACAC commissioned 5 artists working with concepts of Black Identity and Remembrance to create new work in response to research gathered around lynchings in Mobile County during what the Equal Justice Initiative recognizes as the Era of Racial Terror from 1877 to 1950.

For the last two years Abe Partridge has made regular visits and embedded himself in several communities of Appalachian religious snake-handlers. After much time spent, he was given permission to document his experiences; the music, rituals, and stories that called to him. This is an exhibition of new work exploring those experiences, made in direct collaboration with this community.

This series of 6-8 new sculptural quilt works by Coulter Fussell act as open-ended narrative vessels for stories of personal escape. The donated fabric leads the way in terms of story, but certain themes often recur: the physical labor of craft and the economic complexities of fabric use and production. Drawing from a childhood growing up in a river-town that owes its existence to cotton mills, Coulter Fussell is fascinated with the economic (and, in turn, human) relationship to the natural world.

Soynika Edwards-Bush is a self-taught artist, mother of four, and wife, born and raised in Prichard, AL. Bush, who is community-focused and driven to bring art to her city, has worked alongside Legacy 166 and the Boys and Girls Club to bring art into the lives of children. Through her work at ACAC, Bush hopes to further her mission of showing color where there is none, helping to cultivate young artists, and letting art speak what the heart feels.

Sally Heller is a multi-material based artist who creates recognizable yet improbable landscapes constructed from cultural detritus. A modern-day bricoleur, savvy cultural hacker and urban archaeologist, Heller assembles a litany of mundane materials and cultural castoffs into recognizable yet improbable environments that cleverly fuse macro and micro, architectural and organic, artifice and nature.

Based in New York City, Akiko Ichikawa is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and editor. Ichikawa’s work, existing as performance, installation, and art.net, has been exhibited in The Hague Berlin; Philadelphia; Washington DC; Newark; St. Paul, Minnesota; and Incheon, South Korea.

This exhibition of new and existing work by Elsa María Meléndez (Caguas, PR 1974) explores the intersection of political and personal identity. Through large-scale fabric constructions, as well as small-scale dioramas that the artist calls “theaters”, the narrative spaces Meléndez creates tell stories that document the uncertainty one experiences while living in Puerto Rico, an “Island of Confusion.”

Guest curated by curatorial collective Triptych Arts, this exhibition looks at the different codices of Black folk magic and its widespread international iterations that continue to challenge Eurocentric modernist binaries.

The Lost Cause merges art history and contemporary imagery to construct an alternate reality, critiquing representations of race, masculinity and ultimately exploring “history” as a malleable and inherently creative enterprise. The work reimagines symbols and elements of history and imbues them with a new mythology replete with iconography that subverts white male gaze. 

Inspired by Ben Vereen’s 1981 tribute performance to the great black vaudevillian Bert Williams at the Reagan inaugural gala, Surplus in Pantomime contextualizes abstraction in the broader conversation of black identity. Curated by Y. Malik Jalal, this exhibition shines a light on five black artists working in, and through abstraction.

Flashing the Leather (a baseball term used to admiringly describe a dexterous defensive play) explores baseball as a point of artistic reference and inspiration over the decades, focusing particularly on the period from the infamous baseball strike of 1994 to the present day. This exhibition highlights works of art that address the rituals and concepts within baseball and baseball history, archetypes and superstitions unique to the game and the use of baseball objects as an artist’s medium.

Tony Bingham will be working to engage with the community directly again, to document the rich history here through a series of photographs using cameras constructed from the discarded plantation lumber of the Klein Wallace house, a stop-motion animation film, and cast metal “communion vessel” sculptures. 

Sizhu Li is a Chinese-born multi-disciplinary artist based in New York. Lived and educated on two different continents, Li has developed a unique visual language of immersive kinetic installations to illustrate her understanding of the universe, society, and nature, which was influenced by Eastern wisdom and Western philosophy.

Tender is Our Skin is an exhibition of photographs, films, videos, and voices by artists whose work explores the intimate moments of coming of age.

Masta My Language​ is an ongoing, multi-part project that includes original poetry, mixed-media works on paper, sculpture/installation, performance art, and experimental musical scores.

The underlying violence of disenfranchisement is a lack of visibility. When we talk about societies ‘most vulnerable’ we are talking about a complex and wildly diverse population out of sight. The power of art in this context might be to drag light into a dark room, or to build empathy.

Thompson explores alchemical transformations through clay + textiles, examining marginalized bodies and eliciting social change through her work.  Sculpted shapeshifters and hybrid landscapes investigate otherness.

Retreating from the stress and chaos of the last year, I created another landscape; populated by an army of friendly creatures. Here the burdens of coronavirus, climate change, and political division are dismissed by hot pink kittens that arc gracefully through meter showers and owls that bury into beds of daffodils.

The Invisible Histories Project (IHP) is designed to be a repository for the preservation of the history of LGBTQ life first in the state of Alabama and then the entire Southeast.  The archive will preserve, collect, and protect the living history of the diversity of the Queer community–both urban and rural.

Social distance has become the new convention since 2020, but for some, social distances have been in place much longer.

Tigers are predators, a label which invokes sinister images of violence and peril; the wrath of the wild. We don’t normally imagine predators in languid pools, draped in an unconstrained landscape…

FretHaus 2021 features work from Auburn University School of Industrial and Graphic Design’s Industrial Design Senior Thesis and opens to the public April 25, 2021.

Imagery of snakes has a long historical heritage in American culture that traces back to the country’s founding.

Born in Carolina, Puerto Rico, and currently based in Oakland, California, Sofía Córdova’s work considers “sci-fi and futurity, dance and music culture(s), the internet, mystical objects, extinction and mutation, migration, and climate change under the conditions of late capitalism and its technologies”

Making projections into an unknown future can be a dangerous business. As we deal  with feelings of impending doom, we create space(s) for self-preservation in an  attempt to meet the moment when it arrives. Until then, we remain suspended in space  and time. As it relates to the works in this exhibition, the title is employed as an  affirmation rather than a negation. Float, Fly, Transcend.

“Degrees of Visibility” is Ashley Hunt’s study of the visual politics of mass incarceration, a nine-year survey of prison landscapes throughout all 50 U.S. states and territories. Asking how camouflage, disappearance and concealment have allowed mass-scale imprisonment to spread invisibly all around us, it shows glimpses of a carceral society alongside the imagining of prison abolition.

In our current moment the lines between art and advocacy have started to blur. Although artists have always addressed political and human rights concerns, the current era of activism is tipping the scale and gravity of cultural production. Questions of how the art is used to affect public opinion and sway others to a cause are being asked worldwide.  Why do artists choose to make work that confront problems in the world?  Why would they decide to advocate?

Although each Land Report artist investigates formal and conceptual issues based in the landscape as an individual, the essence of our collective lies in the intersection between the things each of us point at – as if we were pointing to locations like road signs. New meanings and contexts emerge when viewers see the conversations that open up between works in an exhibition that would not normally occur when pieces are exhibited in isolation. Furthermore, the development of the work for each exhibition is a result of the artists being in direct and indirect dialogue with each other, the spaces they inhabit and the people they interact with there. Through this active process, members of the collective make new work as if it were a conversation, even though each artist acts autonomously and there is no hierarchical structure imposed.

Hair City Fair by House Pencil Green, Joseph Herring and Amy Ruddick’s design/art studio, is a multimedia installation that explores the carnival as a site of artistic production, communal ritual, and aesthetic consumption.

Cheer Me Up, Cheer Me On is exhibition of new and existing work from multimedia artist Valerie George. The artist uses her art practice to document the transformation of her body and spirit through multimedia video installations that interweave the aesthetics of celebration and punk culture to articulate a deeply personal narrative.

Monstrous Feast delves into the connections between art, humor, and social dialogue. In this exhibition, interdisciplinary artist Colleen Terrell Comer (she/her) highjacks antiquity, and drives it headlong into the carnivalesque landscape of modern-day motherhood.Comer utilizes sculpture, painting, and performance to unpack assumptions about gender, productivity, and privilege within the context of both art-making, and private life.

The Drowned, curated by Aaron Levi Garvey as a part of Alabama Contemporary Art Center’s new guest curator program, is a collection of photographs, paintings, and films that highlight and play with altered realities.

Guest curated by Ashley Stull Meyers through the Alabama Contemporary Art Center’s new Guest Curator Program, If You Have Ghosts includes four artists who engage with contemporary fiber techniques (both physical and digital) to recall their familial and ancestral histories.

Yoland uses multi channel video installation, performance, text, sculpture, and photography to chronicle the migration and movement of her and the tumbleweed. Yoland playfully approaches a serious topic by re-interpreting the iconic and deeply “American” nature of tumbleweeds, immigration, freedom, and borders. The piece aims to examine personal agency and the fluid nature of identity.

Atlanta based emerging artist Y. Malik Jalal will mount his first solo exhibition this fall at Alabama Contemporary, curated by elizabet elliott. Jalal was born in Savannah, GA, and raised in the Atlanta suburbs. He paints and makes images and objects. His work is equally personal and fictitious, rooted in both the artist’s own identity and his relationship to the collective cultural identity and history of the African diaspora in the American South. 

New York-based artist Francine Tint’s (1943-present) colorful paintings are influenced by and contribute to this long lineage of abstract art. Taking inspiration from artists such as Willem de Kooning and Arshile Gorky, Tint creates lyrically free abstracted paintings that express intuition through color. Tint credits discussions with Clement Greenberg in her studio as a guiding artistic force. Though abstract expressionism is an oft-imitated and commented upon style, Tint’s paintings remain distinctively her own, especially considering the field is largely male-dominated. 

Urban Wild, curated by elizabet elliott, is an exhibition of work that sits at the intersection of Southern street culture and fine art traditions. The historical city streets and dirt roads of the Deep South are a whole other kind of backdrop for these works, inspiring art that is as eclectic as it is playful. These artists draw from graffiti, tattoo, skate, and hip-hop culture, as well as comic book illustration, pop art, folk art, and even old-fashioned sign painting. This exhibition aims to capture the breadth and diversity of art that makes public place its forum, as the Southern Street becomes a stage and canvas all its own.

The second iteration of Raise 251, 251.2, takes a deep dive into the culture, economy, and traditions of the Cambodian and Laotian communities seeded in Bayou La Batre. By taking a focused look at these communities’ approach to food, work, and faith, we are expanding and diversifying the parameters of how health is defined in our community.

Featuring new commissions exploring hidden or overlooked issues affecting community health in Mobile, Raise 251 aims to educate and empower Mobile’s citizens by enhancing their capacity to better participate in decision-making about their health.

Alabama Contemporary’s next major nine-month exhibition and community initiative features multimedia works by fifteen of Cuba’s foremost contemporary artists and explores Cuban culture through the categories of Home & Family, Play & Recreation, Travel & Transportation, Communications & Technology, and Dreams.

From May 4, 2017 Alabama Contemporary Art Center presents ‘Sister Shores: From Mobile to Havana’, a four month exhibition and initiative for community engagement exploring contemporary life in Cuba.

Alabama Contemporary partnered with the Souls Grown Deep Foundation of Atlanta, Georgia, to produce History Refused to Die, an exhibition featuring seventy-five works of art by fifteen self-taught African American artists from Alabama.

Featuring projects from the Los Angeles Nomadic Division and Tom Leeser from CalArts, Pre-Glo focused on the concept of globalism and its effect on contemporary social issues.

In 2012, Alabama Contemporary saw record-breaking numbers for the Futures Project, featuring Kenny Scharf, Candy Chang, Dawn DeDeaux, Nina Weisman, Tom Leeser, and New York design firm, 2X4