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.