Current
Remembering the Avenue
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.
Dangerous Landscapes
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.
Wata Ways
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.
Upcoming
Threads of (dis)Integration
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.
Past
Hurricane Party
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.
A Feast to Remember
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.
Project 42
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.
Black River
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.