Exhibitions

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.