Exhibitions

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. 

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Hobo filmmaker/phototramp Bill Daniel is back on the road with a pop-up photo show comprised of 30 years of 35mm photographs beginning with the early 80s punk scene in Texas, featuring all of your favorite old school punk bands.