By Brienne Walsh
Published on October 28, 2021
Adrienne Elise Tarver, "Manifesting Paradise: High Priestess 2,: 2020, ink, colored pencil and oil ... [+]
When the lockdowns due to the pandemic began in March of 2020, Adrienne Elise Tarver was living in Atlanta, Georgia. She couldn’t go to her studio, so she began painting small works in her apartment inspired by tarot cards, which have been used for divination purposes since the 15th century. “The world felt like it was ending, and tarot tells the future, so the idea of thinking about the future felt really comforting to me,” Tarver says.
Concurrently, Tarver was doing a lot of thinking about her own family history. Her paternal family is from Georgia, she spent part of her childhood in the state and her parents had retired there after raising her and her brother in Illinois. “I thought about being a black person in the South,” she says. “I’m in love with the landscape, the oak trees and Spanish moss and kudzu, but all of that is also evocative of the terrible nightmare of slavery. You can’t really remove the place from this double meaning.” She began doing some research on her family name, and found that there was a town named Tarversville — and an extinct one named Tarver — in Georgia. “In the history of America when a black person has a name that connects to a place it's generally because of the plantation where their ancestors were enslaved,” she says.
Adrienne Elise Tarver, "Namesake," 2021, Oil on canvas, 60 x 48 in
Her research led her to photographs of the former Tarver Plantation, which was owned by Henry Tarver from 1850 until 1897. Hundreds of slaves farmed his 5,000 acres of land. The plantation house, which features 16-foot-high ceilings and a driveway lined with live oaks, was recently refurbished, and is currently on sale for over $21 million. The listing mentions that sweet potatoes were grown on the estate to feed Confederate troops, and that it was used by a Kentucky horse breeder as her winter retreat until her death in 2013. No mention is made of the people who lived and worked on the land. Tarver printed out a photograph of the house and placed it on the wall with her studio alongside of some of her tarot card drawings. There, she considered their relationship to each other, and her own relationship to the past, and to the future.
In traditional decks of tarot, there is always a tower card that depicts a tower being struck by lightning and engulfed in flames. The “tower” symbolizes a moment of great destruction, but also, rebirth. “Looking at the Tarver plantation, I realized it needs to go up in flames,” she says. She began painting the plantation house not restored, but instead, engulfed in fire.
Adrienne Elise Tarver, "Manifesting Paradise: Tower 16," 2020, Oil pastel, ink and colored pencil on ... [+]
This effigy was the starting point for two exhibitions of Tarver’s work currently open in the United States. “Underfoot,” a site specific installation of wallpaper, paintings and studies, is open at the Atlanta Contemporary through January 9, 2022. And “The Sun, the Moon, and the Truth,” an exhibition of paintings inspired by the tarot, is open at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum through January 2, 2022.
The exhibition at the Atlanta Contemporary is centered around Namesake (2021), an oil painting that draws on many small studies of the Tarver Plantation in flames. Tarver often mines thrift stores for old photographs that she uses as inspiration for characters in her paintings.
Adrienne Elise Tarver, "Eclipse," 2021, Oil on canvas, 48 x 30 in
Eclipse (2021) is inspired by a vintage photograph of a black nanny standing behind a white mother and child. In the painting, her features are almost obscured by the starchy whiteness of her uniform. The exhibition also features Work in Progress (2021), a portrait of a woman whom Tarver refers to as Vera Otis. She is a fictional character, inspired by another photograph from a thrift store. Vera, who in the portrait looks weary, and somewhat disdainful, serves as a surrogate for Tarver and black women in general, and appears often in Tarver’s work. “Black people's history wasn't important enough to write down, so it gives this open space of still being able to invent the narrative,” Tarver says. “Underfoot,” which also features paintings of a cotton field and a driveway lined in live oaks, reaches back in time to mine a history that has been whitewashed. “Here's a place and what are all the moments from this place that help clarify the context and meaning of it,” she suggests.
Adrienne Elise Tarver: The Sun, the Moon, and the Truth (installation view), The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, September 8, 2021 to January 2, 2022. PHOTO: JASON MANDELLA
The exhibition at the Aldrich, meanwhile, looks towards the future. Tarver realized that the luxury of thinking about the future is one that was denied to her ancestors and continues to be denied to so many black people in the United States today. “The simple idea of mattering enough to have your own life, to be valued, is powerful concept in itself,” she says.
Made in the summer of 2020, when Black Lives Matter protests were taking place around the country, the exhibition is dominated by small ink, pastel and colored pencil drawings that bear names of tarot cards. The tableaus within them are lush, strange, otherworldly. Nude figures, often androgynous, are held still within a sort of tropical paradise. Tarver left the South this past summer and moved back to New York. But if you look closely, you can see the kudzu and the palm trees of Georgia, those quiet groves dense with humidity and buzzing with insects, in her future.
Vera Otis also appears at the Aldrich, again with her head thrown back, bearing the same weary expression as her doppelgänger at the Atlanta Contemporary. At the Aldrich, her portrait is entitled “Weary as I Can Be” (2021) and shows her juxtaposed against a split background. To the left, a grouping of people silhouetted against the sun. To the right, a portal that leads to a lush grove. Here, Vera Otis is a sage, a time traveler, a goddess. Are the planes of the canvas behind her connected? Or do they remain separate, the portal a barrier that keeps humans from the garden of Eden?
“The fact that there is a future is a powerful statement in itself,” Tarver says.
To learn more about both exhibitions, visit the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum website, and the Atlanta Contemporary website.
To learn more about Tarver’s work, visit her website.