Gallery: Adrienne Elise Tarver (CFA’07)
Head Above Water by Adrienne Elise Tarver
Gallery: Adrienne Elise Tarver (CFA’07)
“My work for the past five years has really been about Black female identity within the Western landscape,” says Adrienne Elise Tarver (CFA’07), an associate chair of fine arts at Savannah College of Art and Design. In Escape, the 2020 exhibition of Tarver’s work at VICTORI + MO, a contemporary art gallery in New York City, her lush tropical landscapes, vacation photos, and cruise ads juxtaposed with images of human suffering and exploitation showed how the history of colonialism continues to impact Black women. “I was thinking about the duality of the word ‘escape,’” says Tarver. “Sandals Resorts and all of these vacation places, they all use ‘escape’ in their ads. The idea that you’re escaping your normal life, you get to go visit this place for a moment and forget everything. It just felt so ironic, because, ultimately, these places were built upon slave labor. The people who were creating these seductive landscapes that everyone is trying to escape to would have loved to escape to freedom.” The first painting viewers saw as they entered Escape was Head Above Water (above), which shows a woman’s legs dangling as she floats in sunlit water. In her review, New York Times art critic Jillian Steinhauer writes that at first the painting suggested “glamorous freedom.” But after seeing the rest of the show, she writes, “instead of seeing a scene of luxury, I imagined one of the women swimming to freedom.”
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