Visual Arts

Claiming seats, examining visibility, and foregrounding multifaceted Black women

At WBUR’s CitySpace, artist Adrienne Elise Tarver (CFA’07) discussed her Public Art Fund Project: She Who Sits with curator Jenée-Daria Strand and CFA Dean Harvey Young.

On October 22, 2024, Tarver returned to Boston, where she earned her BFA in Painting at Boston University School of Visual Arts, to join in conversation with Strand and Dean Young about the reach and impact of her work.

Tarver’s art, displayed on hundreds of bus shelters and newsstands in New York City, Chicago, and Boston, features a series of paintings foregrounding multifaceted Black female identities. The exhibition, hosted by Public Art Fund, explores the visibility and invisibility of Black women and the seats they can—or cannot—take within public and social spaces.

Public Art Fund brings dynamic contemporary art to a broad audience by mounting ambitious free exhibitions of international scope and impact that offer the public powerful experiences with art and the urban environment.

Miss the event? Watch the recording!

Get to know the art

Following the creative impulses of collage, interdisciplinary artist Adrienne Elise Tarver uses both personal imagery and found photographs as source materials for the paintings in this exhibition.

She who sits is Tarver’s first solo public art exhibition and features six new works that continue her exploration of the centrality of the Black matriarch. Each subject is seated in an intimate environment and each painting is inspired by the artist’s personal archive as well as media archives–especially that of Ebony Magazine, a cornerstone of culture, news, and entertainment. Tarver’s imagery positions the act of sitting as a reclamation of rest and power. The work nods to the ways activists have used sitting in public space as a tool to shift the socio-political dynamic in the United States. For decades, sit-ins have been used by Black activists to enact direct change within legal systems that aimed to confine and erase Black presence. The seated subjects in Tarver’s paintings quietly confront passengers at bus shelters, which in turn offer moments of physical respite and restful contemplation. 

Adrienne Elise Tarver: She who sits is curated by Jenée-Daria Strand, Assistant Curator at Public Art Fund.

Get to know the artist

Adrienne Elise Tarver is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY with a practice that spans painting, sculpture, installation, photography, textiles, and video. Her work addresses the complexity and invisibility of Black female identity including the history within domestic spaces, the fantasy of the tropical seductress, and the archetype of the all-knowing spiritual matriarch.

She has exhibited nationally and abroad, including solo shows at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Connecticut; the Academy Art Museum in Maryland; Atlanta Contemporary in Atlanta, Georgia; Dinner Gallery (formerly Victori+Mo) in New York; Ochi Projects in Los Angeles; Wave Hill in the Bronx, NY; BRIC Project Room in Brooklyn; and A-M Gallery in Sydney, Australia and two-person exhibitions at Hollis Taggart in New York; Wedge Curatorial in Toronto, Canada. She recently received the CFA Distinguished Alumni Award from her alma mater, Boston University, and the Nancy Graves Foundation Grant. She has been commissioned for projects through the New York MTA, the Public Art Fund, Google, Art Aspen, and Pulse Art Fair and has been featured in online and print publications including the New York Times, Forbes, Brooklyn Magazine, ArtNews, ArtNet, Blouin ArtInfo, Whitewall Magazine, and Hyperallergic, among others. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and BFA from Boston University.