Lucinda Bunnen: Inward, Outward, Forward
Curated by Allison Grant

Adrienne Elise Tarver: Underfoot
Curated by Jamie Steele

On View: Saturday, September 18, 2021 – Sunday, January 9, 2022

Public Opening: Details TBD based on COVID-19

ATLANTA —June 8, 2021 —Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (Atlanta Contemporary) announces the exhibitions for Fall 2021: Lucinda Bunnen, Inward, Outward, Forward curated by Allison Grant (Gallery 3); and Adrienne Elise Tarver, Underfoot, curated by Jamie Steele (Gallery 4). Project Spaces details are forthcoming and available on Atlanta Contemporary’s website.

In keeping with our announcement in July 2019, Atlanta Contemporary remains committed to working with independent curators believing that interchange aligns with our mission and deepens engagement with existing and yet defined audiences. The upcoming exhibitions – both this Fall and in the year ahead – champion artists, center equity, and expand the practice of contemporary art.

Inward, Outward, Forward

Artist-collector Lucinda Bunnen is a powerhouse in Atlanta photography. She has spent the last fifty years creating exquisite artworks infused with the magic, wonder, fear, and mystery of being alive. Inward, Outward, Forward showcases the artist’s wide-ranging use of photography and simultaneously highlights her contributions to Atlanta’s art community through philanthropic work with a selection of works by other artists in her personal art collection.

Bunnen pushes against conceptions of photography as a narrow or definable medium. She is driven, instead, to uncover new possibilities for artistic expression. She does this by toggling: inward, outward. She turns inward, photographing her personal life and sometimes manipulating images in her backyard or home darkroom. Then she pivots outward, investigating the lives of strangers and places near and far. She collects artworks by other artists for her home and collaborates with institutions to build their collections. She creates space for her art practice, then goes into the community to advocate for opportunities for others. All the while, she pushes forward, opening new pathways for art to surprise, engage, and inspire—boldly carving out room for what is next.

Atlanta Contemporary is a fitting place to celebrate Bunnen’s life and work. She is among a group of local artists who founded the institution in 1973—under its original name, Nexus.

About Lucinda Bunnen

Lucinda Weil Bunnen is a photographer living in Atlanta, Georgia. Bunnen, now 90 years old, began her photography career at the age of 40, when she and her family took a trip to Peru for her birthday, and she discovered a love and a talent for the art form. Since then, she has been a prolific photographer, artist, collector and benefactor to the photography community in Atlanta and around the country.

About Allison Grant

Allison Grant is an artist, writer, curator, and assistant professor of photography at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. From 2010-2017 she served as assistant curator at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago (MoCP), where she curated numerous exhibitions including Our Origins (2011); Spectator Sports (2013); and What Remains (2015). Grant co-curated Disruptive Perspectives (2017) with Nadine Weitlishbach and co-published a catalog. The exhibition was mounted simultaneously at both curators’ home institutions: MoCP and Photoforum Pasquart in Beil, Switzerland. In 2015 Grant curated the exhibition From Now at Filter Space, Chicago. Essays by Grant have appeared in Minding Nature Journal and INCITE: Journal of Experimental Media, Volume 7, as well as numerous artist books and exhibition catalogs.

Artworks by Grant have been widely exhibited and are held in collections at the High Museum of Art (Atlanta), DePaul Art Museum (Chicago), Columbia College Chicago, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Research Foundation art collection, and the King County Portable Works Collection (Seattle). She was awarded the 2020 Portfolio Purchase Award from the Atlanta Photography Group, received the 2019 Developed Work Fellowship from the Midwest Center for Photography and was shortlisted for the 2019 FotoFilmic Mesh Prize. Grant holds an MFA from Columbia College Chicago (2011) and a BFA from the Columbus College of Art and Design (2004).

Underfoot

Adrienne Elise Tarver is an interdisciplinary artist based in Atlanta and Brooklyn with a practice that spans painting, sculpture, installation, photography, and video.

Tarver’s exhibition, Underfoot, stems from her interest in origin stories and where we come from. Her own beginning’s, like so many other Black American’s, is unclear. And yet, despite how the Western idea of landscape can separate us from the land, we continuously seek and feel connection to place.

A place holds history beneath the ground. We can change the surface, but the language of the roots remains.

About Adrienne Elise Tarver

Adrienne Elise Tarver is an interdisciplinary artist based in Atlanta, GA, and Brooklyn, NY with a practice that spans painting, sculpture, installation, photography, and video. Her work addresses the complexity and invisibility of the Black female identity in the Western landscape – from the history within domestic spaces to the fantasy of the tropical seductress.

She has exhibited nationally and abroad, including solo or two-person exhibitions with Dinner Gallery in New York; Ochi Projects in Los Angeles; Hollis Taggart in New York; Wedge Curatorial in Toronto, Canada; Wave Hill in the Bronx, NY; BRIC Project Room in Brooklyn; and A-M Gallery in Sydney, Australia. She has been commissioned for projects through the New York MTA, the Public Art Fund, Google, Art Aspen, and Pulse Art Fair. She has been featured in online and print publications including the New York Times, Brooklyn Magazine, ArtNet, Blouin Art Info, Whitewall Magazine, and Hyperallergic, among others. Tarver received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and BFA from Boston University.

About Jamie Steele

Jamie Steele currently lives and works in Atlanta, GA. She is founder of the Atlanta, exhibition space, Camayuhs. She obtained her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012 upon which she received the John Quincy Adams fellowship awarded by Jessica Stockholder. Recent curatorial projects include Feels Warm Like Things Burning, LUMP, Raliegh, NC, 2019; Dodd Bod, a student exhibition at the University of Georgia, 2019; Satellite Fair, Miami, FL, 2018, and Very Far Away From Anywhere Else, AA Projects, Vienna, Austria, 2017. She is currently a juror for Stove Works’ Guest Curators Program for their 2022 - 2023 season.

About Atlanta Contemporary

Atlanta Contemporary engages the public through the creation, presentation and advancement of contemporary art. Founded in 1973 as Nexus, a grassroots artists’ cooperative, Atlanta Contemporary has since become one of the southeast’s leading contemporary art centers. We play a vital role in Atlanta’s cultural landscape by presenting over 45 exhibitions throughout the year, featuring consequential artists from the local, national, and international art scenes. We are one of the few local institutions that commissions new works by artists, paying particular attention to artists of note who have not had a significant exhibition in the Southeast. We organize 90+ diverse educational offerings annually, unrivaled by other local organizations of our size. We are the only local organization to provide on-site subsidized studio space to working artists through our Studio Artist Program, removing cost as a barrier to the creative process. Visit atlantacontemporary.org to learn more.

All press inquiries, contact:

Veronica Kessenich, Executive Director

veronica@atlantacontemporary.org

Images:

Lucinda Bunnen, Three Points of Light, Atlanta Georgia, 1979, silver gelatin print, courtesy of the artist and Marcia Wood Gallery

Adrienne Elise Tarver, Untitled, ink, colored pencil, and oil pastel on paper, 12x16 in, 2021