Curb Center visiting artists reimagine memory through art this fall

"Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it's not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place-the picture of it-stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don't think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened."

- Toni Morrison, Beloved

After a semester spent exploring the potential future of art as a tool for democracy, The Curb Center is now looking back: at lineage, at family and at collective memory. Programming this semester will be centered on writer Toni Morrison's concept of "rememory," defined in her novel Beloved as collective memories, especially those connected to trauma, that can be recollected in some way by those who were not present for those experiences.

This is the framework for visual artist Lanecia Rouse and poet Ciona Rouse's collaborative exhibition HAGOOD, now on display at The Curb Center until Dec. 4. These sisters are using mixed-media collage, installation, color meditations and poetry to explore their matrilineal line and the town in which it began: Hagood, South Carolina.

"It [Hagood, South Carolina] is where our maternal living memory begins," Ciona Rouse writes. "Hagood is a sort of home-even though it mostly exists for us in our infant memory. But there's something about the South, something about being Black in the South, something about being Black and woman in the South that makes looking back a necessary way forward."

The exhibition runs from Sept. 22 to Dec. 4 and will include two artmaking workshops titled "Kindred" in which participants will work directly with the artists in collage and poetry-writing exercises that explore familial connection. RSVP for the first workshop, which will be on Sept. 24, 4-6 p.m. The second workshop will be on Nov. 1, 11-2 p.m. and will be open for RSVPs soon.

Lanecia Rouse has been awarded the inaugural Berg Global Artist-in-Residence Fellowship in the College of Arts and Science. Her residency is co-hosted by . The fellowship, alongside the Kindred workshops and the creation of HAGOOD, includes a close collaboration with Murphy's course, Icons and Monuments. In this course, students are investigating the iconography and imagery surrounding the historic Roger Williams University, a historically Black university that burned down in 1905 and on whose grounds the Peabody College buildings now stand. The centrality of rememory to Lanecia Rouse's artistic practice makes her a fitting partner to Murphy and his students as they investigate how institutional memories take shape and get passed down through generations. "Ms. Rouse is helping students develop innovative means of memorializing the nearly invisible history of Roger Williams University," Murphy writes. "At the same time, she is helping us see how creative practice and research can complement one another, and showing us what a deeply thoughtful, ethical and meaningful artmaking looks like."

Lanecia Rouse is a mixed-media visual artist whose practice includes collage, photography, abstract painting, curation, writing and teaching. Her work has been exhibited by the University Museum at Texas Southern University, Reynolds Gallery, Second Street Gallery and Zeitgeist Gallery among others. Her work was featured in Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage, which debuted at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville before traveling to The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.

Ciona Rouse is a poet, an editor and the author of Vantablack, a chapbook from Third Man Books (2017). Her work has appeared in Oxford American, Wildness, Booth, The Account, Still, Talking River Review, Gabby, Matter and elsewhere. She served as a resident poet for the Nick Cave: Feat. exhibition at Frist Art Museum, culminating in a poem called "We," which was named 2018's "Best Poetry Performance" by the Nashville Scene.

Another artist visiting The Curb Center this semester whose work deals with lineage and memory is educator, advocate and flutist Adam Sadberry. He will be visiting Vanderbilt courses, offering a master class to Molly Barth's Flute Studio, presenting for The Curb Center's undergraduate Curb Scholars, and performing at Turner Hall with pianist Nathan Cheung during a two-day visit co-hosted by Blair School of Music. Sadberry's work explores his relationship with his late grandfather, L. Alex Wilson, a prolific journalist with connections to the Civil Rights Movement.

Sadberry has previously been hosted by the Hollywood Bowl, Merkin Hall, Harlem Stage, The Phillips Collection, Barnes Foundation, Chamber Music Detroit, Newport Classical, University of Chicago, Chautauqua Institution and the Eastman School of Music, among other venues.

"These artists investigate beliefs about memory, family and community itself by using the past as a tool for artmaking, furthering The Curb Center's mission to elevate art as a mode of inquiry," Leah Lowe said. "We are honored to host these artists at The Curb Center and delighted to share their work with communities at Vanderbilt and in Nashville."

For more information about "Rememory" and other programming, visit our website, follow us on Instagram or sign up for our monthly newsletter. Vanderbilt faculty can contact Rachel Thompson at [email protected] for information about class visits to our gallery space.