Tennessee Triennial Reimagines Plans for Inaugural Edition and Sets Sights on 2023

After the inaugural Tennessee Triennial for Contemporary Art got pressed back from an preliminary launch date in 2021, the company revealed that its veryfirst edition will now take location in 2023 and will focused around the style of “RE-PAIR.” Now setup to open in January 2023 and then run more than 3 months into May, the Tennessee Triennial will spread out into various places in Memphis, Nashville, Knoxville, and Chattanooga.

Overseeing it all as consulting manager will be María Magdalena Campos-Pons, an artist and teacher of fine arts at Vanderbilt University who is likewise the creator of the Engine for Art, Democracy and Justice (a “trans-institutional effort” in Nashville) as well as GASP Gallery in Brookline, Massachusetts, and Intermittent Rivers, a biennial job in Matanzas, Cuba. Campos-Pons has likewise showed work of her own in global showcases consistingof Documenta and the Venice Biennale.

The existence of Campos-Pons marks an upgrade from preliminary strategies, veryfirst made public in 2019, for the Tennessee Triennial to be directed by Andrea Zieher of New York’s ZieherSmith gallery along with co-curators Lauren Haynes and Teka Selman. As was prepared from the begin, the triennial will be provided by the Tennessee-based company Tri-Star Arts, which administers exhibit programs, artist studios, and associated operations in various cities throughout the state.

A description of the 2023 Tennessee Triennial’s style checksout, in part, “To recover, stitch, and recompose fractured bodies. We propose a brand-new website of encounters, with yet undefined edges, borders, areas. These will be cartographies of the mind as well as locations of the land.” It continues: “RE-PAIR asks you to promise, to reassess the function of the arts, the significance of art as a vital force in society and enhancer of human experiences. Can Art galvanize our energies to restore our towns with onlineforums, and concepts that bring options to seclusion, hardship, anguish?”

Venues for the exhibit will consistof the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, the Frist Art Museum, Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery, the Parthenon Museum, the Hunter Museum of American Art, the Knoxville Museum of Art, and the Big Ears Festival, amongst others engaged through some 16 partnering companies.