The Courtyard Gallery presents Send–Go, an exhibition of new paintings from University of Texas at Austin alumna Carris Adams. In her large-scale paintings and drawings, Adams appropriates and resignifies vernacular signs taken from local businesses in diverse neighborhoods. Transplanting these designs from streets onto canvas or paper, and inserting them into an art gallery, she seeks to expose how the signs function as social markers that are implicitly classed, raced and gendered. When deprived of the surrounding context, they invite viewers to question the ways in which they make sense of place and identity.
In Send–Go, Adams presents recent work that examines the repercussions of reducing a black woman’s body into an object marked for mass consumption. Works on view, such as Lady Mocha ask: What does it tell us about how a black female body is valued, both by her own community and others? Do our perceptions shift when she is compared, in turn, to a precious stone? Embellished with glitter and hardened by enamel, Adams’s paintings render visible captivating and enduring stereotypes constructed around black womanhood.
About the Artist
Dallas native Carris Adams received a BFA in Studio Art from The University of Texas at Austin in 2013 and an MFA from the University of Chicago in 2015. She currently lives and works in Chicago. Adams’ works have been shown in exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem in New York (2016), Logan Art Center Gallery in Chicago (2015), and South Dallas Cultural Center (2014), among other venues. Her first solo exhibition, titled This, That, and the Third, was on view at Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Chicago in March of this year.
About Courtyard Gallery
The Courtyard Gallery is located in the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center at The University of Texas at Austin and presents a rotation of exhibitions that feature artwork from faculty and alumni of the Department of Art and Art History in the College of Fine Arts.