Tia - Simone Gardner

Tia-Simone Gardner is a cross-disciplinary artist whose practice engages Black feminism through a dialogue with ritual, iconoclasm, and geography. “Space,” she writes “can be produced as toxically gendered and racialized, often in ways that are illegible.” She is interested in how work grounded in hybrid drawing/time-based methods can activate and reimagine thick sedimented layers of time, knowing, being, and struggle. The idea of geography allows her to think about the struggle over space, place, and time, as simultaneous events that reproduce anti-blackness and orient (or disorient) the black body through various form containments. For this project, Gardner consulted the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University and worked with New Orleans cultural practitioners, activists, and organizers. Gardner graduated from the University of Alabama in Birmingham with a BA in studio art and minor in Art History in 2005 and received an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2009. Gardner has participated as a studio Fellow the Whitney Independent Study Program, and held residencies at IASPIS in Stockholm, Sweden and the Center for Photography in Woodstock, New York. She is a Birmingham native and currently living in Minneapolis, Minnesota.