Overview

In Her Place charts a network of artists working at a high caliber with deceptively specific criteria—they are all women, and they all work in Nashville, Tennessee. The plurality of styles, subjects, and media they choose to work in is so diverse that grouping them together proves that, if anything, there are as many differences among these artists as there are similarities. But isn't that what it is to be Southern? Hasn't life in the American South been a quagmire of contradictions from the very start? The South has always been defined as much by what it isn't as what it is, in much the same way that women have been defined by how they are not like men. The standard for an American artist—and perhaps for a person in general—seems to be a white, straight, cisgender man of vaguely Northern residence. Anything that deviates from that criteria needs to be justified, pointed out, turned into something exceptional in order to simply be visible. It is refreshing, then, that this exhibition does not wallow in the stagnant waters of Southern stereotypes. The artists of In Her Place are legion. They include a Tehran-born sculptor making vessels out of Tennessee red clay, an artist from Arkansas working with cardboard and references to unsettling histories, and a Nashville-born painter whose images of civil rights–era sit-ins read just as poignantly in 2026 as they would have in 1960. If anything ties these artists together, it is not their gender or their location. It is their shared ingenuity and the comfort with which they subvert.

Full Product Details

Author:   Kathryn E. Delmez ,  Laura Hutson Hunter ,  Seth Feman ,  Sai Clayton
Publisher:   Vanderbilt University Press
Imprint:   Vanderbilt University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 22.90cm , Height: 2.30cm , Length: 30.50cm
Weight:   1.334kg
ISBN:  

9780826508348

ISBN 10:   0826508340
Pages:   192
Publication Date:   15 January 2026
Audience:   General/trade ,  Professional and scholarly ,  General ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

This Must Be the Place: Director’s Foreword and Acknowledgments Seth Feman Foreword Katy Hessel Introduction: Nashville’s Magnetism Is Its Mystery Sai Clayton and Kathryn E. Delmez Southern Artists and Their Discontents: Why Place Still Matters Laura Hutson Hunter Nashville’s “Good-Ole-Girl” Network: Art Leaders at the End of the Twentieth Century Vivien Green Fryd Tender Loving Care: Notes on Art Work and Care Work Michelle Millar Fisher The Power to Imagine: The Artist-Educators of In Her Place Shaun Giles Generation Next: Women Art Leaders in Twenty-First-Century Nashville Joe Nolan Silence Is a Form of Communication: Voices on the Life and Art of Alicia Henry (1966–2024) Michael J. Ewing Plates Artist Biographies Sai Clayton, Mac Cooper, Laura Hutson Hunter, and Mouminatou Thiaw Setting the Stage: A Selected Chronology of the Nashville Art World, 1949–2001 Susan W. Knowles Photography Credits Contributors Lenders to the Exhibition

Reviews

""Perhaps place means more, not less, than it used to. It is where you are from and also where you choose to be. It is a setting for human behavior. Place--that particular point of view that can ground an artist--is more important than it has ever been. It just looks different now."" --Laura Hutson Hunter, excerpt from the essay ""Southern Artists and Their Discontents""

""Perhaps place means more, not less, than it used to. It is where you are from and also where you choose to be. It is a setting for human behavior. Place—that particular point of view that can ground an artist—is more important than it has ever been. It just looks different now."" —Laura Hutson Hunter, excerpt from the essay ""Southern Artists and Their Discontents""

Author Information

Kathryn E. Delmez has been a curator at the Frist Art Museum since 2001. She has organized numerous exhibitions, including Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage; LeXander Bryant: Forget Me Nots; Bethany Collins: Evensong; Terry Adkins: Our Sons and Daughters Ever on the Altar (with Jamaal Sheats, director and curator, Fisk University Galleries); Murals of North Nashville Now; We Shall Overcome: Civil Rights and the Nashville Press, 1957–1968; Nick Cave: Feat.; Shinique Smith: Wonder and Rainbows; and María Magdalena Campos‑Pons: Journeys. She was also the curator of a major retrospective on photographer Carrie Mae Weems that traveled to four venues, including the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Delmez has been the editor of several accompanying books and overseen the presentation of more than 35 touring exhibitions at the Frist such as Jeffrey Gibson: The Body Electric, Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists, and 30 Americans. Laura Hutson Hunter is a writer, editor, and curator based in Nashville. She has been the arts editor of the Nashville Scene for more than a decade and curates the exhibition series Adult Contemporary.

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