BIO
b. 1987 Cincinnati, Ohio
Adrienne Gaither is a visual artist, whose abstract paintings explore a variety of topics including race, familial ties, emotional health, class, and the politics of geometric abstraction. She has held solo exhibitions at Transformer in Washington D.C., Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA) in Brooklyn, and Union Arts in Washington D.C. Her work has been exhibited in a host of group exhibitions at Cuchifritos Gallery in New York, DeNovo Gallery in Washington D.C., and Prizm Art Fair, among others. She has been commissioned by the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum, Sundance Film Festival, and PepsiCo. Her work appeared in Margo Crawford’s 2017 monograph Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics, in which Crawford writes of Adrienne’s work: “Gaither’s use of abstraction as a means of critiquing the twenty-first century rhetoric of colorblindness is one of the most powerful usages of black abstraction ...” Adrienne’s work has also appeared in D’ailleurs & dici! #2 and D’ailleurs & dici! #3 by Marc Cheb Sun. In 2018, she was awarded a fellowship from the D.C. Commission of the Arts and Humanities, a position in which she continues to hold. Adrienne holds a Master of Fine Arts from Howard University. She currently resides in Washington, D.C.
STATEMENT
My personal experiences as a Black queer masculine-presenting woman inform my art and practice. By using geometric abstraction, I deconstruct the world as I see it and reassemble it in a way that preserves and encodes the breadth of my perspective. I am aware of the tension between canonized geo-abstract movements such as Suprematism and Constructivism and their aesthetic origins, which are stolen interpretations of indigenous West African patternmaking coopted as tools of intellectual elitism and white supremacy.
Through geometric abstraction, I aim to showcase and celebrate the brilliance and invention of Black aesthetics as a worldwide cultural contribution. My art practice is an act of resistance against the constraining boundaries of the figure and whitewashed art history, providing me with the ability to produce emotionally meaningful and visually compelling works.