ADRIENNE ELISE TARVER
Homeplace
November 14, 2025 - January 11, 2026
Opening Reception:
November 14, 6-8 PM

McBride / Dillman is proud to present Homeplace, a solo exhibition of new work by Adrienne Elise Tarver, opening November 14 with a reception from 6–8 pm and running through January 11, 2026. In her most ambitious installation to date, Tarver transforms the gallery into a richly layered mid-century domestic space inhabited by Vera Otis, the long-standing fictional subject of her paintings.

Vera’s story is entwined with intergenerational omens—images and objects that carry knowledge, warning, and memory across time, from past to present to future. Within this imagined home, Tarver conceives of the walls themselves as protective vessels, holding and transmitting these fragments across generations. In this way, the installation becomes not only a space for Vera, but also a threshold between eras—piercing into the past while opening toward the future.

Tarver’s work examines how Black women’s identities have been constructed, obscured, and mythologized throughout history, media, and the collective imagination. The resulting images blur the line between presence and absence, offering a shifting vision of selfhood. In Homeplace, visibility is not a fixed state but a process: fluid, negotiated, alive. Tarver’s practice focuses on reclamation—turning the tools of representation inward. Her recent public commission She Who Sits (2024) extended this dialogue into urban space, portraying seated Black women whose presence became a form of resistance—an assertion that rest, too, is radical.

Homeplace continues this trajectory inward and forward, revealing Tarver’s deft ability to move between materiality and meaning. Tarver offers a vision that feels at once historical and deeply personal—a meditation on what it means to be seen, and to see oneself anew.

Adrienne Elise Tarver is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY with a practice that spans painting, sculpture, installation, photography, textiles, and video. Her work addresses the complexity and invisibility of Black female identity including the history within domestic spaces, the fantasy of the tropical seductress, and the archetype of the all-knowing spiritual matriarch.

She has exhibited nationally and abroad, including solo shows at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Connecticut; the Academy Art Museum in Maryland; Atlanta Contemporary in Atlanta, Georgia; Dinner Gallery (formerly Victori+Mo) in New York; Ochi Projects in Los Angeles; Wave Hill in the Bronx, NY; BRIC Project Room in Brooklyn; and A-M Gallery in Sydney, Australia and two-person exhibitions at Hollis Taggart in New York; Wedge Curatorial in Toronto, Canada. She recently received the Distinguished Alumni Award from her alma mater, Boston University, and the Nancy Graves Foundation Grant. She has been commissioned for projects through the New York MTA, the Public Art Fund, Google, Art Aspen, and Pulse Art Fair and has been featured in online and print publications including the New York Times, Forbes, Brooklyn Magazine, ArtNews, ArtNet, Blouin ArtInfo, Whitewall Magazine, and Hyperallergic, among others. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and BFA from Boston University.