Homeplace
November 14, 2025 - January 11, 2026
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.
RELATED EVENTS
TAROT GATHERING
Saturday, November 22 from 4 - 6 pm
This event extends from Adrienne Elise Tarver’s ongoing Manifesting Paradise project—an interdisciplinary project based on the Tarot.
Homeplace continues Tarver’s ongoing effort to collapse linear time, intertwining past, present, and future through the language of objects and omens.
Join us to learn more about Tarver’s practice and her current exhibition. Readings are limited to ten guests. To request a reading, please complete this brief questionnaire. Selected participants will be contacted by November 20, and a waitlist will be available during the event.
READING GROUP
Sunday, December 14 from 2 - 4 pm
Adrienne Elise Tarver hosts a reading and discussion group, selected readings include bell hooks’ “Homeplace: A Site of Resistance” and an excerpt from This Is Our Home: Slavery and Struggle on Southern Plantations by Whitney Nell Stewart.
Seating is limited; additional details will be shared closer to the event date.
PAINTINGS
WORKS ON PAPER
SCULPTURES
