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Tia-Simone Gardner is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and Black feminist scholar. Her creative and scholarly practice are interested interdisciplinary strategies and engage ideas of ritual, iconoclasm, and geography. Gardner grows up in Fairfield, Alabama, across the street from Birmingham and received her BA in Art and Art History from the University of Alabama in Birmingham. In 2009 she received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Practices and Time-Based Media from the University of Pennsylvania. Gardner participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program as a Studio Fellow and has been an invited artist at a number of national and international artist residencies including the Center for Photography at Woodstock, A Studio in the Woods, and IASPIS Sweden. She has also been awarded a number of fellowships for her work including the McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship. Her current work as brings together the Blacl geographic with questions of geology to examine race and landscape particularly the Mississippi River and her home in Fairfield/Birmingham.
Within her studio practices she is building a writing practice that includes recent articles and essays of the experimental kind:
"There's Something in the Water"
The work on the river has shown in New Orleans, Minneapolis and Berlin Germany as a part of the Haus derr Kulturen der Welt, Mississippi: An Anthropocene River collaboration with artists, scientists, and intellectuals working across throughout the Mississippi watershed.
"Chronotopophobias" an essay that precedes the work she is beginning to research. As a part of this work she has been invited to be a Smithsonian Artist in Research Fellow for the summer of 2021. This project looks at Blackness, extraction, and landscape with her mother that addresses questions of biopolitics, Black memory and indigeneity by looking at the houses that the women in her family lived in the post-bellum South. A part of this work was recently published by Georgia Journal, an independent art publication in Los Angeles produced by Shoghig Halajian, Suzy Halajian, and Anthony Carafello,
"Land(s)crape" an essay about the accelerated abraiding of Black, Indigenous, Brown and Asian spaces from city spaces published by Scape, a landscape architecture journal published in the Twin Cities by ASLA and Edited by Jen Krava and Ethan McKnight.
Tia-Simone currently lives in Saint Paul, Minneaota.
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