Arts
David Maddox
Adrienne Outlaw has earned plenty of recognition for her sculptures and installations, with their distinctive look and voice. So her recent commission to create six works for the new U.S. Embassy in Abuja, Nigeria, comes as no great surprise, although there is a mental leap involved in imagining the work of a familiar Nashville artist transported some place so far away. Based on the strength of an earlier submission Outlaw made to another Department of State art program, curator Kresta Tyler Johnson contacted the artist this February to see if she would be interested in proposing work for the embassy in Abuja. Tyler Johnson wanted to "challenge people's expectations while offering a peaceful quality that would allow viewers to transcend their environment." This description certainly fits Outlaw's work, where polished design and careful craft often serve to embody psychological tensions, particularly relating to women's emotional lives.
Expanding Her Reach: Nashville artist Adrienne Outlaw at work in her studio. Photo by Eric England
Four of the new pieces use porcupine quills, one of Outlaw's signature materials. She was familiar with some uses of the quills in African culture from previous projects and study, but in researching African art to prepare for this show, she found they had additional cultural roles as ornaments and good-luck charms. This only added depth to Outlaw's understanding of herself as an artist. "I was choosing this material for formal and intellectual reasons," but somewhere in the back of her mind, she says, she knew there was more to it. The associations with magical or spiritual power have given her a way to understand the attraction these objects hold. She says work on this commission has "informed me about my own choice of materials and processes, and given me a larger vocabulary to work with."
For the other two pieces, Outlaw reworked the "Vessels of Grace" installation that was shown last year at the Vanderbilt University Hospital. In that piece, a wall of lustrous wire mesh baskets served as receptacles for prayers and thoughts that hospital patients, staff and others wrote on small pieces of paper. Outlaw always envisioned reviving this work in different places, although for the Embassy it was not possible to have the interactive element. Instead, Outlaw filled the baskets with slips containing African proverbs and sayings as a way of acknowledging the often unacknowledged wisdom the world has received from Africa and its people.
A commission like this certainly advances an artist's career, but in the best of cases, like Outlaw's contributions to the embassy in Abuja, it also advances her aesthetics.
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