Self-taught artist Yanira Vissepo has tapped into something extraordinary with her ink-on-textiles method — she’s among the youngest (if not the youngest) contributors of In Her Place, the massive but still selective group show of Nashville women artists currently hanging at the Frist Art Museum. And she’s also gotten the attention of ZieherSmith, the Edgehill-area gallery with roots in New York’s Chelsea Arts District. For this exhibition, Vissepo will present a new body of work that incorporates stained raw canvas with collaged linocut-printed black linen cutouts. Vissepo’s interest in botany and migration is especially powerful in an era of both climate crisis and immigration crackdown, and gives her work a critical edge. The work in On the Mountainside by the River is inspired by botanical landscapes in Nashville as well as her native Puerto Rico, the speculative fiction of Octavia E. Butler and her recent travels to Echizen, Japan. Echizen is a village with a 1,500-year history of papermaking, and Vissepo’s time there helped develop both her practice of water-based woodblock printing and her understanding of multifaceted global perspectives.
Feb. 7-28 at ZieherSmith
1207 South St.
