ABOUT
Vadis Turner (b. 1977, Nashville, TN) creates sculptures and mixed media works that reframe traditional narratives of femininity. Having grown up in the American South, the artist considers the generational influence of women navigating cultural conventions.
In her practice, Turner incites the misbehavior of domestic materials, granting them agency and transcendence. Engaging the grid as an expressive feminine structure, curtains and bedsheets are coupled with metal leaf, brick dust and other household elements. Given a new voice, they take the forms of emboldened windows and unruly vessels. Often titled after mythological or literary women, Turner's work feminizes the grid and recasts domesticity as monumental.
Turner has held solo exhibitions at the Frist Art Museum, Huntsville Museum of Art, Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts, and the University of Colorado. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Arts and Design, Brooklyn Museum, Bunker Artspace, Taubman Museum of Art, Tennessee State Museum, Kentucky Museum of Arts and Crafts, Huntsville Museum of Art, Hunter Museum of American Art, and the University of Alabama. Turner has also exhibited at the Museum of Arts and Design, LongHouse Reserve, Brooklyn Museum, Andy Warhol Museum, Bunker Artspace, ICA Portland , Minnesota Museum of American Art, Cheekwood Museum, Knoxville Museum, among others.
She has been an Artist in Residence at Yaddo (2018 & 2024), Museum of Arts & Design, Materials for the Arts, and the Hambidge Center and received a Fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center. Her work has been reviewed and featured in Vogue, Artforum, Art Papers, New York Times, Hyperallergic, Widewalls, Two Coats of Paint, Burnaway, Wallpaper*, Observer, Artnet, and Whitehot Magazine.
Turner was the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant. Her projects have been funded by the Joanne Leonhardt Cassullo and Dorothea Leonhardt Fund at the Communities Foundation of Texas, Inc., Jenni Crain Foundation, Barbara Demming Memorial Fund, South Arts, Tennessee Arts Commission, and the Current Art Fund, a regranting program through the Andy Warhol Foundation. Turner received a BFA and MFA from Boston University.