In Her Place

In Her Place charts a network of artists working at a high caliber with deceptively specific criteria—they are all women, and they all work in Nashville, Tennessee. The plurality of styles, subjects, and media they choose to work in is so diverse that grouping them together proves that, if anything, there are as many differences among these artists as there are similarities.

But isn’t that what it is to be Southern? Hasn’t life in the American South been a quagmire of contradictions from the very start?

The South has always been defined as much by what it isn’t as what it is, in much the same way that women have been defined by how they are not like men. The standard for an American artist—and perhaps for a person in general—seems to be a white, straight, cisgender man of vaguely Northern residence. Anything that deviates from that criteria needs to be justified, pointed out, turned into something exceptional in order to simply be visible. It is refreshing, then, that this exhibition does not wallow in the stagnant waters of Southern stereotypes. The artists of In Her Place are legion. They include a Tehran-born sculptor making vessels out of Tennessee red clay, an artist from Arkansas working with cardboard and references to unsettling histories, and a Nashville-born painter whose images of civil rights–era sit-ins read just as poignantly in 2026 as they would have in 1960.

If anything ties these artists together, it is not their gender or their location. It is their shared ingenuity and the comfort with which they subvert.

Kathryn E. Delmez has been a curator at the Frist Art Museum since 2001. She has organized numerous exhibitions, including Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage; LeXander Bryant: Forget Me Nots; Bethany Collins: Evensong; Terry Adkins: Our Sons and Daughters Ever on the Altar (with Jamaal Sheats, director and curator, Fisk University Galleries); Murals of North Nashville Now; We Shall Overcome: Civil Rights and the Nashville Press, 1957–1968; Nick Cave: Feat.; Shinique Smith: Wonder and Rainbows; and María Magdalena Campos‑Pons: Journeys. She was also the curator of a major retrospective on photographer Carrie Mae Weems that traveled to four venues, including the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Delmez has been the editor of several accompanying books and overseen the presentation of more than 35 touring exhibitions at the Frist such as Jeffrey Gibson: The Body Electric, Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists, and 30 Americans.

Laura Hutson Hunter is a writer, editor, and curator based in Nashville. She has been the arts editor of the Nashville Scene for more than a decade and curates the exhibition series Adult Contemporary.