Adrienne Jacobson Oliver
Photo by Hyeyon Moon
Artist-in-Residence
Adrienne Jacobson Oliver (she/her) is an artist-researcher who explores Black matrilineal expressions that suspend time, entangle memory, and invite intimacy, articulating themselves through a key of resonance and silence. A ‘rehearsalist’ of Black feminist poetics, she moves between durational mediums, weaving folklore, archival fragments, and vernacular gestures to reimagine ‘the Black maternal’ as a site of haunting and possibility. A 2024–25 Helena Rubenstein Critical Studies Fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, Adrienne is trained in performance theory and media studies; she holds an MFA in Studio Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Based in Charlottesville, her work and collaborations have been supported and presented in national and regional galleries, publications, and festivals.
Instagram: @adriennejacobsonoliver
2026 Research Residency Project
Adrienne is the Spring 2026 Artist-in-Residence. Her residency project continues long-form research that began with f r e e s t a t e, a hybrid performance score and manuscript forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse in 2028, which interrogates resonance, listening, grief, landscapes of the American South, and the afterlives of Black maternality. An initial inquiry centered particular and contested sites of subjection and freedom; however, in research practice, Adrienne followed frequency and what emerged through encounters, rather than geography.
“Through my embodied research, I am beginning to build a series of durational monuments that take their departure from the spontaneous, impermanent memorials that can be found at sites of unexpected loss. These interventions will not commemorate a single event, however, and instead act as a gesture toward a more invisibilized and fugitive history — the monuments arrive in media res, commemorating and designating ongoing ruptures and complicity. Wandering with doubt, ambivalence, intimacy, sensuality, and the strangeness of knowledge beyond certainty, this is grief without a fixed address and memory without an archive: traces of aliveness present amid history violently obscured.
Working with field recordings, readings, performed text, and other fragments, this series will move into a sonic realm. Coupled with Super8mm footage that uses the camera as another form of listening and attending to duration, atmosphere, and the unvoiced, these materials work as a constellation, holding what the other cannot.”
The residency will culminate in a public presentation in fall 2026, bringing together documentation, materials, and listening methodologies generated through the research. Additional programming will include collective dialogue and durational practices in relation to the work.
