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
Adrienne is the Spring 2026 Artist-in-Residence. Her residency project is a site-specific, durational, performance-based conceptual project joining archival investigation, sound art, and local B/black histories at the intersection of ecospeculative methodologies.
What happens when mourning becomes a method?
How might Black maternal grief provide a vernacular archive, a temporal strategy, and a form of creative world-un/building?
What is possible when we listen from within the belly, the hold, the womb, the wound, the break?
"Free State" confronts the racialized economies of mourning, memorialization, and maternal resistance in the wake of premature, strategic, sanctioned, oft-disappeared Black death. Drawing from a constellation of Black feminist, psychoanalytic, and decolonial frameworks, and local history/ians, the project investigates how Black maternal grief—as both a private sorrow and a public act—transcends symbolic memorials to become an insurgent aesthetic and ethical form: 'resonant abeyance.'
