Bitter Sweet Earths | Tia-Simone Gardner

Tia-Simone Gardner’s exhibition Bitter Sweet Earths traces what she calls a “colorline composed of the earth,” beginning in her family’s Fairfield neighborhood outside Birmingham, Alabama, where extractive industries engineered dead ends and terraformed streets to segregate white and Black working-class communities. Across photography, cyanotypes, and sculptural arrangements of mined matter, the exhibition renders these divisions with a precise, poetic clarity, allowing a local landscape to register at the scale of global industrial systems.

Grounded in deep research and family history, Gardner treats mined materials as holotypes, indexes, and specimens of the political geologies that underwrite the modern United States. Her images reveal the material costs of resource extraction, segregation, and uneven development. From family photo albums to monumental mid-century carvings such as Mount Rushmore at Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe and the Confederate figures at Stone Mountain, she reads images, stones, and archives as layered strata that compose the nation.

Bitter Sweet Earths considers how land is deployed differently for different publics and audiences, turning the personal—and specifically Blackness—into a critical vantage on the creation myths of the United States.

Gallery Hours:
Wed-Sat: 12pm - 5pm