Exhibitions

ADAM ALWAN: REAL/HEAL

Space 204 (Vanderbilt University) / 1204 25th Ave. S. January 9, 2025 - February 6, 2025 (Reception: January 9 3:00pm - 5:00pm)

Adam Alwan

The Vanderbilt University Department of Art proudly welcomes back the 2023 Margaret Stonewall Wooldridge Hamblet Award Recipient, Adam Alwan, for a solo exhibition in Space 204 (January 2025).

Adam Alwan is a queer multidisciplinary artist from Glenview, Illinois. He attended Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, majoring in Art & Human and Organizational Development. His thesis exhibition Queer Bodies awarded him the Margaret Stonewall Wooldridge Hamblet Award - allowing him the financial support to take the following year post graduation to travel and make art. His return to Space 204 and the EBI Studio Arts Center will culminate in an exhibition featuring the work created during his award year.

Alwan writes about his studio work as "revolving around the themes of care, growth, and change, with considerations of nature and the queer community." He often utilizes plants in his installation as a suggestion of this growth. Inspired by his time with his grandmother, Alwan uses mediums from his childhood as vehicles to address experiences in his adult life. Alwan employs photography, installation, sculpture, and other mediums to speak to our innate desire for empathy and connection. The root of Alwan’s artistic practice uses his lived moments as a foundation to engage with the public and prompt our own self-reflection.

His upcoming exhibition, REAL/HEAL is a multi-media presentation driven by the passion of his grandmother in October of 2023 and the anniversary of his father's passing in 2013. During his travel through Europe, Alwan felt a great physical distance from his family, an ever-growing span of time between the passing of his grandmother and the present, as well as deepening gaps in his memory. Utilizing familial photographs, objects, textiles, and practices to explore memory rooted in his personal vulnerability - losing a loved one, forgetting, and surrendering oneself.

REAL/HEAL opens on Thursday, January 9, 2025 in Space 204 with a reception from 3pm to 5pm in the E. Bronson Ingram Studio Arts Center located at 1204 25th Avenue South, Nashville, Tennessee.

This exhibition and reception are free and open to the public.

For more information please email the Vanderbilt University Department of Art at artdept@vanderbilt.edu and follow the department on instagram at @vanderbilt.art.