黑料不打烊

In Tenderhead, Lisa Jarrett weaves together her interest in migration and tracing lost familial histories to Beauty Supply stores and salons鈥攃ritical intersections of Black life. The artist鈥檚 first solo museum exhibition in Oregon features new works and site-responsive installations that activate the abundant patterns, colors, images and textures found at the Beauty Supply. She says that, 鈥淭he Beauty Supply is my art supply store.鈥� It is a site where she accesses physical materials as well as the less tangible memories activated by these materials so important to her work.

Jarrett suggests that the Beauty Supply,salon, and kitchen sink are places undeniably linked to migration and diaspora as surrogate homelands. The geographic locations, aesthetics, layout, products, customers, and economies of the Beauty Supply locate it firmly in this 鈥渋n-between鈥� place, setting it apart as a complicated site of joy,nostalgia, desire, and unmet need. Jarrett investigates how these relatively mundane places and objects function as dynamic living archives in Black communities and families that accompany us from generation to generation. Places like the Beauty Supply (as well as the people, objects, ideas, and experiences contained therein) are the foundation of the work in this exhibition. Tenderhead refers to a question that she (and many others) vividly remember being asked while getting their hair done as children: 鈥淎re you tenderheaded?鈥� Jarrett says, 鈥淚t鈥檚 a loaded question,鈥� and this exhibition offers windows into her reply.