Tia-Simone is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and Black feminist scholar. Working primarily with video, digital drawing, images, archives, and spaces, Gardner has made a practice of tracing Blackness in landscapes, above and below the ground’s surface. Through her work with still and moving images, she brings together fragments of things and lives alongside the events and the places to which they gave meaning.

Ritual, disobedience, geography, and geology are the specters and recurring themes that cross her work. Gardner grew up in Fairfield, Alabama, across the street from Birmingham, and learned to see landscape, capitalist extraction, and containment through this place. She received her BA in Art and Art History from the University of Alabama in Birmingham.

In 2009 she received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Practices and Time-Based Media from the University of Pennsylvania, followed by her participation as a Studio Fellow in the Whitney Independent Study Program. Gardner has been an invited artist at a number of national and international artist residencies and been awarded a number of fellowships.

Her current work brings the questions of Black geography to questions of geology in order to examine ideas of race and landscape along the Mississippi River and her home in Fairfield/Birmingham, Alabama.

https://newsuns.net/tia-simone-gardner-change-is-a-place/