Vadis Turner

Vadis Turner (born 1977 ) is an American mixed media artist living in Tennessee. Her work encourages “the misbehaviors of domestic materials.” Exploring “the expressive possibilities of the grid," many works are titled after maligned female figures.

"My content often draws from tragic heroines from Greek mythology, literature and shared experiences from different generations of women. I partner these stories with domestic materials that have the potential to speak in some way…allowing them to transcend their intended functions, contradict their structural natures and betray traditional gender associations."

Curtains, thread, metal leaf, archival adhesive "Mannerist distortion is the ancestor of Surrealist fantasy, and Turner’s female grids—the distortion bespeaks their tragedy--are surrealist fantasies with an expressionistic twist." - Donald Kuspit, She Drank Gold Catalogue essay

Turner has had solo shows at the Frist Art Museum, TN; Huntsville Museum of Art, AL; University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, CO; and the Abroms-Engel Institute for Visual Arts at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, AL.

Her group shows include the Museum of Arts and Design, NY; Brooklyn Museum, NY; The Andy Warhol Museum, PA; The Bunker Artspace, FL; Kentucky Museum of Arts and Crafts, KY; 21C Museum Hotels, TN; Hunter Museum of American Art, TN; Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art & Design, ME; Minnesota Museum of American Art, MN; Islip Art Museum, NY; Knoxville Art Museum, TN; Susquehanna Museum of Art, PA; and Cheekwood Museum, TN.

Her works are in the permanent collections of several museums, including the 21C Museum, KY; Brooklyn Museum, NY; She has been a Lecturer of Art at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN since 2022.

Early career Tampon Wedding Cake (2007) Turner sold and traded it for her own professional gain. The body of work culminated in an installation, Reception, which was acquired by the Brooklyn Museum.

Turner has been described as striving for the "transcendence of the commonplace from its intended function into a vehicle for social commentary." In 2013, Turner was chosen as a resident artist by Materials for the Arts, where she created mixed media pieces with fashion industry textile scraps. MFTA described Turner's work as "'paint[ing]' with ribbon and fabric"; "She uses ribbons as lines, marks, and brushstrokes, large wads of fabric as stains of color, and smaller pieces as drips of hues."

"I like to invent alternative endings and afterlives for tragic female characters from literature. Ophelia and Eve are two examples."

Turner was awarded a Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant in 2016.

Exhibitions Tempest, Frist Art Museum, TN

"I am especially drawn to textiles that were made by previous generations of women, so I buy damaged hand-sewn quilts on eBay. I like the idea of reinventing the future of unwanted pieces that were made with time and care." – Vadis Turner

Megaliths, Ent Center for the Arts, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, CO

118 x 120 x 10 inchesBraided bedsheets, dye, acrylic, resin, wood, mixed media "….created specifically for the UCCS Galleries of Contemporary Art solo exhibition Megaliths, Turner investigates the Neolithic era and the shift from a hunter-gatherer society to one centered around agriculture and cultivation/control of the natural world. In this most recent body of work, Turner’s works inhabit and claim both the walls and the floor of the gallery."

Megaliths is composed of four sculptures created entirely of braided bedsheets and their own mixtures of adhesives, dyes and other materials: Cumulus Megalith, Ghost Megalith, Undressed Stones Somewhere Between Unraveling and Revelation and Red Gate.

Daisy McGowan, director and chief curator for GOCA, wrote in a statement: "Through this body of work, Turner seeks to upend assumptions of masculine versus feminine materials by melding domestic materials like bedsheets with what the artist refers to as ‘macho’ forms and shapes."

Cups and Grids, Geary, NY

“The exhibition Cups and Grids brings the...work of Vadis Turner, a beacon in the Southern contemporary art firmament, to Geary in downtown New York. The presentation includes large-scale, mixed media wall sculptures made primarily of resin and cement, leather and cloth, and three-dimensional vessels charred wood, paint, and braided bedsheets. Turner’s pieces harken to the visceral and conceptual qualities of art made in the area in late the 1960s and early ‘70s. This was a time of deep interrogation and subversion of the anti-expressive nature of Minimalist pursuits—particularly the grid—and when materiality, as well as decorative and craft-based media, were being championed primarily by female artists.”

“Indeed, the works on view in the exhibition might not have been conceived—or at least given merit today—were it not for the consciousness-raising artistic efforts of Hammond, Eva Hesse, Joan Snyder, Howardena Pindell, and others of this earlier era. In her visceral and conceptual use of materials, and her embrace of the decorative, the romantic, and the bodily, Turner is clearly the daughter of this very rebellious revolution.”

“In Encounters, Vadis Turner converses in the language of bed sheets, charged with the memory of distilled human energy and content in the mess. The new large-scale, textile-focused works featured in the exhibition expand on the artist’s previous flirtations with the grid as a structural arrangement, method, and figure. Both on and off the wall, Turner’s pieces offer ample space for reflections on material contradictions, specifically as they relate to the expectations, functions, and limiting assumptions placed on the South’s crafts and its craft makers. Encounters vehemently embraces the maxim that constraints are points of departure, as observed in Turner’s creation of windows we cannot see through, vessels that refuse to hold, and curtains built to let the light in.

The vessel acts as another hallmark in Turner’s creative practice. In these works, the grid reaches a fever pitch, becoming hyper-materialized. The artist manipulates the grid as figure itself—it is lines and holes, horizons and axes, mesh, gauze, panels, and webbing. When one realizes the grid’s capacity as a field that one can fall through, balance on, and weave between, the ‘failure’ of the vessels—that is, their unapologetic porosity—becomes a testament to their creative possibilities.”

"Turner sticks to traditional forms—the relief, the vessel, the grid—that prompt feelings of being tethered, whether to art history, to histories of women being yoked to the domestic, or to gender altogether. The artist’s vessels address these tethers elegantly. She became interested in vessels made from fabric, a form and a material meant to hold, but such vessels are porous, some with gaping holes—a refusal."

Grants, awards, and residencies Turner’s projects have been funded by the Joan Mitchell Foundation, South Arts, Tennessee Arts Commission, and The Current Art Fund, a regranting program through the Andy Warhol Foundation.

Turner’s residencies include Corporation of Yaddo, NY (2018, 2024); Museum of Arts & Design, NY (2012); Hambidge Center, GA (2020); and Vermont Studio Center, VT (2022).