HAGOOD: Lanecia A. Rouse + Ciona Rouse
The Curb Center at Vanderbilt
September 22-December 4, 2025
September 22-December 4, 2025
“this past was waiting for me
when i came”
-Lucille Clifton
Hagood, South Carolina.
34° 03′ 15.60″ N. -80° 34′ 10.79″ W.
It’s where our maternal living memory begins. Great-Great-Grandmother Annie, who lived into our toddler years, called Hagood home. It’s where she took in her namesake and our Grandmother Annie Lee when she was still young and begged to leave Philadelphia to stay in Carolina with her grandmother. It’s where Annie Lee gave birth to our mother Connie. Hagood is a sort of home—even though it mostly exists for us in our infant memory.
But there’s something about the South, something about being Black in the South, something about being Black and woman in the South that makes looking back a necessary way forward.
HAGOOD finds visual artist Lanecia Rouse collaborating with her sister and poet Ciona Rouse to explore their matrilineal line, in search of the softness and steel of the long line of women that carried them into the world. Through mixed media collage, installation, color meditations and poetry, the artists conjure up the world of their mothers, relying on passed-down stories and objects from the family archive, photographs, and the intentional practice of Toni Morrison’s concept of rememory—an act of re-experiencing inherited memories that are not your own. HAGOOD reflects the griefs, the artistry, the care and the resiliency that bind their family line and define their experience as Black women in the southern United States.
HAGOOD invites you to the land, to the home, and to the table the Rouse sisters have set. There, we encounter and contemplate the necessary quest into past connections that make us human today.
when i came”
-Lucille Clifton
Hagood, South Carolina.
34° 03′ 15.60″ N. -80° 34′ 10.79″ W.
It’s where our maternal living memory begins. Great-Great-Grandmother Annie, who lived into our toddler years, called Hagood home. It’s where she took in her namesake and our Grandmother Annie Lee when she was still young and begged to leave Philadelphia to stay in Carolina with her grandmother. It’s where Annie Lee gave birth to our mother Connie. Hagood is a sort of home—even though it mostly exists for us in our infant memory.
But there’s something about the South, something about being Black in the South, something about being Black and woman in the South that makes looking back a necessary way forward.
HAGOOD finds visual artist Lanecia Rouse collaborating with her sister and poet Ciona Rouse to explore their matrilineal line, in search of the softness and steel of the long line of women that carried them into the world. Through mixed media collage, installation, color meditations and poetry, the artists conjure up the world of their mothers, relying on passed-down stories and objects from the family archive, photographs, and the intentional practice of Toni Morrison’s concept of rememory—an act of re-experiencing inherited memories that are not your own. HAGOOD reflects the griefs, the artistry, the care and the resiliency that bind their family line and define their experience as Black women in the southern United States.
HAGOOD invites you to the land, to the home, and to the table the Rouse sisters have set. There, we encounter and contemplate the necessary quest into past connections that make us human today.
|
Lanecia Rouse is a multifaceted visual artist whose work includes collage, photography, abstract painting, curation, writing, and teaching. Her work was featured in Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage, which debuted at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, TN, from September to December 2023, before traveling to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, and The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. She is the inaugural recipient of the Berg Global Artist-in-Residence Fellowship. Ciona Rouse is a poet, editor, and author of Vantablack, a chapbook from Third Man Books (2017). Her work has appeared in Oxford American, Wildness, Booth, The Account, Still, Talking River, Gabby Journal, Matter: a journal of political poetry and commentary and elsewhere. She served as a resident poet for the Nick Cave: FEAT exhibition at Frist Art Museum, culminating in a poem called “We,” which was named 2018’s “Best Poetry Performance” by Nashville Scene. |