Solo Exhibition
Fine Arts Center at Colorado College, Colorado Springs, USA
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September 4, 2026 – December 5, 2026
Curated by Katja Rivera
Holaday and Seagraves Galleries
Opening Celebration: Friday, September 4, 5–8 p.m.
Barbadian artist Annalee Davis’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States, More Tender Geographies, brings together more than thirty works spanning a decade of the artist’s practice. Davis examines what she calls a “post-plantation landscape” through a process by which she looks to land to explore evidence of rupture, care, resistance, and survival. Barbados, a southern Caribbean nation, was first colonized in 1627, then finally gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1966 and became a republic in 2021. Its social and ecological history shapes Davis’s sustained attention to land, labor, and cultural heritage.
On view are works in which Davis incorporates materials found on her family’s property, a working dairy farm that formerly operated as a sugar plantation. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century pottery sherds likely used by both plantation owners and enslaved laborers are visible in Davis’s (bush) Tea Services, which she has used for distilling teas from local plants, fostering discussions about extraction, disintegration, and ecological devastation on the island. Ledger papers left behind on the property became the substrates in a suite of drawings of plants cultivated in Barbados, such as sugarcane, paw-paw, and blue vervain. The sugar plantation, in Davis’s works, provides a lens through which to reckon with Barbados’s historical reliance on enslaved and indentured labor as well as its environmental impact; monocrop farming has led to a loss of relationship with the land and soil.
Davis also presents a collection of dried plants in How to Know a Land II (2026), a topographic drawing in From a Garden of Hope (2016), and large-scale embroidered textiles, such as Post Reproductive Breasts Sprouting New Life (2024–26). Together these works emphasize plants in the process of healing, care, as well as reproductive and post-reproductive health. Alongside these works, the exhibition debuts a newly commissioned sound installation created by Davis in collaboration with musicians from Barbados (Simon Pipe & Jomo Slusher) and Martinique (Marcel Jean-Baptiste). In an underground limestone cave, the musicians engaged in a dialogue with the natural world through sound, echo, and reverberation.
Across the exhibition, Davis encourages viewers to recognize mutual entanglements: between past and present, between people, and between humans and the natural world. In ways that are deeply personal yet global in reach, Annalee Davis explores colonial histories of extraction and labor, and the sacredness of land, to unearth possibilities for resistance in the present, while imagining more responsible futures.
Written by Katja Rivera
Annalee Davis: More Tender Geographies on view at Fine Art Center, Colorado Springs
Photo Credit: Wes Maygar
Thank you to the Servais Family Collection and the Ian McNeel Collection for lending works to this exhibition.
More Tender Geographies on Bloomberg Connects
Discover More Tender Geographies through Bloomberg Connects, a free digital arts and culture guide offering a closer look at the exhibition and selected works.
Listen to Annalee Davis introduce the exhibition in a short audio recording, and explore works that reflect her ongoing engagement with Barbados's post-plantation landscape, histories of labour and extraction, ecological memory, and practices of care and renewal.
HIGHLIGHTS
KCME Annalee Davis’ Performance Spotlight | Radio Interview
As part of More Tender Geographies at the Fine Arts Center at Colorado College, Annalee Davis joined Colorado Springs radio station KCME for an episode of Performance Spotlight.
In this conversation, Davis introduces her artistic practice and the ideas underpinning the exhibition, reflecting on her ongoing engagement with Barbados's post-plantation landscape and the relationships between land, memory, colonial histories, and ecological care.
Recording, Process and Place
Images from the making of Chants for the Sixth Extinction, including photos from the recording of Solastalgia: Geologies of Grief in an underground limestone cave in Barbados, where conch, drum, and trombone met the reverberations of the chamber itself, alongside the landscapes and references that inform the exhibition.
