Sculptures and Paintings by Gary White and Nyasha Madamombe

Nyasha Madamombe is one of the most unique visual artists to emerge from Zimbabwe, Africa. An interdisciplinary artist, Nyasha combines tradition and technology to tell the untold story of the collective African experience. This ability to move between disciplines allows her to examine and spotlight issues related to collective memory, tradition, the spiritual, and the contemporary. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the National Art Gallery in the Zimbabwean capital Harare, in Johannesburg South Africa, Tennessee, Chicago, and New York.

Gary L. White is a native of Nashville, born and raised. White received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Watkins College of Art and Design in 2011 and received his MFA in Ceramics from The University of Tennessee Knoxville. White is a Belmont Faculty Fellows 2022 and teaches Ceramics at Belmont University. His works have been exhibited in solo shows and group exhibitions throughout the country. White conducts a cross-cultural visual investigation, that records folkways, identity, and the experiences of the “Southern Other” in both historical and contemporary times.

Gary White Show Statement:

Storytelling is an integral beloved pasttime and vehicle for the conservation of history, people, and events. It was inevitable that this rich tradition would make its way into my practice as an artist. My work is informed by the rich complex history of the American South, from the perspective of a multiethnic southern experience. A category of which I have termed the “Other”. My work pays homage to the past and celebrates the present. Histories, lifeways, Ancestors, tribal traditions, folklore, and religious practices of this south meander their Way throughout the work. These motifs and archetypes are elevated to a sainted status. The figures transport the viewer back in time to revisit the past and ponder the present. Within the work there is held metaphorical memory, archived experiences, and wisdom.

Nyasha Madamombe

My work investigates the essence of being. It explores my relationship with the present world, bound to the ancient African tradition of my ancestors. Ancestors who exist in rituals, stories, artifacts, spirit and through me. My experience of new worlds is intimately rooted in the African philosophy of Hunhu/Ubuntu, the essence of that which makes us human. The thread that binds the individual to the collective. It puts human connection at the center, by embracing a timeless truth that, “I am because we are, and because I am therefore we are".

My work speaks to the duality of existing between two disparate places, where I was born(Africa) and where I live (America). I exist, perpetually, in two parts. The world of object-making allows me an expanded habitation at this beautiful and sometimes contradictory convergence.

My art becomes an intimate process of transcending without negating my experience and that

of others. The spiritual giving form to the corporeal. The ancient to the new. I am interested in capturing an echo of the past through the presence of absence. What no longer exists in the physical, triumphs in the re-imagined. On this journey, I am informed by oral histories passed down through generations and written narratives. These narratives, told by others, often crowd out African voices. My art therefore seeks to reclaim the narrative and tell our untold histories to pave an authentic future. I give myself to the telling of African peoples’ collective pain and joy, struggle and triumph. I celebrate these complex, larger than life beings, remembering always, I am because of those who were before me.