“A Carnivorous Year,” 2023. Pigment prints, sequins, and bio-based resin on glazed stoneware. Courtesy of the artist; Chapter NY, New York; and Document, Chicago and Lisbon. The Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts presents “Living and Working,” a survey exhibition of work by artist Erin Jane Nelson, through Sept. 26.
This is Nelson’s largest solo exhibition to date, and her first survey exhibition, bringing together work spanning a decade of her practice. It will travel to the Knoxville Museum of Art in August 2027. AEIVA will co-publish an exhibition catalog with Institute 193, a nonprofit art space in Lexington, Kentucky, that will be released in early June. An opening reception will be from 5-7 p.m. Thursday, May 21, at AEIVA, 1221 10th Ave. South.
AEIVA is part of the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Center for the Arts. AEIVA is open from noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. Visit uab.edu/aeiva or call 205-975-6436.
Free community programming to accompany this exhibition will include summer drop-in tours on Saturdays, a pinhole camera workshop July 7, Science Nights each Tuesday in August and Chamber Music @ AEIVA on Sept. 14. More details are below.
About the exhibition
Spanning photography, textiles and ceramics, Nelson’s works convey a range of emotions that speak to her experience growing up during a time of increasing climate anxiety.
From 2015 to 2025, while living just outside of Atlanta, Georgia, she engaged in a sustained dialogue with the environment and ecology of the southeastern United States, regularly visiting sites like the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia and barrier islands along the coast from Mississippi to southern Virginia.
In response to rising sea levels and the increasingly visible transformation of the earth’s oceans, Nelson focused her inquiry on aquatic ecosystems. These watery realms become spaces of possibility in Nelson’s work, sites for imagining alternative futures and ways of being in the present. She created a body of work both personal and prophetic, memorializing precarious landscapes through the lens of her own lived experience.
Borrowing as much from vernacular craft traditions as from science fiction, Nelson grounds her speculative worlds in the material histories of the region. Her ceramics and collaged textiles contain artifacts from her personal archive, including found objects, photos and ephemera.
Nelson’s work is preoccupied with the passage of time and the ways it can be experienced, marked and held. It reflects both anxiety about what lies ahead and a tender nostalgia for the present as it unfolds. Rooted in the everyday, it finds a quiet persistence in the intimate labor of living and working on a changing planet.
A UAB art student leads visitors on a tour through AEIVA’s galleries.
Free community activities at AEIVA this summer
Enjoy Summer Saturday drop-in tours, engaging, conversational tours led by AEIVA’s student guides that are designed for everyone, from curious first-time visitors to seasoned art enthusiasts. No registration is required; just stop in on Saturday between noon and 5 p.m. Tours generally last between 20 and 30 minutes.
- Science Nights at AEIVA: This partnership with the Birmingham Zoo brings together science and art from 5-7 p.m., with open galleries, light refreshments and hands-on activities.
- 4: Recycling and reusing materials in nature
- 11: Pollinators and seedpods
- 18: The invisible world with watercolors
- 25: Clay and memory with pinch pots
- AEIVA will screen the 2018 science fiction cosmic horror film “Annihilation,” directed by Alex Garland, at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 17, with an introduction by Gareth Jones, who teaches film studies in UAB’s Honors College.
About the artist
Nelson lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 2011, she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from The Cooper Union. She has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta; Chapter NY, New York; DOCUMENT, Chicago; and the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta; among others. Nelson’s work is currently on view in the 2026 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. It was also included in the 2021 New Museum Triennial and in group exhibitions at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Moss Art Center, Virginia Tech; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen; the Fries Museum in Leeuwarden, Netherlands; La Galerie, centre d’art contemporain, Noisy-le-Sec, France; Deli Gallery, New York; Van Doren Waxter, New York; Capital Gallery, San Francisco; and the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich. Nelson is a recipient of the 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts.
This exhibition is made possible in part by a grant from the Alabama State Council on the Arts.
