OCHI is pleased to present She who sits, an exhibition of paintings by Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist Adrienne Elise Tarver. The works on view originated as Tarver’s debut solo commission with Public Art Fund, first presented across roughly 300 transit shelters and newsstands in New York, Boston, and Chicago in 2024. She who sits will be on view at OCHI, located at 605 N. Western Avenue in Los Angeles, CA, from September 12 through October 10, 2026. A public reception will be held at the gallery on Saturday, September 12 from 6-8pm.
The paintings in She who sits explore the centrality of the Black matriarchal figure, framing the posture of sitting as a site of self-contained power and agentic rest. The works center on Vera Otis, an invented figure Tarver has spent the past decade shaping after discovering an anonymous woman in a secondhand photograph. Seated in intimate environments both interior and outdoor, an ordinary pose of rest becomes a quiet, public claim on presence and reclamation of selfhood.
Tarver draws on an extensive collection that brings together personal snapshots, found imagery, and media archives, including clippings pulled from vintage copies of Ebony and Jet magazines. The resulting paintings sit at the intersection of portraiture and myth-making, using color and interior space to hold both the specificity of a single imagined life and a broader meditation on rest as a form of agency.
Commissioned by Public Art Fund for Adrienne Elise Tarver: She who sits, an exhibition on 300 JCDecaux bus shelters and newsstands across New York City, Chicago, and Boston on view from August 14 – November 24, 2024.
