ABOUT THE 2025 MISSISSIPPI INVITATIONAL

The Mississippi Invitational is a biennial exhibition that highlights some of the most exciting contemporary art made in the state of Mississippi. The 2025 Mississippi Invitational: Call Home features work by twelve artists selected through an open application process by guest curator TK Smith. Chosen for their creativity, skill, and ingenuity, these artists each engage with the multifaceted—and at times contradictory—concept of home.

Call Home attempts to interrogate our sites of origin. In their own unique ways, works in the exhibition define, complicate, or defy what it means to be from a place. They grapple with the notion that we are molded by where and who we come from. They explore the ways we escape from, or return to, a place or idea of home that no longer is, or possibly never was. 

Through photography, text, ceramics, installation, painting, and sculpture, the featured artists contend with memory, trauma, nostalgia, and hope in vulnerable and generous ways. Regardless of how we define home—as a place, a person, an afterlife, an inner life—the call incites connection back to somewhere we find solace in being known.

This digital catalogue includes exhibition photography as well as a collection of short texts by authors personally selected by the 2025 Invitational artists. Contributing writers were encouraged to pen texts using the style, voice, and format of their choice. The resulting suite of poetry, journalistic and critical prose, creative essays, and personal reflections offers diverse perspectives on the artists, their practices, and their lives. 

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION CURATOR

TK Smith is a curator, writer, and cultural historian. His interdisciplinary research engages materiality to analyze art, identity, and culture. As a public scholar, he serves as a conduit between artists, ideas, and communities to produce thoughtful exhibitions, publications, and programs. He currently works as Curator, Arts of Africa and the African Diaspora, at the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University. Smith’s writing has been published in exhibition catalogues, academic journals, and periodicals, including Art Papers where he is a contributing editor. In 2022, he was awarded an Andy Warhol Writers Grant and in 2024 he was awarded a Leo and Dorothea Rabkin Prize. He has been a visiting lecturer at numerous academic and cultural institutions, including Cornell University, where he taught undergraduate courses on cultural criticism. Smith is a doctoral candidate in the History of American Civilization program at the University of Delaware, where he is completing his dissertation Granite, Power, and Piss: The Transformation of a Confederate Symbol.