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Entangled Time: Entangled Space

Nell Gottlieb

Entangled Time: Entangled Space Nell Gottlieb

Gadsden Museum of Art October 4 - November 25, 2025

Foreward from Museum Director One aspect of art that is often overlooked is the role of research. The strongest exhibitions are built not only on imagination but also on careful investigation. Entangled Time: Entangled Space grows out of years of archival research, family history, and material exploration. The result is an exhibition that is visually compelling while inviting us to look more deeply at the history of the place we call home. As director of the Gadsden Museum of Art, I believe one of our most important responsibilities is to present exhibitions that invite discovery. Entangled Time: Entangled Space is an exhibition that feels especially meaningful in Gadsden. Our community carries many layers of history, some celebrated and others too often overlooked, and it is important that we explore all of them. Rather than offering simple conclusions, Gottlieb’s work encourages viewers to slow down, ask questions, and consider how the past continues to shape the places we inhabit today. Growing up in the South myself, I understand how important family roots and place can be. Yet this exhibition also reminds us of the irony that many of us who speak most passionately about belonging are ourselves descendants of newcomers to this land. Gottlieb takes us on a visual journey through the history of this landscape, the Muscogee homeland, the forced removal of its people, the expansion of the cotton economy built on enslaved labor, and the transformation of rivers and forests through industry. She approaches these stories with curiosity and encourages reflection. A particularly rewarding aspect of presenting this exhibition is its entering into dialogue with our own collections. In What Kudzu Hides, Gottlieb incorporates an early Mississippian bowl and stone projectile points from the museum’s Indigenous holdings. Projectile points also appear in The Cotton Economy, where they rest among archival documents and personal objects. These artifacts become more than historical objects; they become active participants in a contemporary work of art. Seeing familiar objects from our collection in a new context reminds us that museums are places where the past and present continually inform one another. As visitors move through the gallery, the individual works begin to reveal unexpected connections. Ceramics, textiles, photographs, maps, artist books, and found objects invite conversations across media and across time. Together they create an experience that is both personal and expansive, reminding us that the places we know are shaped by many stories, many voices, and many generations. Like the exhibition itself, those stories remain entangled, continuing to unfold around us. The Gadsden Museum of Art is proud to present Entangled Time: Entangled Space. It exemplifies what the arts can do at their best: foster curiosity, deepen understanding, and create opportunities for meaningful conversation. Whether visitors come because of an interest in contemporary art, local history, or simply a desire to experience something new, I believe they will leave with a richer appreciation for the complexity of the place we all share. —Ray Wetzel

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Curator/Scholar short essay If you’ve ever done any sewing, you’ve had the experience of attempting to undo something: a pattern piece attached upside down, a knotted clump of thread. Even the most conscientious seamstress knows that removing stitches will leave holes and impressions in a fabric. Sometimes it is best to leave them be and build around them. Much like a fabric piece, one’s cultural and economic inheritance also leaves immutable impressions. And while these cannot be erased, they can serve as a map for forming a deeper understanding of the connected histories that shape a life, a culture, and a landscape. Gottlieb’s Entangled Time: Entangled Space uses materials that highlight these immutable imprints, and she utilizes a unifying stitching motif to create a visual and symbolic cohesion. In The Tallapoosa: From Okfuskee to Tuckabatchee, Gottlieb uses red clay pigments collected from the modern site of her ancestral creek that flows into the impounded river as a background for a map of the area before the land was parceled and sold. In Coosa Bend, she again uses site-harvested pigment as a map background, this time showing plantations with gridded fields of cotton that overtook the once-natural landscape. These layers of dirt express both the psychological accumulation of memory and the historical accumulation of archaeology, while placing her personal experience into the broader context of the landscape. Gottlieb further explores gridding and parceling of land in Entangled Spaces (Gridded). The piece features individual images from the Coosa and Tallapoosa Rivers arranged in a physical grid. However, the grid presentation is organic rather than strict. Unattached edges and loose hanging strings bring to mind settlers’ unwieldy attempts at carving square parcels from a rebellious and natural landscape. This imposition of will does not stop at the land, but also speaks to forced labor and assimilation of culture. In Logan’s Creek, 1954, Gottlieb layers a cyanotype of her own baptism in Logan’s Creek with stitching and text, and then stains it with silt in the creek. This juxtaposition of personal experience with materials of place creates a dialogue between her own memories and the physical record of a the landscape before it was altered by damming and development. The piece also speaks to the use of religion to enforce cultural and societal norms. This imposition of outsider will upon the culture is further explored in What Kudzu Hides. A basket woven from the invasive kudzu vine is displayed above Muscogee cultural artifacts, serving as a metaphor for settlers’ absorption and displacement of the complex culture that had existed in the area for centuries. Like the hand-sewn stitches featured throughout the installation, the artist weaves together this complex story or history, inheritance, and experience. Local cotton, harvested red clay pigments, river silt, and site imagery tell not only the story of a specific geographical place, but also the personal story of the artist who is inextricably linked to the landscape through her own memory, and through generations of ancestors who played divergent roles in its history of cultural displacement, colonization, enslaved labor, and commodified land. 3

Entangled Time: Entangled Space Entangled Time: Entangled Space reflects the Indigenous understanding of time as cyclical, layered, and connected with space. This contrasts with Western or “settler” time, which is linear, focused on progress. For settlers, progress meant “civilizing” Indigenous people to European ways, making the land more productive, transforming “empty” land into surveyed and deeded property, and harnessing the power of the rivers. For the Muscogee people, the land and rivers were communal and sacred. Settler definitions of “civilization” dismissed existing fields, traditions, and governance. These tensions came to a head in the 19th century in Alabama. The Coosa and Tallapoosa Rivers were once the hunting grounds and homelands of the Muscogee people. On the Tallapoosa, the 1814 Battle of Horseshoe Bend ended in defeat and the Treaty of Fort Jackson ceded 21 million acres to the United States. That land was quickly surveyed and sold to settlers eager to build cotton wealth through enslaved labor. These rivers also hold my own history. My grandfather’s family were settlers and enslavers along the Coosa. My grandmother, his wife, imbued in me the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. Her own line, however, traces back to a Muscogee great grandmother at Tuckabatchee on the Tallapoosa. This elder’s strength and connection to the land was transmitted to me by my grandmother through word and deed. These 19th-century patterns persisted into the 20th, and today, with systems reinforcing the inequities of slavery, racism and cultural erasure and the economies of cotton and timber. Rivers were dammed to create hydroelectric power, flooding towns and cemeteries and pushing species toward extinction. The settler vision of time, progress, and industry achieved dominance. This exhibition gathers fragments of those histories. Works in multiple media explore the rivers as carriers of memory, conflict, and continuity. Landscapes, river dirt, written meanders, and stitched flowing water and survey grids ground the work. Though divided by a gallery wall, the Coosa and Tallapoosa share one story entangled in time and space.

By 4 Benson Lossing–The Pictorial Field Book of the War of 1812, Public Domain

Rivers as Exhibit Organizer The spine of the exhibit, the wall that divides the gallery space, separates work inspired by the Coosa and Tallapoosa Rivers. On either side are pedestals with pitchers that speak to the entangled histories and spaces of the Coosa (on the left) and the Tallapoosa (on the right). These pitchers are placed as a meander of the threads of this entanglement of history, land, and the artist’s legacy beginning with the shattering time of settler colonialism in the 18th and 19th centuries and continuing through its aftermath. The emphasis of the Coosa is on enslavement, the cotton monoculture, the impoundment of the Coosa with its ecological consequences. The Tallapoosa focuses on indigenous culture and relationship to the land, treaties with the US Government culminating in the loss of land following the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, and the river’s impoundment, especially the formation of Lake Martin that covered what had been the Muskogee town of Okfuskee and the freedman’s town of Kowliga. On each side there is a pitcher honoring the artist’s familial matriarchial lineage on the Coosa Bend and the Tallapoosa at Moore’s Creek. To the left of the exhibit title vinyl is a seven foot written meander for each river, ending in their convergence as the Alabama River. This is a free form narrative covering the entanglement described above and written from the artist’s perspective. Moving around the Coosa wall, rivers and creeks are prominent in some works or set the place for works related to the cotton economy and enslavement. Logan’s Creek, 1954, documents the artist’s baptism in a creek that flowed into the Coosa and speaks to the erasure of this space by the expansion of the Lay Dam in 1967. The next works, Transformation: Blood Money, Witness, and Cotton Economy, address aspects of enslavement and the cotton economy. The river reappears in the painting Coosa Bend and in Gridded which combines photographic landscape blocks from both the Coosa and Tallapoosa regions. On the right, works examine the artist’s Muskogee matriarchial lineage, the shattering of both cultural spaces and ecology by the impoundment of Lake Martin and climate change, a map painting of the Tallapoosa from Okfuskee to Tuckabatchee that is a companion to Coosa Bend, and What Kudzu Hides with archaeological artifacts from the Gadsden Museum mounted below Andrew McCall’s kudzu vine basket.

Meander 2: Braided Time divides the gallery space into two sectiions, the Coosa River on the left and the Tallapoosa River on the ri comprised of 75 slip case pitchers with Mishima decoration. The pitchers’ texts and images speak to the history of settler colonialism damming of the rivers with the consequences of impoundment, and family legacy.

ight. Meander 2 is m, monoculture, the

The mishima of the pitcher in image below shows the Coosa and Tallapoosa Rivers converging to form the Alabama. It was the first pitcher in the Tallapoosa line. The three vases above represent the Alabama River. Andrew Jackson’s quote from his letter to his wife after the Treaty of Fort Jackson is written in gold on them “I have no doubt but, in a few years, the banks of the Alabama will present a beautiful view of elegant mansions, and extensive rich and productive farms and will add greatly to the wealth as well as the security of our southern frontier…” Decals on the vases include magnolia blossoms, cotton, and a man in a kilt.

The Coosa meander proceeds toward the Alabama pedestal in the top image, while the Tallapoosa proceeds to the Alabama in the bottom, showing the Alabama vases as the destination. While the two tributary rivers contain pitchers representing different times and topics, the Alabama vases focus on the plantation economy and settler colonialism without regard for the Muskogee history, industrialization, or the river ecology.

Matriarchial Lineage: Grandmother and the Owl refers to a childhood memory of the artist. An owl had flown into an open window of an upstairs room at the Wallace House. It was unable to get out and was distressed. While she watched from a doorway, her grandmother went to the owl, picked it up, and released it through an open window. The artist recalls her grandmothewr’s acknowledging her Muscogee grandmother who, she said, had a close relationship with the earth and the creatures within it. The lidded ceramic dishes use contemporary slip cast kitch objects as knobs, an owl, deer and walnut to reference the natural Muscogee world, as well as a critical commentary on our cultural view of nature. 12

Matriarchial Lineage: Grandmother and the Owl is next to Matriarchial Lineage: Daughter’s First Deer and is the first of the Tallapoosa wall-hung works.

Matriarchial Lineage: Daughter’s First Deer (opposite) is an installationof the European mount skill and hide of the artist’s daughter’s first deer, shot when she began to hunt in mid-life. On the shelf is a ceramic bowl made from antler shapes with cast glass and resin deer vertebrae, along with actual bones. The daughter’s hunting in Texas was an unexpected nod to her Alabama inheritance. 13

Shattered Time (Lake Martin) As I was doing research for this body of work, I learned that Lake Martin covered the town of Okfuskee and the free Black town of Kowliga, among other things when the Tallapoosa River was dammed in 1926. This led me to think of the layering of time and space. The geologic rock base represents deep time. It shows the effect of compression, folding, and shear. Tectonic plate collisions in the Paleozoic era older, deeper rocks to the surface. These movements over geologic time contrast with our own historic period of a shatter time of cultures on the Tallapoosa River and of ecosystems.

The effects of impoundment by the Martin Dam include extinction of some fish and mussel species. The neighboring Coosa River, impounded by the Lay Dam and others, is the fifth most endangered river in the country. I also began to think about climate change and pictured this as the erasure of Russell Shores, a community at Lake Martin, by rising water and an apocalyptic shift in the land and sky. Silt from the Tallapoosa River was used in the pigment for the lake bottom, soil, and the lake bank.

The Tallapoosa: Froom Okfuskee to Tuckabatchee. Made with red clay pigment collected from the road bed that goes over the current County Line Creek. The waterways and other map elements are acrylic paint. The time period is during post contact but before gridding of the land and land loss. 2025.

The Tallapoosa from Okfuskee to Tuckabatchee My Moore (Muskogee/Scots) ancestors lived near Moore’s Creek (now County Line Creek) which was across the river from Tuckabatchee. They are listed on the 1832 Creek census records of Thlakatchka & Okefuskee Echee Sehogee Town. I imagined the land as it was then, with open land, forests, streams, homes and fields. Paths run along the waterways and connect homes and forests. These facilitated trade and movement between villages and to hunting grounds. Later they became the roads used by settlers to enter into what had been Muscogee Territory to carve out homesteads. Communal fields line the river near towns. They are planted with the three sister mounds of corn, beans, and squash. Because the crops were not individual plants laid out in rows, European style, the settlers discounted the Muscogee agricultural practices. Cane breaks along the river remain alongside the food crops and were actively managed. Cane was used in basketry and building. The pigment is clay collected by the artist from the roadside near Moore’s Creek (now County Line Creek) where it had been brought in during road construction

Acrylic paint and Tallapoosa County dirt on unstretched canvas, 2025. 18

What Kudzu hides. I have long been fascinated with kudzu, the invasive plant brought into the South in the 20th century to stop erosion. It can grow up to a foot a day. It often covers abandoned buildings and hangs down from trees that it has climbed. It can choke out what lies beneath. I view it as obscurance, suffocation, and suppression. Here, a kudzu vine basket created by artist Andrew McCall from Lowndes County sits above a late Mississippian bowl and arrowheads from the Gadsden Museum of Art collection. The lighting on the work creates shadows that reach down covering the Muscogee cultural artifacts. Kudzu covers the ground hiding what is lying underneath.

Kudzu basket by Andrew McCall torched with map gas, artifacts from the private collection of the Gadsden Museum of Art, 2025. 20

As you round the dividing wall from the Tallapoosa wall works, you view both meanders, looking through Meander 2: Braided Rivers to the title wall and Meander 1: Meander of the Mind. This is a seven foot long handwritten text forming river meanders. The artist engaged in free writing, providing historical information, personal experiences, and commentary specific to the Tallapoosa, Coosa and Alabama River areas. 24

Meander 1: Meanders of the Mind. Acrylic marker on Bristol paper, 2025.

Found table cloth stained in lake silt, cyanotypes on cotton organza, and tea dye on broadcloth, 2025.

Logan’s Creek, 1954 This textile work is based on my own and three other children’s baptism in Logan’s Creek in Harpersville Alabama. The baptismal spot for Klein Baptist Church was the same one as the swimming hole that we used daily during the summer. It was impounded by the expansion of Lay Dam in 1967. The vintage table cloth on which the toned cyanotypes of photographs from 1954 and tea-dyed text are stitched was placed in the silt under the water of the inlet that erased Logan’s Creek for 24 hours to create its staining. The photographs were taken by my mother.

The justiposition of these two works speaks to the historical connection of the neighborhing Wallace and Scott families and of the role of religion in maintaining social structures. Rev. Scott, a cotton planter, enslaver and minister, is a reference for Transmutation: Blood Money. On the right, his great granddaughter and I are being baptised in the creek on their family property into the church which sits on Wallace land.

Found choir robe and collection plate, cotton, acrylic medium and pennies, 2021.

Transmutation: Blood Money Religion was an important part of settler life. Planters supported churches, and some ministers were planters, Rev. James Scott of the plantation adjacent to that of the Wallaces founded Scott’s Grove Baptist Church, which became the Black mother church in the area. Samuel Henderson, father-in-law of Kate Henderson Wallace, was an important minister from Talladega. Son of a printer, he was one of the first editors of the Southwestern Baptist newspaper (now the Alabama Baptist) and also a participant in the first Confederate secession conference. My grandson, Jacob Cotlar, glued the cotton to the pennies.

The eyes were made by the artist’s granddaughter, Caro Gottlieb. Terracotta, cotton, and solarfast, 2025.

Witness The eyes refer to those enslaved on the Wallace plantation. Their names that we know are inscribed in gold on the back of eyes. Those lost to memory are represented by blank-backed eyes. They gaze toward the viewer, holding them accountable. The cloth images are of the animals and people associated with stories of the Wallace house and the Coosa River. The embroidered handkerchief is based on a photo of the artist as a young girl at the Wallace house. The cloth image on the right is of a page of Kate Henderson Wallace’s scrapbook. She pasted ephemera over her minister father’s working journal, in this case a poem and photo of Robert E. Lee on top of a letter.

Caged Bird Caged Bird is composed of burlap figures, representing persons enslaved by the Wallaces. The title is taken from Maya Angelou’s book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Found metal object, burlap, cotton, 2020-2025

This portion of the exhibit wall locates the context of the Wallace House in the larger community of plantations along the Coosa River at the Coosa Bend. The homes are placed withing gridded fields, echoing the surveyed grids that allowed their purchase from the federal government. These plantations were all related as kith or kin. This community of Scottish Americans formed a tight knit group and marriages linking them were common. Coosa Bend. Acrylic paint and dirt pigment from the Wallace grounds on unstretched canvas, 2022.

The two works above focus on the Wallace Plantation as a site of enslavement and the production of cotton on Muscogee land. The found table-top desk has arrowheads and land grant document cyanotypes, pennies with cotton linter, and a book with the name of persons the Wallaces enslaved. Burlap figures, stuffed with cotton, are trapped inside the metal bars of a bird cage replica, with a bird singing outside at the top of the cage. The Settler Economy, Found table top desk, artist book, Gantts Quarry (Sylacauga) marble dust, pennies with cotton linter, polymer clay cyanotype images on organza, arrowheads from the private collection of the Galveston Museum of Art. Caged Bird, Burlap, thread, cotton and found metal object, 2025. 37

Found table top desk, artist book, Gantts Quarry (Sylacauga) marble dust, pennies with cotton linter, polymer clay cyanotype images on organza, arrowheads from the private collection of the Galveston Museum of Art.

The Cotton Economy This work frames the basis of the Wallace plantation cotton economy on what was once Muscogee land, that was taken at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend and sold to settlers. They used this land for the monoculture farming of cotton. The artist’s book contains the known names of the people enslaved by the Wallaces and passages from James Mallory’s (Wallace kith) agricultural journal from 1843-1877 that was published as Fear God and Walk Humbly. It sits on marble dust, extracted and used for buildings.

Coosa Bend Coosa Bend was inspired by the 2019 exhibit Mapping Memory: Space and History in 16th Century Mexico at the Blanton Museum in Austin. These Mapas de las Relaciones Geográficas were created by indigenous artists in the late 16th century for Spain and incorporate an amalgamation of imagery and symbols from their culture and from the colonizers . It is from the perspective of the Wallace House and outbuildings, looking to the Scott-Bradford House on the left and across and along the Coosa River to Selwood, Alpine, Mount Ida, and Mallory Crossing. Residents of the latter and the Wallace House stitched squares on the Mt. Ida Quilt made for the wedding of Virginia, the daughter of James Mallory, author of Fear God and Walk Humbly, who resided at Selwood. The quilt is assumed to have been made at Mount Ida, home of the groom’s sister. The resulting 4´× 6´ canvas reflects the mapmaking tradition of Mapas, representing a history and interpretation of the space occupied by these Scots settlers from Virginia who became kith and kin. The brown pigment is dirt from the Wallace grounds. Cotton forms a sea around the buildings, crossing the highways, just as I saw it in 2018

Entangled Spaces (Gridded) Eight inch squares, signifying surveyed quarters of land, are printed with images from the Coosa and Tallapoosa Rivers area Some are printed with owls, sturgeon, and butterflies. Some squares are further subdivided by blood-red stitching. All are finished with beeswax. Cast paper grids sit on top of this surface.

Ink jet prints on tea dyed paper, acrylic relief ink, cotton embroidery floss, beeswax, paper pulp and fishline, 2025.

Works Listing Meander 2: Braided Time, 2025 Dimensions: 75 cast porcelain pitchers, with Mishima text and images. River braids reflect settler colonialism, industrial use of the rivers with impoundment, and family legacy. Created with Caro Gottlieb.

Matriarchial Lineage: Grandmother and the Owl, 2025 Dimensions: Acrylic paint and dirt pigment from the Wallace grounds on stretched canvas. Hung above three slip cast boxes with knobs on the lid from contemporary deer, owl, and walnut molds (kitch culture).

Matriarchical Lineage: Daughter’s First Deer, 2025. Dimensions: European mounted deer skull, deer hide, ceramic bowl with clay, cast glass and resin, and found bones. Deer skull and hide courtesy of Erin Gottlieb.

Shattered Time: Lake Martin, 2025. Dimensions: Acrylic paint and Tallapoosa River silt on stretched canvas.

The Tallapoosa from Okfuskee to Tuckabatchee, 2025. Dimensions: Acrylic paint and Tallapoosa County roadside clay beside Moore’s Creek on unstretched canvas.

What Kudzu Hides, 2025. Dimensions: Kudzu basket made by Andrew McCall and purchased in Marengo County, torched with map gas, Native American artifacts from GMA Private Collection

Meander 1: Meanders of the Mind, 2025. Dimensions: Acrylic marker on Bristol paper.

Logan’s Creek, 1954, 2025. Dimensions: 44” x 72” Cyanotypes and stitching on a vintage table cloth stained from the silt/water of the Lay Lake backwater impounding and erasing Logan Creek, the baptismal site. Original photographs by the artist’s mother, Erin Wallace Harrell, taken in 1954.

Transmutation/Blood Money, 2021. Dimensions: Found choir robe and collection pate, pennies with cottonfiber. The latter made with the assistance of Jacob Cotlar.

Witness, 2025. Dimensions: Terracotta clay with names of enslaved Wallaces on reverse, cyanotype and solar fast on fabric, handstitched cotton handerchief.

Caged Bird, 2025 Dimensions: Burlap, thread, cotton, and found metal object.

The Settler Economy, 2025. Dimensions: Found tabletop desk, Gant Quarry marble dust, artist book, pennies with cotton linter, polymer clay, cyanotype images of land patents on organza, and Native American artifacts from GMA Private Collection.

Coosa Bend, 2021. Dimensions: 48” x 72” Acrylic paint and dirt from the Wallace grounds.

Entangled Spaces: Gridded, 2025. Dimensions: Ink jet print on tea-stained paper, thread, acrylic paint, beeswax, cotton paper pulp cast on fishline.

Artist Statement I work across multiple media to examine how personal memory is entangled with longer histories of settler colonialism, enslavement, and Indigenous removal in the American South. My work begins from my own coming of age as a white woman in Jim Crow Alabama and extends outward to confront the structures that continue to shape racialized inequity, environmental harm, and cultural erasure. For many years, I have been reckoning with my family’s history in central Alabama. On my grandfather’s side, my ancestors enslaved people on a cotton plantation on the Coosa River. The plantation’s founder was a soldier who came south with Andrew Jackson during the Creek Wars. On my grandmother’s side, I have a Muscogee great-grandmother who was married to a Scottish trader living in the Muscogee village of Thlatchaka on the Tallapoosa River. He had two Muscogee wives; his first wife died young,and her children moved west ahead of forced removal. Their sons are said to have fought at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. He and his older daughters were also enslavers. These intertwined histories do not resolve into a coherent lineage. They remain contradictory, unsettled, and morally irreconcilable. As a child, I spent summers in the 1950s with my grandmother in the Wallace house in Harpersville, Alabama. The house was largely empty and lacked plumbing and running water. We grew vegetables, ate fruit from the yard, and swam in Logan’s Creek. During those summers, I learned my family history through stories shaped by the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. I came to know the land intimately and to love it deeply. Only later did I begin to understand that this ground was contested space—land marked by Indigenous presence and dispossession, by enslaved labor, and by the narratives my own family used to justify ownership. My work approaches time and history as layered, recursive, and fractured. The landscapes I work with—rivers, fields, and houses—are not passive backdrops but active witnesses. They carry the traces of violence, survival, and erasure. My work seeks to acknowledge inherited responsibility, to resist inherited narratives, and to make visible the entanglements that still shape how land, history, and identity are understood.

Biography Nell Gottlieb is an interdisciplinary artist whose work examines settler colonialism, enslavement, Indigenous removal, and the persistence of these histories in contemporary landscapes and personal memory. Her practice spans ceramics, textiles, works on paper, artist books, and installation. She completed the Block Program at the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2019). Gottlieb has had solo exhibitions at the Gadsden Museum of Art, Gadsden, Alabama (2025); the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Alabama (2022); the Neill-Cochran House Museum, Austin, Texas (2022); and the Community Artists’ Collective, Houston, Texas (2020). Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions. In 2018, after inheriting her family’s former plantation house in Harpersville, Alabama, Gottlieb co-founded the Wallace Center for Arts and Reconciliation. This moment marked a significant turning point in her artistic and personal work, lelading to a sustained focus on the material, historical, and ethical legacies of enslavement and settler colonialism. Gottlieb’s writing accompanies her visual practice. Her memoir chapter, I Called Him John, traces her reckoning with family history and is included in the forthcoming book Dissident Daughters of the Confederacy: Growing up White in the Jim Crow South. She holds a BA and MA in psychology from Emory University and a PhD in sociology from Boston University. Gottlieb is professor emeritus of public health education at the University of Texas at Austin, where she taught from 1980 to 2011. Her background in social science and public health informs her artistic investigation of systems, power, and responsibility. A native of Alabama, she has lived in Texas since 1980. www.nellgottlieb.com www.wallacearts.org

Artist Timeline This timeline traces the lived, educational, and professional experiences that shaped the artist’s practice. 1945 — Born in Birmingham, Alabama 1950–1958 — S pends summers with her grandmother at the Wallace house, Harpersville, Alabama 1958–1962 — R amsay High School, a segregated Birmingham public school. Encouraged in art by a teacher trained with Hans Hofmann, New York City 1962–1968 — E mory University, Atlanta, Georgia. BA and MA in Psychology 1968–1971 — R ockefeller University, New York City. Works with the Neighborhood Youth Corps 1971–1980 — R esides in California and Massachusetts Works in public health and social research. PhD in Sociology, Boston University

1980–2011 — Professor of Public Health Education, The University of Texas at Austin. Begins sustained study in visual art alongside academic career 2003 — Death of spouse 2011–2019 — Resides in Houston, Texas. Completes the Block Program, Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2019) 2013–2026 — Participates in more than thirty-eight group exhibitions 2018 — Inherits the Wallace family plantation house, Harpersville, Alabama. Co-founds the Wallace Center for Arts and Reconciliation. First Black and white descendant homecoming at the site. Ceramics residency, Atelierhaus Hilmsen, Hilmsen, Germany 2019–present — Resides in Austin, Texas 2019–2024 — Volunteer Executive Director, Wallace Center for Arts and Reconciliation 2020 — C hoked on Cotton, Community Artists’ Collective, Houston, Texas. Shape Residency, Vinegar Projects, Birmingham, Alabama 2022 — W alk Humbly, Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Alabama. Reveal and Restore, Neill-Cochran House Museum, Austin, Texas 2025 — Entangled Time: Entangled Space, Gadsden Museum of Art, Gadsden, Alabama 51

The Wallace Center The Wallace Center for Arts and Reconciliation is a descendant-led nonprofit organization located in Harpersville, Alabama. Established in 2018, the Center promotes racial reconciliation, healing, and repair through the arts, intentional dialogue, and a commitment to inclusive and accurate history. The organization is based at a former plantation house built in 1841 by enslaved labor, a site that embodies the intertwined histories of Indigenous dispossession, slavery, and post-emancipation Black life in central Alabama. The Wallace Center was co-founded by Harpersville Mayor Theoangelo Perkins and artist Nell Gottlieb, Black and white descendants connected to the Wallace Plantation. From its inception, the Center has been shaped by the belief that reconciliation must be grounded in place and led by those most directly connected to that history. Rather than treating slavery as a closed chapter or focusing primarily on the lives of enslavers, the Center centers the experiences, labor, and ongoing presence of African Americans who were enslaved on the plantation and whose descendants continue to live in Harpersville and beyond. Art is a core strategy of the Wallace Center’s work. Two site-specific sculptures by artists Tony Bingham and Elizabeth M. Webb powerfully address and center the lives of those enslaved on the place and were developed with community engagement. Poet Salaam Green’s The New Revival features poems based on interviews with Black and white descendants. An artist residency program, in collaboration with the Alabama Contemporary, begins in 2026. In addition to visual and literary art, the Wallace Center develops programming that brings descendants, local residents, artists, scholars, and visitors into sustained conversation. Annual descendant homecomings provide space for relationship-building across racial and familial lines. Public programs include artist talks, readings, community dialogues, and educational events focused on local history, land use, and the long-term effects of slavery and segregation. These programs are designed to operate at a hyperlocal scale while addressing questions that resonate nationally.

The Wallace Center does not position itself as a museum or a memorial in the traditional sense. Instead, it functions as an active site of engagement where art, history, and dialogue intersect. Its work emphasizes ongoing responsibility rather than resolution, and process rather than closure. By combining descendant leadership, contemporary art, and public programming, the Wallace Center offers a model for how historic sites of slavery can be reinterpreted as places of learning, accountability, and shared civic work.

Published in conjunction with the Entangled Time: Entangled Space exhibition at the Gadsden Museum of Art October 4 – November 25, 2026. COVER front, COVER back, and ENDPAGE Entangled Time: Entangled Space Meander GRAPHIC DESIGN: Greg Hervey Research and editorial assistance included the use of AI-based tools Produced by the Gadsden Museum of Art 515 Broad Street Gadsden, Alabama 35901 256.546.7365