Tenee’ Hart: skin deep
June 6 – June 20 | Opening Reception June 6, 1pm–9pm
Bosom Booster III, detail from installation, 2025
COOP is pleased to present skin deep by Tenee’ Hart. In skin deep, Hart navigates the thin membrane between vulnerability and performance. Turning to materials closest to these closed-door rituals, the quiet witnesses of perfection and erasure - acts that shape how we are seen and how we learn to see ourselves. These materials come from domestic spaces - where expectations of femininity settle like a film of dust. Hart chooses to distort and unravel them, and in that undoing, they are pushed to a point where they strain against their own histories. The exhibition invites viewers to look beneath the decorative and the desirable, to feel how the pursuit of the “ideal” can leave scars, and to recognize that what we dismiss as the surface is often the site of our deepest wounds.
Working with materials that are soft, familiar, discarded - often carrying the weight of memory - Hart recals the women that came before her: their labor, their struggle, and their resilience. Every thread is a connection: every gesture is an act of release. Hart wraps, knots, and binds not to contain, but to reveal. These sculptures carry contradictions - beauty and ache, devotion and loss, elegance and rupture. To drop fear is to trust that what’s tender can also be strong. Where softness becomes resistance. Where quiet is not silence - but presence. Where our stories are stitched together - truth by truth, thread by thread.
This will be Hart’s first exhibition in Nashville, and the artist will be present at the opening reception on Saturday, June 6th from 1-9PM, and at an artist talk on June 20th at 12PM.
More about the Artist
Tenee’ Hart is an 'unconventional' fiber sculpture artist pursuing themes of feminism that delve into topics of beauty, anatomy, and the inequality of women. Wrapped fibers, gushing forms, and the manipulation of the ‘everyday’ are crucial components within Hart’s abstract works. Hart hails from Virginia, where she received her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Mary Washington in 2011, later earning her Masters of Fine Arts degree from Florida State University. She is currently an educator and Co-Head of the Online Distance Learning (ODL) program and Lead Fibers Instructor at Florida State. Hart is also the Graduate Advisor and Coordinator for the Department of Art.