Gadsden Museum of Art

Entangled Time: Entangled Space

October 3, 2025 to November 26, 2025

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, 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 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’s line 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.

Tallapoosa

Coosa