Adrienne Elise Tarver: She who sits

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 Ave 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_ center on Vera Otis, an invented figure Tarver has spent the past ten years shaping, sparked originally by an anonymous woman glimpsed in a secondhand photograph. Each new painting expands Otis's story, giving Tarver a vehicle for working through her own family history and for considering how personal memory folds into larger historical narratives. Across this body of work, Otis becomes a study in stillness: drawing loosely on mid-century Black actresses including Dorothy Dandridge, Eartha Kitt, Hattie McDaniel, and Lena Horne, she never performs for an audience. Seated in interiors and outdoor scenes alike, she is unhurried and self-possessed, so that an ordinary pose of rest becomes a quiet claim on presence. Tarver draws on an archive that mixes personal snapshots, found photographs, and clippings pulled from vintage magazines, layering material from different eras to root Otis's invented biography in real historical texture. 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.