The Institute of Contemporary Art
The ICA Chattanooga at UTC
The ICA Chattanooga is a public gallery for the contemporary South, propelling art and ideas through exhibitions, research, and programming that connect UTC to the Chattanooga community.
On View
Reconsidered Recollections
Art collections, by nature, spend the majority of their time resting in the undercrofts of museums, quietly awaiting exhibition. Reconsidered Recollections is no different. Carefully co-curated from the ICA’s Permanent Collection by UTC students, the process of selecting, researching, and curating unseen artworks for this exhibition reactivates each artwork within new contexts and interpretations. At the same time, the exhibition itself functions as a measure of recollection, inviting viewers into a shared act of sustaining the histories of these works.
Throughout the gallery, collaborative subsections unify previously disconnected pieces, developing thematic connections across research, interpretation, and display. In these groupings, recurring ideas surface through the construction of identity and memory, escapism, uncertain journeys, and ambiguity. What emerges within this show is not a singular or fixed narrative, but a constellation of recollections that are continually redefined through cycles of interpretations.
Once the exhibition closes, these artworks will return to the ICA’s Permanent Collection, accompanied by new research and renewed visibility. Through this process, Reconsidered Recollections presents these works to the public and extends their interpretive histories beyond the limits of storage, lingering in the ongoing process of looking, remembering, and reimagining.
This exhibition is co-curated by students in Dr. Bart Pushaw’s Spring 2026 class of ART 4150: Object Archaeology—Research, Writing, and Interpretation for the Museum and supported by the Walker Center for Teaching and Learning High Impact Practices Grant. The students who curated the exhibition include:
Josie Bailey, Maggie Bean, Cordelia Burks, Lillian Dent, Jayme Felts, Hadley Garren, Michael Griffith, Delilah Haman, Amarree Hardaway, Elizabeth Howle, Janan Kleinstick, Nora Lindsey, Aly Lovelace, Grace Magnini, Isabelle Malone, Nate Mullen, Kaileigh Odell, Nathan Richards, Renee Ritchie, Isabella Smith, Britain Steward, Jordan Swearingen, Jae Sweetin, and Natalie Wells.
Exhibition open by appointment only until the semester begins.
Art. People. Place.
The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) is located within the Fine Arts Center
on the campus of University of Tennessee Chattanooga (UTC), 752 Vine Street, Chattanooga, TN 37403.
The ICA is free and open to the public.
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