Angel Fernandez, Sisyphean Line, 2020 (still). Site-specific performance/land drawing. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Angel Fernandez

Alabama Contemporary Art Center (ACAC) is a non-collecting visual art organization committed to supporting living artists and placing contemporary art in direct dialogue with the Deep South’s social, cultural, and ecological realities. Over the next three years, the institution will adopt an itinerant model that embeds projects in site-responsive partnerships across Alabama. This approach uses nonstandard spaces—banks, restaurants, domestic interiors—and will activate underutilized infrastructure across the state. 

Through this model, ACAC will expand its curatorial and geographic reach while redistributing resources to artist-run and community-led initiatives. The curatorial team approaches exhibition-making as community-centered and artist-led, prioritizing risk-taking, sustained collaboration, and mutual aid. 

Angel Fernandez and Winter Rusiloski, aerial view of in-progress, site-specific installation, 2025. Produced for Transience: Trace and Erasure in Lost Landscapes, September 18–November 16, 2025, in collaboration with Huo Bao Zhu Gallery, IAC, Troy, AL. Courtesy the artist

Upcoming projects and partnerships for 2025 include DISH by Laura Tanner, a site-specific exhibition on Southern foodways and oral histories; Archive South, a cyanotype community session led by LeXander Bryant at the Historic Avenue Cultural Center; and an installation by Anthony Rodrigues in a former financial institution in downtown Mobile. Together with Troy University, ACAC will commission new work by artists Winter Rusiloski and Angel Fernandez in West Texas and Alabama to explore displacement, border politics, and migration through performance and installation.

Terri Foster, Terri, Age 5, 2020. Embroidery. Courtesy the artist

In 2026, GUT PUNCH by Ellie Dent, in partnership with the Mobile Medical Museum, will explore medical trauma and gendered experience through sculpture and museological critique. Reuse artists Jacob Reptile and Calder Kamin will present Crypto Petting Zoo, an immersive installation at the Mobile Museum of Art. Terri Foster, whose autobiographical installations interrogate institutional identity and memory, will create a solo project at the Wallace Center for Art and Reconciliation. Olivia Junnell will guest-curate a site-responsive iteration of Sonic Rupture by Amina Ross, and a site-specific sound and virtual installation by Tansy Xiao will be sited in a vault.

elizabet elliott joined the Alabama Contemporary Art Center in November 2018 and stepped into the role of Executive Director in January of 2020. Since 2007, elliott has specialized in social practice exhibitions that commission new work to leverage the arts for community benefit. Prior to Alabama Contemporary, she worked at the Mobile Museum of Art. She was also the founding director of the Rumor Union (Mobile, AL), a grassroots community art organization that organized site-specific installations, performance and new media festivals, cross-disciplinary collaborations, outreach and education projects, and guerrilla exhibitions. elliott received her BFA with First Class Honors from Massey University in 2009 and her MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from Goddard College in 2014, with a focus on social/civic practice. 

Allison Schaub has been with the Alabama Contemporary Art Center since January 2012, and rose from front desk attendant to curator in that time. She has installed more than seventy-five exhibitions across multiple roles, curates exhibitions, and oversees curatorial logistics. She has a penchant for post-feminist works, fiber art, and multimedia installations. Schaub is also the program manager for the Verdant Fund, an expansion of the Andy Warhol Foundation’s regional regranting program. She attended University of South Alabama, where she majored in photography.

Micah Mermilliod has been with the Alabama Contemporary Art Center since September 2020. In addition to curating, he helps manage internal exhibition processes, facilitates communication with exhibiting artists, and handles registrar duties for incoming artwork. He is a practicing artist with a BFA in Studio Art, concentrating in photography and printmaking, and an MFA in Creative Technology and Practice from the University of South Alabama (2022). 

Garrett Grimes Timme is a drag artist and musician based on the Gulf Coast of Alabama, with five years of experience in events planning and design and eight years of involvement in the local arts scene. Through guerilla events and exhibition-making, they have had the opportunity to work with several local charities and organizations to create and coordinate events ranging from community outreach fundraisers to parties, concerts, and performances. Their background in nontraditional performance art and music informs the way they create space for new and emerging artists in their role overseeing performance art and public programming at Alabama Contemporary Art Center.

Erin Dunn, Beryl Gilothwest, Telfair Museums