MELUNGEON

Melungeon

Tamara Reynolds

On view March 23–June 26, 2026.

The EADJ team will hold visitor hours at Begonia Labs on Thursdays and Fridays from 4-7pm, on Saturdays from 1-4pm, or by appointment.

Begonia Labs: 2805 West End Avenue, Nashville, TN.

Melungeon is a portrait of Sneedville, Tennessee, a community associated with the Melungeons—a mixed-race people whose ancestry draws from African, Native American, and European lineages. Treated as racially indeterminate and marked by suspicion, they were historically pushed to the margins of Appalachian life, finding refuge in the ridges and hollows of East Tennessee. Through Tamara Reynolds’s lens, their histories of migration, mixture, and myth emerge as a lived inheritance: layered, complex, and evolving.

Working in close relationship to this community, which is also her husband’s lineage, Reynolds’s images move between intimate moments, domestic spaces, and landscape with trust, proximity, and care. The endurance of the Melungeons is visible in moments of ordinary beauty—a young man floating in the still water of Elrod Falls, a boy held close by his older brother in quiet protection, a child running through sunlight, a couple resting together in a summer field. 

Where we expect isolation, Reynolds’s images reveal relation. Where we encounter misunderstanding, they make space for presence. Where we meet prejudice, they answer with dignity. At a moment when American identity fractures along imagined lines of purity, Melungeon reminds us that mixture—mélange—has long been our nation’s story.

Exhibition text by EADJ Curator of the Somewhere We Are Human Program, Grace Aneiza Ali.

This exhibition is part of Somewhere We Are Human, the Spring 2026 Public Programs series of the Engine for Art, Democracy & Justice at Vanderbilt University. Support is provided by the Ford Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.