Tenderhead Trails
On the Work of Lisa Jarrett

by Allie Tepper
ed. by Lumi Tan
May 16, 2026

From a streetside view of the newly opened galleries at the Portland Art Museum, a pink neon sign glows with a single word: tenderhead. The sign references the name of artist Lisa Jarrett’s solo exhibition, which assembles the latest work from her series Migration Studies (2018–present). Jarrett has said that her primary artistic medium is questions, and the word tenderhead evokes a query on sensitivity. Are you tenderheaded? is a question that young Black girls often hear from their mothers, aunts, or stylists while getting their hair done. Jarrett’s tenderhead sign, which reflects a storefront vernacular of beauty supply stores, however, is titled another name: Harriet Tubman (2025). Jarrett’s titling, after the renowned abolitionist and leader of the Underground Railroad movement, elicits another set of questions. Was Harriet Tubman tenderheaded? How often does one think of the iconic freedom leader’s physical presence — the particularities of her personhood, beyond strength? “Did you know that Harriet Tubman was less than five feet tall?” Jarrett asks me in a recent studio visit. The fluorescent sign, which emits a visual signal of a Black space to passersby in the Portland metropole, is hung at Tubman’s tender height.

Jarrett’s encoded citation of Tubman at the entrance to her exhibition points to her deeper work of connecting intimate spaces of Black life and aesthetic practices within a genealogy of liberation. What happens when we consider the geographies of the beauty supply store, which are almost always found in proximity to Black communities, in relation to historical routes to freedom? Jarrett’s Migration Studies ask us to consider this active dialogue between past and present. Without mapping the two neatly atop one another, she teases with nuance their attachments through a studio practice that draws from her own autobiography, travels, and desires — tracking ceaseless possibilities of movement, kinship, and transformation amidst enduring conditions of constraint.

The beauty supply store, which offers vital resources for everyday rituals of beauty and care, and resplendent aesthetic potential, still exists within a matrix of racial capitalism. Many of these stores are not Black owned, and their locations often point to histories of redlining and displacement. But as Jarrett signals through the secret presence of Tubman, they also point to an underground, to the more private, everyday spaces of tenderness and expression where their materials are used, such as the domestic interior, neighborhood hair salon, or in this case, the artist’s studio. Jarrett extends this interplay of public and private as she transports the framework and materials of the beauty supply store to the museum, another site of aesthetic commerce and power.

Lisa Jarrett, *503 portraits of wig mannequins and 1 portrait of Diana Ross (Beauty and Beyond)*, 2025. Pigment prints on molded Sintra, 226 × 270 × 13 in. Courtesy the artist and Portland Art Museum (Photo: Mario Gallucci)

For Tenderhead, Jarrett has produced two large-scale wall installations from divergent materials and formal strategies. In 503 Portraits of Wig Mannequins and 1 Portrait of Diana Ross (Beauty and Beyond) (2025), the artist presents a floor to ceiling installation of close-up images of wig mannequins taken during the artist’s visits to beauty supply stores across the continental U.S. The installation transposes the sensation of visual overwhelm that is characteristic of the maximalist hair displays of the beauty supply store, defined by infinite choices of color, shine, texture, and style. But here, more than hair itself, Jarrett pulls our attention to the demure, painted faces of hair-framed mannequins who stare pointedly at the viewer with a downcast gaze.

The particular angle, frame, and scale of Jarrett’s portraits imbue her watchful mannequins as stand-ins for 503 women with a kind of agency. The installation’s lenticular design, in an assertion of opacity, further complicates any easy consumption of these figures, or of Jarrett’s work. As much as they look back, they also avert our gaze through their variant angles, which require the viewer to reposition her body and approach the work closer in order to observe each panel. The installation, which orients viewers into a space of embodied looking, troubles the panoptic qualities of sight that the museum and legacies of white Western art typically set up. Somewhere within this field of faces, a recognizable image appears: a close-up image of Diana Ross, taken from her 1980 Diana album cover. Ross, who has embraced infinite hair evolutions, which she almost always meticulously constructs herself, acts as a kind of punctum in the collection of photographs, reminding us of the power that unapologetic personal style wields.

Lisa Jarrett, *Migration Studies, Beauty Supply (No. 111, Taproot: The direction of the rain.)*, 2025. Mixed media (synthetic hair woven into weaving net, beads, pigment prints, and clips), 273 1/4 in × 180 in × 5 in. Courtesy the artist and Portland Art Museum (Photo: Mario Gallucci)

While 503 Portraits contends with images of the beauty supply store, in other works, like the large-scale tapestry Migration Studies, Beauty Supply (No. 111, Taproot: The direction of the rain) (2025), Jarrett intimately engages, through her own striking handiwork, with its materials. The artist, who has a passion for drawing, engages line through threads of bright pink synthetic hair which she stitches into black weaving nets, the material substrate of sew-in hair extensions. In Jarrett’s unconventional use of the materials, her lines both trace the geometries of the net’s gridded surface and escape its logic, swerving paths of desire, freely imagined or traveled. Returning to the concept of migration, which is so much about detachment, journeys away and from — Jarrett’s work asks us to consider how, from a position within the African diaspora, one remains attached. The artist began researching African textile patterns, recovering messages encoded in their intricate designs. Within the tapestry, Jarrett’s exploratory pink line also stitches a Nigerian pattern known as uferre mirri, an elegant design of repeating parallelograms, that translates as “the direction of the rain.” ¹

Lisa Jarrett, *Phenotyped (Rachel, Lisa, and Miley Jarrett Picking Berries; Ella Jones; Papa, Martha, and Miley Jones)*, 2025. Mixed media (head scarves, synthetic hair woven into weaving net, pigment prints, and clips), 60 × 58 in. Courtesy the artist and Russo Lee Gallery (Photo: Emi Ogata)

As a companion to Tenderhead, Jarrett also presented a solo exhibition, Nightlights, at her gallery Russo Lee this fall, and there is an intimate conversation between the aesthetic forms in both shows. In a series called Phenotyped (2025), which continues her exploration with synthetic hair and weaving nets, stitched lines migrate around leopard printed and glittered headscarves that the artist cut and pressed into quilted squares and pinwheel patterns. Quilts of African American heritage have long been associated with movement — of journeys north and west. According to many legends, in the era of the Underground Railroad, codes and directions were embedded into their pliant surfaces to communicate safe passage. Jarrett turned to quilting to connect with her late grandmother from rural Arkansas, who she never met, but who left her with an heirloom pinwheel quilt topper. Extending these gestures of attachment, the artist used tiny hair clips to fasten family photographs between the pinwheel spokes, including images of herself picking berries as a child, portraits of her great-grandmother Ella Jones, and views of her family’s farm in rural Arkansas. The geometry of the pinwheel, consisting of four radial parallelograms, echoes forms of the uferre mirri in Tenderhead — resonating in diasporic time and conjuring braided secrets sown into a young girl’s crown.

What will set you free? is another question that Jarrett has kept at the forefront of her studio practice for many years. For Jarrett, the answer lies not in a particular location, but in small moments of liberation — in the experiences that her body is having. In the context of her exhibition at the Portland Art Museum, Jarrett invites viewers to “tend toward,” to quote Huey Copeland, these sensations and material matters of Black life.² In the radiant presence of the glowing pink and patterned works in Tenderhead, there is an overwhelming feeling of sensorial delight — of the joy and tactile pleasure that went into each object’s making. With the hands of a beautician, Jarrett channels the contact shared between mothers, daughters, and trusted kin — the treatment of care and creative prowess bestowed upon a tenderhead — as she reattaches to the histories, practices, and people to which she belongs.

Jarrett encountered the uferre mirri in this book: Duncan Clark, Sarah Fee, Vanessa Drake Moraga, African Textiles (New York: Abbeville Press, 2022).
I am grateful to Huey Copeland for this insightful framing and to Sampada Aranke for her brilliant meditations on this term within a discussion of relational forms of sight. See: Huey Copeland, “Tending-toward-Blackness*” October 2016 (156): 141–144; and Sampada Aranke, “Blackouts and Other Visual Escapes,” Art Journal 2020 (79:4): 75.

Allie Tepper is an interdisciplinary curator and art historian invested in experimental practices in contemporary art. She is the curator of Las Vegas Ikebana: Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi, the first retrospective on the artists’ five-decade exchange, presented at the Cooley Gallery, Reed College and the Columbus Museum of Art at the Pizzuti, and editor of an accompanying monograph. She has curated exhibitions and performances for the Walker Art Center, Whitney Museum of American Art, SculptureCenter, and the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling.