Adebunmi Gbadebo: True Blues, 2019

In this series, I am engaged with concepts around land, memory, and erasure. In “History Paper”, I use beaten cotton linters and human hair collected from black barbershops to form sheets of paper. These papers become abstracted documentations, loaded with genetic histories carried through the hair.  I introduced blue into my work after my maternal family traced and located the three plantations our ancestors were forced to work as enslaved Africans. True Blue Plantation harvested Indigo and rice.

The Katonah Museum of Art announces Bisa Butler solo exhibition

March 15 – June 14, 2020

Bisa Butler’s spectacular textile portraits are a revelation, seducing the eye with colors and patterns while commenting wryly on episodes from twentieth-century black life.

— Luke A. Fidler

Lauren Fensterstock

Lauren Fensterstock creates elaborate sculptures and installations in the material of ladies’ accomplishments. These historically devalued female crafts- such as paper quilling and shellwork- are often dismissed as mere decorations of domestic life.  By freeing these traditions from the culture of the parlor, She is able to explore their capacity to speak on the complexities of the world beyond the domestic sphere.

Her research focuses on the history of nature– specifically, the garden and the grotto. Through these lenses, She explores the often-paradoxical ways man has understood his place in the world; and as a result, how these vantage points influence the ways we reshape the world around us. At a time when human activity has developed into a devastating global force, it is critical that we question the cultural and philosophical precedents shaping our understanding of the planet.

Leonardo Benzant

“I imagine myself as an Urban Shaman exploring both my familiar visible world and the hidden dimensions of other realms that lurk beneath the surface of daily life.”

Barbara Earl Thomas

We are being called upon to do more than witness and document the confusion.  Our environmental, social, and political challenges cross all lines and they require us to write a new story
– Barbara Earl Thomas