Curated by: Amy Andrieux
On View: October 10 – December 14, 2025
Location: MoCADA Culture Lab II, 10 Lafayette Avenue Brooklyn, NY 11217
Artist Talk Details: TBD | RSVP
Workshop Details: TBD | RSVP
SUMMARY
FREE THE LAND! is a cultural survey that contemplates African diasporic indigeneity and the literal and symbolic impact of history on our contemporary environmental landscape – from the embodied relationship with Mother Earth, to colonialism, climate change, and climate injustice.
Opening October 9, 2025 and on view through December 14 at MoCADA Culture Lab II at the L10 Arts and Cultural Center in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, this multidisciplinary exhibition is curated by MoCADA’s Executive Director + Chief Curator Amy Andrieux and features works by 20 artists, including the celebrated Chakaia Booker, Tabita Rezaire, Lizania Cruz, Deborah Jack, Illiana Emilia Garcia, and Yussef Agbo-Ola among rising notables including Hana Ward, Jaime Lauriano, and Mario Marcilau to name a few.
“Here is the magnificent climate; here is the fruitful earth under the beauty of the southern sun; and here, if anywhere on earth, is the need of the thinker, the worker and the dreamer. This is the firing line not simply for the emancipation of the American Negro but for the emancipation of the African Negro and the Negroes of the West Indies; for the emancipation of the colored races; and for the emancipation of the white slaves of modern capitalistic monopoly.” – W.E.B. Du Bois, “Behold the Land” speech; October 20, 1946.
Inspired by the writings of African-American sociologist, writer, and historian W.E.B. Dubois for the show’s curatorial point of view, and those of Black Brazilian feminist scholar Beatriz Nascimento for its spatial design, FREE THE LAND! is rooted in an intersectional, multigenerational, and international conversation about geographies of liberation. Grounded by Nascimento’s theory of the quilombo – free territories dedicated to African cultural practices, or as she puts it, “African villages where the Black population took refuge to pine after their motherland…”, where “armed resistance to the slavocratic regime” was enacted and exalted – the show works to detangle the vines of apartheid, exploitation, and imperialism from the African diaspora’s traditional and concentrated connection to land as stewards, laborers, farmers, foragers, root workers, and healers. To reconcile this shared history before any pruning can begin, Free The Land! poses an existential question about how one survives this critical moment, where land sovereignty lays at the root of multiple political conflicts (Palestine, Haiti, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Ukraine, etc): Will you build or will you destroy?
The show’s name comes from the Black Liberation Movement’s long-held call to action for land reparations and justice, which is inextricably connected to LandBack!, the Indigenous-led intercommunal movement calling for “a return to communal land ownership of traditional and unceded Indigenous lands and rejects colonial concepts of real estate and private land ownership. Return of land is not only economic, but also implies the return of relationships and self-governance.” Let the weeds of exploitative labor be pulled out while the restorative waters of ancestral memory nourish our legacy… By reclaiming our relationship with nature, we address climate injustice and confront colonialism at the root: Free the land, free the people.
THE ARTISTS + SELECT WORKS
Photos: 1) The artist. 2) FRAGILE No. VII by Alexis Mendoza, 2025, mixed media, 21 high X 20 diameter.
Alexis Mendoza is an artist; a writer and an independent curator who presently lives in the Bronx, New York. Mendoza graduated from the National School of Fine Art in San Alejandro, Havana, Cuba in 1988, and received a Masters in Art History from Havana University in 1994. Most of his work has been focused on painting, sculpture, drawings, installation, and printmaking. His artwork has been exhibited in museums and galleries around the world in countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, England, France, Germany, Mexico, the Netherlands, Peru, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States. He is the co-founder and co-creator of the Bronx Latin American Art Biennial, and a founding member of BxArts Factory.
Alexis Mendoza is part of a generation of Cuban artists that create art fueled by the belief that artistic creations could present a form of utopia, expressing some type of independence an inversion of the original premise that drove the Cuban avant-garde and serve as a model for a new society. In Mendoza’s paintings, orientation and direction are all placed in abeyance. Placing the basic, familiar attributes of things to one side, Mendoza discovers the essence of color presence. The color is the matrix of memory, and within it, the images surface, with utopias and its denials. By radicalizing the object representation, presence lets us grasp time. Mendoza registers this knowledge by depicting the mutual invasion of color and representation. Black Painting, the style and the term, was established in Cuba in the 1950’s by Guido Llinas, a prominent Cuban abstract painter, printmaker and member of the Eleven Group. Alexis Mendoza’s studies on Black Painting are based on Llinas’ philosophy and creations. Although the predominant color in Mendoza‘s paintings is not black, he has found that the overlapping and the transition of colors metaphorically reflect the use of these colors in Afro-Cuban practices and rituals.
Photos: 1) The artist. 2) Minimum Wage by Chakaia Booker, 2022. Rubber tires, metal, and wood, 26 x 32 x 22 inches
Chakaia Booker (born 1953 Newark, New Jersey) is an internationally renowned and widely collected American sculptor known for creating monumental, abstract works from recycled tires and stainless steel for both the gallery and outdoor public spaces. Booker’s works are contained in more than 40 public collections and have been exhibited across the US, in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Booker was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005. Recent public installation highlights include Millennium Park, Chicago (2016-2018), Garment District Alliance Broadway Plazas, New York, NY (2014), and National Museum of Women in the Arts New York Avenue Sculpture Project, Washington DC (2012).
Photos: 1) The artist. 2) Inheritance by Collin Riggins, 2025. Inkjet print from medium format film, 20×24 inches.
Collin Riggins is an analog photographer and filmmaker from Kansas City, Missouri. He received a B.A. in African American Studies and Visual Arts from Princeton University. Collin creates work that is animated by his own family histories, which stretch from Missouri, to the Carolinas, to New York. As the proud son of sharecroppers, teachers, and dancers, Collin seeks to express the depth and beauty of African American heritage and celebrate the ways we have passed down a rich spirit of resilience across time. He ultimately hopes to produce an enlivened archive that his family and found family alike can feel gratified to exist within, and that envisions African American heritage as a living, diasporic continuum. In addition to his personal practice, Collin is interested in contributing to efforts that expand access to the arts, such as co-founding IMAG(in)E, a free film photography program for high schoolers in the Bronx.
Photos: 1) The artist. 2) The Fecund, the Lush and the Salted land Waits for a Harvest…Her People… Ripe with promise, Wait until the Next Blowing season by Deborah Jack, 2022, single-channel video.
Deborah Jack is a St. Maarten and Jersey City based multi-disciplinary artist whose work is based in video/sound installation, photography, painting and text. Her work engages a variety of strategies for mining the intersections of histories, cultural memory, ecology and climate change. Her current practice connects the effects of the hurricane storm surge in relation to coastal erosion, the saltwater inundation of intertidal spaces She imagines these rhizomatic, protective intersectional landscapes and wetlands as sites of resistance. This altered landscape, post surge, though temporary, is an exciting conceptual space regarding the intangeble memory of water as it intersects with the land and the people who live there.
Her work was featured in the exhibition Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990’s-Today at the MCA Chicago and ICA Boston in Fall 2023. In Fall 2021 a retrospective, Deborah Jack: 20 Years was presented at Pen + Brush in New York City. She has exhibited at TENT Rotterdam, the Perez Art Museum of Miami in the 2019-2020 exhibition, The Other Side of Now: Foresight in Contemporary Caribbean Art, and Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago, the SITE Santa Fe Biennial, Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling, Portland Art Museum, and Delaware Art Museum. Her work is in the collections of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, MCA Chicago and the Smith College Museum of Art. Deborah received a Nancy Graves Grant for Visual Artists (2021), Jersey City Individual Artist Grant (2022), a 2023 Changing Climate Resident at the Santa Fe Art Institute and was a Surfpoint Foundation Artist-in-Residence (2023). Deborah Jack received a 2024 Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Deborah is currently a Professor of Art at New Jersey City University.
Deborah recently presented her new body of work in a solo exhibition entitled, Intertidal Imaginaries: The Resistant Geographies of the Shore in the Aftermath of Saltwater Surges, at the Houston Center for Photography. Concurrently, she is participating in Hurricane Season at the Des Moines Art Center. Her forthcoming exhibitions include Constellations: Racial Myths, Land, and Labour at the Esker Foundation and the Prospect 6 Triennial: the future is present, the harbinger is home.
Photos: 1) The artist. 2) from Fileve Tlaloc’s Coloured Pots: Izinkhamba kwamaKaladi series of low-fire ceramic pottery, 2022.
Fileve Tlaloc is a multigenerational, creole South African-American artist born and raised in NYC. She has lived and worked in China, South Africa, and Latin America. She pursued a BFA at City College in Harlem, New York specializing in painting and ceramics under the guidance of Sylvia Netzer. Throughout her artistic journey she studied photography, painting, and ceramics. As a result, she enjoys experimenting and engaging new media.
Being a member of a multicultural, multiethnic family, she incorporates and blends sacred and profane cultural symbols to explore the human experience and individual as a cultural being and identity as a series of relationships and roles.
After a few years teaching art and history at an alternative public high school in East Harlem, Fileve pursued and obtained a doctorate in anthropology from Indiana University Bloomington, all the while creating art. Her research focus was identity formation of creole communities in KwaZulu-Natal province, South Africa. With the support of Rotary International, she used photography as a medium to engage local youth in a photo-ethnography-project that resulted in 3 exhibits that unpacked their communities and relationships.
Upon returning to the USA, she and her partner a “digital repatriation” project that revisited the Wanamaker archive on Native American photographs by reuniting the images of ancestors with living descendants at Tuscarora Nation outside of Niagara Falls. The resulting exhibition “Stirring the Pot”< displayed a series of 25 photographs depicting the original image with their descendant(s) in sites of their choosing. It has been displayed 6 times throughout Indiana and New York states and at Tuscarora Nation.
After teaching anthropology in Indiana, her family decided to move to Western New York’s southern tier. New places force people to redefine and find themselves. The move not only inspired her journey back into ceramic work but also challenged her to inform people about her identity, including a dissertation that unpacks race and government policy as related to her family histories. Her hope is to continue to blend her ethnographic skills and artistic abilities to explore communities’ values, challenges, and identities to create thought provoking work and projects that inspire others.
Photos: 1) The artist. 2) As natural as Natchez by Hana Ward, 2024. Oil on linen, 36 x 54 in (91.4 x 137.2 cm).
Hana Ward makes paintings and ceramic works that explore themes of identity, introspection, and transformation. Appearing both ethereal and visceral, Ward weaves together moods, motives, and narratives to depict Black and Brown feminine figures who reflect and dream, creating their sovereign worlds from the inside out. These multitudinous visions of unfolding self-actualizations are sometimes sheltered in the solitude of domestic space and other times liberated into landscapes. Influenced by anticolonial histories, spiritual texts, and cycles of the natural world, as well as the canon of art history, Ward’s work excavates inner dimensions to discover a world where one’s sovereignty is in the here and now.
Hana Ward (b. 1989, Los Angeles, CA) received a BA from Brown University in 2011. Ward’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Museum in Long Beach, CA; the California African American Museum, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Harun Gallery, Beyond Baroque, and OCHI in Los Angeles, CA; The FLAG Art Foundation in New York, NY; Mrs. in Queens, NY; Roche Projects in Kyoto, Japan; and The Breeder in Athens, Greece. In 2023, Ward attended the Hayama Residency in Japan and in 2017 she received a Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs Artist-in-Residence Grant. Ward’s work has been featured in numerous publications including Artforum, Frieze, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Financial Times, Amadeus, Artillery Magazine, and AUTRE. Ward currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and is represented by OCHI.
Photos: 1) The artist. 2) The Sage and the Dreamer by Iliana Emilia Garcia, 2018. 40 wooden chairs, wire, rope.
liana Emilia Garcia is a well known Dominican artist who has been involved in the arts since an early age under the teachings of Nidia Serra, from weekly visits to the Museum of Modern Art to her collections of posters, long plays, stamps, cans, books, wrappers, packages and anything that she found visually interesting.
She received her AAS from Altos de Chavon/The School of Design, affiliated with Parsons the New School of Design, in her native Dominican Republic in 1989. Received an scholarship to attend Parsons Summer Program in 1988 and later received her BFA in Communication Design from Parsons The School of Design in 1991, after being awarded the Ruth Vanderpool Parsons Institutional Scholarship for Portfolio Excellence.
While Garcia has been actively developing her art with mixed media, drawings, installations, video art, printmaking and big format paintings, also maintains a career in fashion graphics for companies like Guess Jeans, Gap, Rocawear, Calvin Klein Jeans, Tommy Hilfiger, and others. In the early 2000’s, she founded her own graphic company, VOX Publicus which is an “on-going” collaboration with her fine arts practice.
iliana emilia garcia works in big format drawings on canvas and paper, escalating installations, printmaking and digital photos on canvas depicting her most iconic symbol: the chair.
The base of her work is the emotional history of everyday things. It’s not about the geographical or physical history, but about the value we give to what we keep from the landscapes we come from; and that we unconsciously keep with us through crossroads. The symbols that seem to breed from the memory of our heritage.
Garcia has been using the chair as her personal instrument related to tradition and visual history; and one of the most public of signs, the heart, as the symbol to represent the intimate side of a communal activity as it is to feel and to interpret. She intends these icons to tell history and to remember it; precisely our basic need of emotional comfort, and our sense of loss and gain.
Her work has been writing about in numerous art publications and catalogues, and exhibited at BRIC, Brooklyn, NY; Exit Art, NY; No Longer Empty at Sugar Hill, NY; The Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, DC; El Museo del Barrio, NY; Aljira Center of Contemporary Art, Newark, NJ; Leonora Vega Gallery,NY; Howard Scott Gallery, NY; NOMAA, NY; Joan Guaita, Spain; the 3rd Triennial Poli-Grafica, San Juan, Puerto Rico; Barnard College, NY; Museo de Arte Moderno de El Salvador; Belgium and many other venues. Her work is part of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art collection, El Museo del Barrio’s collection, the Museo de Arte Moderno of Dominican Republic and several private collections.
She is also a founding member of the Dominican York Proyecto Grafica (DYPG), a printmaking collective
Garcia currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Photos: 1) The artist. 2) Invasão de Pedro Álvares Cabral em Porto Seguro em 1500 by Jaime Lauriano, 2023. Acrylic paint, stickers, inkjet printing, lead miniatures and prints on MDF. 55.9 x 78.9 x 1.6 inches. Courtesy the artist and Nara Roesler Gallery.
Through videos, installations, objects and texts, Jaime Lauriano (b. 1985, São Paulo, Brazil) explores symbols, images and myths that shape the imagination of Brazilian society, placing them in dialogue critical statements that reveal how the colonial structures of the past reverberate in contemporary necropolitics. Drawing from his own experience as a black man, Lauriano addresses the forms of everyday violence that have permeated Brazilian history since its invasion by the Portuguese and has focused, most unjustly, on non-white individuals. In this sense, the artist focuses on the historical traumas of Brazilian culture, understanding their complexities through the agency of images and discourses from the most diverse sources, whether from those considered official, such as communication vehicles and State propaganda; or unofficial ones, like videos of lynchings shared over the internet.
His criticism extends from the macropolitics of the spheres of official power,to micropolitics. Lauriano thinks about trauma not only in terms of temporality, but also spatially, using cartography to question colonial territorial disputes and constructions. Another dimension of his work is the connection with ancestral religions of African origin. The artist uses signs and symbols of the rituals of these religions, such as the white pemba, used in the making of his maps. Lauriano understands how the religious sphere was fundamental for the resistance of those that were enslaved and served as a space for maintaining their connection with their ancestral territory.
Jaime Lauriano was born in 1985 in São Paulo, where he lives and works. His solo exhibitions include: Paraíso da miragem, in collaboration with collective silence, at the Kubik Gallery (2022), in Porto, Portugal; Marcas, at Fundação Joaquim Nabuco (Fundaj) (2018), in Recife, Brazil; Brinquedo de furar moletom, at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Niterói (MAC-Niterói) (2018), in Niterói, Brazil; Nessa terra, em se plantando, tudo dá, Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil (CCBB-RJ) (2015), in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and Impedimento, at Centro Cultural São Paulo (CCSP) (2014), in São Paulo, Brazil. Lauriano presented works at the 37th Panorama of Brazilian Art, São Paulo, Brazil (2022); and at the 11th Mercosul Biennial, Porto Alegre, Brazil (2018). He has also participated in various group exhibitions, such as: Brasil Futuro: as formas da democracia, Museu Nacional da República, Brasília, Brazil (2023); Social Fabric: Art and Activism in Contemporary Brazil, Visual Arts Center, The University of Texas, Austin, USA (2022); Histórias brasileiras, at the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP) (2022), in São Paulo, Brazil; Afro-Atlantic Histories, at the National Gallery of Art (2022), in Washington DC, USA and at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFAH) (2022), in Houston, USA; Quem não luta tá morto – arte democracia utopia, at the Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR) (2018), in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Levantes, at SESC Pinheiros (2017), in São Paulo, Brazil; Territórios: Artistas afrodescendentes no acervo da Pinacoteca at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (2015), in São Paulo, Brazil. His works can be found in institutional collections, such as: Fundação Joaquim Nabuco (Fundaj), Recife, Brazil; Rio Art Museum (MAR), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP), São Paulo, Brazil; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil; and Schoepflin Stiftung, Lörrach, Germany.
Photos: 1) The artist. 2) Interdependency Exercise II by Lizania Cruz, 2025. Acrylic paint on canvas, 6 x 8ft.
Lizania Cruz (she/her) is a Dominican participatory artist and designer interested in how migration affects ways of being & belonging. Through research, oral history, and audience engagement, she creates projects that expand and share pluralistic narratives on migration. Cruz received the 2023 New York City Artadia Award and her newest project was commissioned by The Shed for Open Call 2023. In 2021, Cruz was part of ESTAMOS BIEN: LA TRIENAL 20/21 at el Museo del Barrio, the first national survey of Latinx artists by the institution. Most recently, she was part of 52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone at the Aldrich Museum. She has presented solo shows at A.I.R. Gallery, CUE Art Foundation, International Studio & Curatorial Program, ISCP, Alma Lewis and Proxyco Gallery. Her work has been exhibited at Sharjah’s First Design Biennale, Untitled, Art Miami Beach, The Highline, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts and more.
Cruz has participated in residencies such as International Studio & Curatorial Program, ISCP (2022), Planet Texas 2050 Artist Resident — University of Texas (2022), Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, Visual Arts (2021-2022), Artists Circle on Climate Displacement Fellowship, Institute of Othering and Belonging, Berkeley University (2021), Center for Book Arts (2020-2021), BRIClab: Contemporary Art (2020-2021), A.I.R. Gallery (2020-2021), Robert Blackburn Workshop Studio Immersion Project (SIP) (2019), Stoneleaf Retreat (2019), IdeasCity: New Museum (2019), Recess Session (2019), Laundromat Project Create Change (2017-2019), Design Trust for Public Space (2018) and Agora Collective Berlin (2018). Her work has been featured in Hyperallergic, Fuse News, KQED arts, Dazed Magazine, Garage Magazine and the New York Times.
Photos: 1) The artist. 2) What the Earth Will Give by Madjeen Isaac, 2025. Oil on canvas, 53 x 65 inches,
Madjeen Isaac is a first generation Haitian-American artist whose practice is rooted in home, communality and belonging. Isaac reimagines and hybridizes landscapes that center boundless Caribbean existences, taking up space forging new realities, and experiencing the buoyancy of daily life post-migration. Pulling from elements of her hometown Brooklyn and ancestral homeland Haiti, Isaac re-envisions the “lakou”, a communal yard or third space born out of the Haitian Revolution. Isaac is interested in how the concept of the lakou has changed overtime, shaped by liminality and the emotional experience of existing in one place while yearning for another.
She questions, how does the diaspora continue to place their trust in reimagining new realities of being? How does one reinvent home away from home?
Isaac aims to create dream-like, nostalgic portals and blueprints of sovereign futures, suggesting ideal worlds where access and autonomy are reclaimed, rooted in resistance and revolution.
Isaac received a BFA in Fine Art from the Fashion Institute of Technology and an MA in Art + Edu & Community Practice from New York University. She has had residencies/fellowships including Vermont Studio Center, Smack Mellon’s Artist Studio Program, BRIClab: Contemporary Artist Residency Program, the Laundromat Project Fellowship and Lakou NOU Artist Residency Program at Haiti Cultural Exchange. She has exhibited at numerous institutions including Smack Mellon, Brooklyn Museum, Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute and The Frost Art Museum. In 2023 Isaac collaborated with KITH to create an Artist Series Capsule Collection in Honor of Black History Month. Isaac’s practice has been recognized and received awards including the 2024 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship for Painting and The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation among others.
Photos: 1) The artist. 2) Two boys with a fish, from the Faith series by Mario Marcilau, 2018. Archival pigment print on cotton rag paper, 52 3/8 x 78 3/4 in (133 x 200 cm), Edition 1/1 +2AP.
Mário Macilau (b. 1984, Mozambique, lives and works in Maputo) is a multi-disciplinary artist most known for his photography.
Macilau specialises in long-term photography projects and series that address the complex realities of human labour and environmental conditions. Macilau started his journey as a photographer in 2003 from the streets of Maputo, becoming professional when he traded his mother’s cell phone for his first camera in 2007.
Selected exhibitions include: Songs of the Present, Musée de la Photographie de Saint Louis, Senegal (2018); Afrique Capitales, La Villette, Paris (2017); Pavilion of the Holy See, 56th Venice Biennale (2015); Making Africa, Vitra Museum, Weil am Rhein (2015); Discovery Show, Fotofestiwal Łódź, Poland (2015); Pangaea: Art from Africa and Latin America, Saatchi Gallery, London (2014); The African Art Auction, Bonhams, London (2013); Recontres Picha, Bienalle de Lubumbashi (2013), The Biennale Arts Actuels, Saint-Denis, Réunion (2013); Pan-African Exhibition, Recontres de Bamako: Biennale of African Photography, Mali (2011); VI Chobi Mela Photo Festival, Dhaka, Bangladesh (2011); and Lagos Photo, Nigeria (2011). Macilau has been shortlisted for the 2019 Mast Award and the was a finalist of the Unicef Photo of the Year in 2009, the Greenpeace Photo Award 2016, and is in the permanent collection of the Pompidou Centre.
Photos: 1) The artist. 2) From Nicky Quamina-Woo’s As the Water Comes (Senegal), 2025. Documentary photography.
Nicky Quamina-Woo is a Black + Native Hawaiian visual storyteller who divides her time between the African continent, Southeast Asia, and New York City.
Woo has traveled to and lived in more than 22 countries across the Global South, mainly focusing on stories related to healthcare, immigration, and really anything connected to the long shadows of trauma that fall across marginalized communities. Her projects center on the complex realities precipitated by Western colonization, exploring how cultures survive in the wake of systemic rupture. The collective aftermath and the ways it can shift a group’s underlying ethos to form something new—adaptation as a means of survival.
Her desire to examine these transformations is deeply rooted in her ethnic heritage, the parallels of which inspire her to seek resonance, human fortitude, and healing amidst the ongoing impacts of community upheaval.
Nicky has won a Nikon-Stafford FotoReportage grant, American Photography 37 & 40, Portrait of Humanity, and a Reuters Storytelling grant for her work on a Tanzania-based project about the intersection of Western medicine and witchcraft. She is a proud member of WomenPhotograph, DiversifyPhoto, Black Women Photograph, and Authority Collective, all of which work to further amplify the voices of the traditionally underrepresented.
In her time as an independent, her clients include The New York Times, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, CNN, Human Rights Watch, Facebook, NPR, Apple, Vogue Italia, The Melinda French-Gates Foundation, Google, and Reporters Beyond Borders.
Photos: 1) The artist. 2) A still from Mawe, a short film by Primo Mauridi, 2022.
Primo Mauridi is an artist based in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. His practice revolves around three fundamental pillars: freedom of expression, gender equality, and the reexamination of history. These themes are central to his work, which seeks to deconstruct dominant narratives and uncover forgotten or marginalised perspectives.
In 2020, the Yole!Africa center entrusted Primo with managing its Photos and Videos department, and he received a scholarship to the Canon VII Academy in Paris. His work often uses the body as a powerful symbol, for example, in Surface, he uses skin as a raw material to paint photos that act as resistance against the horror of bruised bodies. Similarly, his ongoing investigation into these themes is reflected in MAWE, a work selected as one of the winners of the MAH residency. In 2023, Primo took part in the Rencontres Internationales des Arts Numériques et Visuels d’Abidjan and was invited by the Musée des Cultures Contemporaines Adama Toungara to participate in the Africa Foto Fair. In 2024, he was selected for the 15th edition of the Dakar Biennale and the Bamako Biennale.
Photos: 1) The artist. 2) A still from Running Out of Time (R.O.O.T.), a short film by Run P. aka Righteous Jones, 2020.
Run P. aka Righteous Jones is a multi-hyphenated audiophile – DJ, music supervisor, producer, and conceptual artist who creates unique sonic experiences for art, fashion, lifestyle, and nightlife.
As a cultural producer, Run P. champions a progressive + soulful blend of electronic sounds and heavy bass lines (house, R&B, hip-hop, electronic, funk, dancehall, Afrobeat, and more). Enter QUENCH, a monthly NYC dance party spearheaded by Run P. that was launched in 2015. With over 10 years of uplifting Black club culture, QUENCH continues to sit at the forefront of the nightlife scene with its timeless tagline: More Bass, More Soul, More Dance. Since 2015 the club night has garnered a well earned reputation for featuring most sought-after DJs/Producers the international dance community forecasting the success of artists like Bambii, DJ Tunez, DJ Lag, Jubilee, Foreigner, Leonce, ShyOne, and countless others. In 2018 Run P. launched QUENCH Presents…. to deliver a portfolio of events that span the breadth of Black music + club culture.
As a live music events and music programming universe, QUENCH Presents… produces and delivers a monthly electronic dance-party called QUENCH; a monthly retro-themed (disco, boogie, and rare grooves) club night called Fried Dynamite; a monthly flavorful AfroLatin meets Caribbean dance party, Algo Riddim, and the annual NY-to-London Carnival celebration, NYLON.
As a music supervisor Run has worked on various projects, including for the Comedy Central-cum-HBO show South Side. He is also the Director of Live Events, Music + Audio programs at The Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA), and is the Programming Director at the Brooklyn-based music venue, Friends and Lovers. Run P. was born, bred, and currently lives in New York City, and performs + produces special musical projects worldwide.
Photos: 1) The artist. 2) A still from Back to Where We Were (In the Presence of our Ancestors), a short film by Sharayna Ashanti Christmas, 2022.
Sharayna Ashanti Christmas is an entrepreneur who has created pathways at the intersection of creativity and business, a cultural worker committed to world-building that centers community ingenuity, and a multidisciplinary performance artist exploring memory and regeneration.
Her work emerges at the intersection of strategy, and transformation, shaping ecosystems where art, community, and sustainability converge. Rooted in a restorative praxis, she cultivates spaces that foster innovation and collective growth, designing accessible fluid structures that connect people and resources.
As an artist, she moves through archival research, choreography, film, and assemblage to illuminate the temporal journeys of the diaspora—past, present, and unseen. Sharayna’s creative practice informs every facet of my leadership, embracing the unknown as a space for discovery.
She has dedicated her work to creating ecosystems that empower creatives, foster intergenerational knowledge exchange, and reimagine sustainable artistic futures. As a founding director of the Baltimore Creatives Acceleration Network (BCAN) at Maryland Institute College of Art, she helped shape a framework that resourced over 2400+ Baltimore-based artists, providing them with the tools to scale their practice and build mindful enterprises from 2018-2024. Through Muse 360, an institution she founded in 2004, she provided space to cultivate radical artistic development through civic engagement, interdisciplinary training, and diasporic youth study abroad. In 2017, Sharayna launched Necessary Tomorrows, a platform that uplifts Black and POC artists by integrating advocacy, curation, and funding—creating space for bold, transformative creative work.
Photos: 1) The artist. 2) Hurry be Patient from Tabi Bonney’s Le Bon Voyage series, a collection of photography celebrating ethnic groups of Ethiopia, including the Suri (Surma) tribe.
Tabi Bonney is a multidisciplinary artist and photographer from Togo, West Africa, and the son of a renowned Togolese musician and activist. Raised between Washington DC, Paris, and Africa, Bonney’s early work as an independent musician garnered global recognition, shaping a perspective that continues to inform his visual practice.
In 2004, Bonney shifted his focus behind the camera, teaching himself photography as a necessity for his clothing line and music promotion. What began as a practical skill quickly became his passion and enduring craft. By 2006, he was also directing music videos—his own as well as for artists like Wale and Raheem DeVaughn—many of which were broadcast on MTV, Vh1, and BET, drawing millions of views. His photography has since become central to his practice, encompassing portraiture, commercial campaigns, and documentary work. He has collaborated with Adidas, The Washington Wizards, DC Tourism, Alaffia, Tidal, and more while his images have been exhibited across the United States, Africa, and Europe. His visuals have been recognized with awards at the Toronto Film Festival. Now based in Los Angeles, Bonney continues to merge his musical foundation with his visual practice, creating work that explores identity and the connective threads between cultures.
Photos: 1) The artist. 2) Deep Down Tidal by Tabita Rezaire, 2017. HD video, 18m44s,; Commissioned for Citizen X – Human, Nature and Robots Rights by Oregaard Museum, Denmark.
Tabita Rezaire is infinity incarnated into an agent of healing, who uses art as a mean to unfold the soul.
Her cross-dimensional practices envision network sciences – organic, electronic and spiritual – as healing technologies to serve the shift towards heart consciousness.
Navigating digital, corporeal and ancestral memory as sites of struggles, she digs into scientific imaginaries to tackle the pervasive matrix of coloniality and the protocols of energetic misalignments that affect the songs of our body-mind-spirits. Inspired by quantum and cosmic mechanics, Tabita’s work is rooted in time-spaces where technology and spirituality intersect as fertile ground to nourish visions of connection and emancipation.
Through screen interfaces and collective offerings, her digital healing and energy streams remind us to access our own inner data center, to bypass western authority and download directly from source.
Tabita is based in Cayenne, French Guyana. She has a Bachelor in Economics (Fr) and a Master of Research in Artist Moving Image from Central Saint Martins (Uk). Tabita is a founding member of the artist group NTU, half of the duo Malaxa, and the mother of the energy house SENEB.
Photos: 1) The artist. 2) Flower-Ring, (Aging Gracefully) by Teri Gandy-Richardson, 2010. Twelve denim butts, 3 back pockets, wood, and chicken wire 60″x60″x6″; (stuffed portions filled with denim)
With origins associated initially with unpaid labor forces in America, denim is believed by Teri Gandy-Richardson, to be deeply relevant within the fabric of who we are today. This artist has expanded her abstract painting practice to use Levi’s denim as her primary medium. Engaging in a meditative practice and process to dissect, twist, tie, mold and adhere worn Levi’s denim scraps, Gandy-Richardson also uses acrylic paint to enhance the dimension while weaving history, and cultural weight into her abstract compositions.
Born in Austin, Minnesota, Teri Gandy-Richardson is a humanist, abstract artist, African-American woman, yoga teacher and cancer survivor based in Brooklyn, NY. Having shown nationally and internationally, Gandy-Richardson has recently been included in group exhibitions at the Textile Arts Center, Brooklyn, New York; The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York and the Jamaica Arts Center, Queens, New York. Internationally, she participated in DENIM— Stylish, Practical, Timeless Blue Fabric with A History, at the Spielzeug Welten Museum in Basel Switzerland. Originally an Architecture major at The Cooper Union, Teri changed her major to Painting, and earned her BFA from Cooper Union’s School of Art.
Photos: 1) The artist. 2) The Path Ahead by Wesley Clark, 2024. India ink, graphite, white compressed charcoal, acrylic wash, oil crayon; 72 x 120 inches.
Can a true history exist if no true memory can be made? This tension between subjective memory and objective history underpins Wesley Clark‘s aesthetic approach. He constructs fictional narratives to guide my process, posing and answering questions about the imagined lives of his objects. These stories inform aesthetic choices—distressing, gouging, or peeling paint to simulate age and wear. Though wholly fabricated, the objects appear familiar, suggesting a history, value, or cultural weight that never truly existed. In this way, he invites viewers to engage with invented artifacts that blur the line between memory and history.
Mark-making and idioms also play a central role in his practice. Each mark, layered through meditation and narrative, carries the residue of imagined time, intention, and use. Whether he’s spray-painting words on plywood, applying oil crayon and compressed charcoal to paper, or carving through thick layers of paint, Wesley works at the intersection of meditative mark-making and the layered meanings embedded in language. Along the journey, he explores questions of spiritual faiths, home, place, erasure, and belonging.
Photos: 1) The artist. 2) 12 Eyes or Origi: Bone Altar by Yussef Agbo-Ola. Wood, Nigerian fabric, white rocks, soil, lavender, and sunflower seeds. NYC fabrication by Mec Zilla.
Yussef Agbo-Ola is an artist and medicinal architect living between London, Lagos, and the Amazon Forest. Born in a multi-heritage household of Nigerian, African-American, and Cherokee descent in rural Virginia, his work reflects hybrid identities and relationships to diverse landscapes, ecologies, and cultural rituals. Agbo-Ola’s multidisciplinary artistic practice is concerned with interpreting natural energy systems through interactive experiments that explore the connections between various sensory environments, ranging from the biological and anthropological to the perceptual and microscopic. His practice questions how art, architecture, and anthropological research can create experimental environments that challenge the way we experience geological conditions and living ecosystems. His works manifest as architectural temples, photographic journalism, material alchemy, interactive performance, experimental sound design, and conceptual writing.
Yussef holds a Master’s in Fine Art from the University of the Arts London, and a Master’s in Architecture from the Royal College of Art. His art and architectural commissions have been widely presented in solo and group exhibitions, including, Institute of Contemporary Art (London), Serpentine Gallery London, Van Abbe Museum, TEDx East End, BBC Arts, Museum Folkwang, Venice Architectural Biennials, Palais de Tokyo, Tai Kwun Arts Center, Sharjah Architecture Trennial, and Lexus Automotive Innovation Centre Japan, among others. Agbo-Ola is the founder of Olaniyi Studio and is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Architecture at Columbia GSAPP, where he directs an experimental design studio called The Art of Poetic Environmental Architecture.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
Click the link to each resource listed below to learn more.
For deeper exploration, visit Brooklyn Public Library for Art and Culture at 10 Lafayette Avenue for additional reference materials that are related to the show’s themes.
