TBA for June 2026

As James Baldwin put it: “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.” This has always resonated with Desmond as a Black man. His lifelong pursuit is to genuinely and honestly express his lived experience through art-making. The African storytelling tradition is a thread that runs through Desmond’s work. Honoring his immediate ancestors as well as those of the African Diaspora is a priority. His highest goal is to turn the terrible into the beautiful, as his work is motivated by recent and historical developments about the African American experience as well as anti-Blackness. He is inspired by images of Black people during the Middle Passage, in the Jim Crow South, and by their representation in today’s mass media. Desmond’s artwork frequently addresses the racial stereotypes that affect Black people. The work’s deliberateness remixes, reclaims, and reexamines the Black struggle. The works of art serve as a forum for illuminating the existence of the nameless, grief, celebration, and resistance.

Prosper Aluu makes figurative and expressive paintings. His stylized figures show the use of the artistic devices of elongation and exaggeration and his unique style of painting the iconic afro hairstyle. These are his ways of celebrating and negotiating African identity. Prosper grew up drawing comics and characters which enabled him understand the human figure and expressions properly, after which he became a full–time studio artist in 2017. In traditional African art visual codes, the exaggeration of the head in comparison to other parts of the body is a well–known visual strategy to establish the head as the seat of wisdom and intellectual prowess according to the beliefs in parts of Africa. Prosper plays with the size, forms and presentation of the head of the figures in his paintings as a visual pun to challenge what he considers a one–sided narrative about the size of the head in traditional African art. While he focuses on black identity, with this he believes that in order to preserve culture, he must continue to create it.

Reshada Pullen-Jireh is a visual storyteller, a teaching artist, and a visual arts leader in the Metro Washington, DC area. They are fascinated by people. Joys, challenges, triumphs, and the ways we give and receive love. They are captivated by the way people express the God within themselves, uniquely, and delight in the manifestation of our creator’s multifaceted being through people. In their work, they question what makes a thing powerful. Sadness, fear, and pain is commonly viewed as powerful because these feelings are oppressive. An onslaught of images of victimization, criminalization, dehumanization or simply overall omission can cause indelible damage for generations. Negativity robs those who engage in it the power and strength to go on, to continue, it extracts the will to live. They choose joy, and take on their own empowerment and in their choosing, they are strengthened and energized. It takes boldness to continue to activate joy when the temptation to suffer is high. They combat tokenism and stereotypical tropes that flood our visual culture. They seek to communicate love, earnest expectation, and life.

For years, Abi took multiple colors of the highest magnitude of pigmentation to paint their reality. And it worked. It exposed the intense emotions they were feeling on the inside and the mania within their mind. However, the continuous layering of these intense colors created deep and dark tones and shadows which eventually consumed them. Having learnt about the power of color in the most profound way, their paintbrush and canvas began to become their healing. The result of this, a collection of canvases whimsically whistling a majestic melody of self-care, self-preservation and self-appreciation which enchants and enraptures its consumer. Canvases conspicuously caressed with pastel tones, pale and soft yet bold with the redolent essence of femininity. A gift they share with the world. One that lets them know that sometimes we all feel ‘fine’, but not ok and it is important that we express and share these feelings. A gift that they see an urgent need for because too many lives are senselessly lost because we fear showing our instability to a society that at times demands more than is humanly possible of humans programmed to never think their best is good enough.