I’m honored to share that my work is currently on view in Borderlands: Soft Margins, Hard Truths, a powerful group exhibition curated by nico w. okoro in collaboration with Connecticut College’s Center for the Critical Study of Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE), commemorating CCSRE’s 20th anniversary.
The exhibition is on view January 20 – March 6, 2025 at the Cummings Arts Center, inside the Joanne Toor Cummings Gallery. The galleries are free and open to the public.
Exhibition Reception
Monday, January 26, 2025
4:30 – 6:30 PM EST
Cummings Arts Center, Joanne Toor Cummings Gallery
Free and open to the public
I will be in attendance and would love to see you there.
My Works in the Exhibition
Liminal Staff
Recovered marine line, sea-tumbled, woven and knotted with alpaca wool, fabric, acrylic yarn, beads, shells, washers, vintage watch parts, and deconstructed line.
Liminal Staff is an emblem of authority and sovereignty,, a sacred artifact that operates as a conduit between worlds. Crafted from recovered marine line shaped by hurricanes and tides, the work is layered with memory and intention. Each knot and material fragment carries a story reclaimed from chaos and transformed into a vessel of spiritual protection and ancestral reverence.
This piece emerges from the tension of being both tethered and adrift. It honors the countless lives lost to the Atlantic, the water graves of the enslave, and the resilience of those who survived. Bridging the living and the dead, land and sea, Liminal Staff echoes tidal pull and cyclical time. Conjure bags, locs of hair, and marine debris lend their essence, layering the work with magic, memory, and reclamation.
We are water’s kin. Like rivers flowing unerringly toward the sea, this piece speaks to our origins, our endurance, and the enduring human capacity to find our way home.
Offering to the Lost Ones
Recovered marine line, sea-tumbled, woven and knotted with eyelash yarn, acrylic yarn, deconstructed line, glass beads, shells, chain, and handmade bells.
Offering to the Lost Ones is a beacon of remembrance honoring the spirits lost during the transatlantic slave trade, while also reflecting on humanity’s ongoing disruption of the natural world. Shaped by storms, the materials carry dual histories, environmental devastation and the turbulent seas that bore witness to unimaginable human suffering.
Each knot, bead, and bell holds space for reflection, transforming debris into a solemn offering for those whose names dissolved into the depths of the Atlantic. Chains and bells converse with shells and glass, mirroring the tension between bondage and liberation, death and resilience.
This work calls us to remember the past while confronting the present. The sea holds ancestral grief and the scars of modern neglect. In this offering, mourning becomes a gesture toward healing, between people, memory, and the natural world.
About the Exhibition
Borderlands: Soft Margins, Hard Truths dismantles social constructs of race, space, and place, imagining an end to the living legacies of colonialism that continue to bind them. The exhibition features work by:
Ophelia Arc, Nic[o] Brierre-Aziz, Alexis Callender, Adger Cowans, Lewis Derogene, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Shabez Jamal, Fidelis Joseph, Nsenga Knight, Ron Norsworthy, Theda Sandiford, Toby Sisson, Dina Nur Satti, and Amanda Russhell Wallace.
If you’re nearby, I hope you’ll join us for the opening reception on January 26. These works are offerings of memory, of reckoning, and of repair and it means a great deal to share that space with you.
