New.Now.
February 8 - March 15, 2025
Hamiltonian Artists. Washington, D.C.
Each year, new.now. serves as a snapshot of the newest Hamiltonian Artists fellows’ creative practices, exhibiting the work they plan to expand upon during their two-year fellowship. Featuring artists Sobia Ahmad, June Canedo de Souza, Jermaine “jET” Carter, Nilou Kazemzadeh, and Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, this presentation of new.now. conjures the feeling of moving through and reaching toward.
Each artist’s work begins to take on an almost fugitive character—at once urgent and hopeful. Fragments of childhood memories surface through oil pastels, wild clay, and colored pencils; glimmers of futurity flicker in moving images and plaster casts; portals of stained glass and collaged tunnels signal a way to go on, while the murkiness of mud-covered canvas and night skies leave destination and distance undetermined.
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press release
images by Vivian Marie Doering, courtesy of Hamiltonian Artists.
Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo
October 7 – October 27, 2023
Capitol Hill Arts Workshop. Washington, D.C.
Inspired by Ntozake Shange’s Black Feminist fiction work of the same name, Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo featured artists Quinci Baker, Jermaine “jET” Carter, Ayana Zaire Cotton, and Kimberly King.
With a tapestry-like approach, the exhibition consisted of drawings, sculptures, prints, and paintings by artists who steward a myriad of craft traditions while breathing new life into Black American visual aesthetics and material culture. Through abstraction, figuration, and lore viewers are drawn into a Black feminist terrain in which little Black girls emerge not only as main characters, but as complex protagonists—carriers of craft, ancestral knowledge, and perhaps most importantly, divine protection.
Mounted in gallery space which doubles as a youth arts education classroom, the group exhibition served an ode to little Black girls—from the golden child to the black sheep—unraveling girlhood’s curiosities, and its inordinate joys.
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press release
documentation images by Vivian Marie Doering.
MIRROR FLOWER, WATER MOON.
April 28 - June 8, 2023
Chicago Artists Coalition. Chicago, IL.
“Kyōka Suigetsu; 鏡花水月; Mirror Flower, Water Moon: meaning something that can be seen but not touched, like a flower reflected in a mirror or the moon reflected on the water's surface; something that is beautiful but unattainable beyond dreams, a mirage.”
Mirror Flower, Water Moon finds its essence in that bittersweet futility of preservation which often underpins the wondrous, romantic, and resonant. R. Treshawn Williamson locates this dream-like temporality in pockets of respite scattered along boulevards and parkways—sceneries from somewheres between urban Washington, D.C., suburban Prince George's County, and rural Maryland. In thinking about personal gaze in practice and interrogating the notion of meaning-making across both ancient and contemporary craft, Williamson arrives with an offering of charcoal mono prints, concrete sculptures, and photographs—laying beauty at the sightline and draping a tapestry of thought within the periphery.
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press release
images by Evan Jenkins, courtesy of the artist
Kickin’ the Can
May 6 - May 28, 2022
ACRE Projects. Chicago, IL.
Kickin’ The Can explores the magic of play time, day dreams, and slow strolls — simply passing the time and doing so with pleasure. Positioned within the Black American dreamscape, this group exhibition contemplates the restorative nature of pastimes and play grounds that exist beyond pathways that mark the pursuit of capital, exploring the jubilance and romantics of Black leisure. The participating artists include Jada-Amina, Jermaine “jET” Carter, Ayana Zaire Cotton, Kenyssa Evans, Janelle Ayana Miller, Shala Miller, Breanna Robinson, Sydney Elexis Vernon, and R. Treshawn Williamson.
In conversation, each work offers a dreamscape for making new friends and choosing your adventure. Video installations, cyanotypes, and screenprints frolick hand in hand, toying with ease and ecstatics, deploying playful poetics that illuminate the many dramas of Black being outside — and in the elsewhere.
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press release
images by Kate Bowen.
Gone Swimming
September 24 - October 31, 2021
The Corner at Whitman-Walker. Washington, D.C.
Photo installation by day and expanded cinema by night, this micro exhibition featuring works by Daniel Diasgranados served as a meditation on Black being and salvation amid recurrent rapture. Photos and moving images rendered light as a beacon, silence as sanctuary, and stillness as a breath of fresh air. Akin to a daydream, Diasgranados’ work embodies the here and the elsewhere. It lives at the borderline between reality and the surreal.
In the wake of screen fatigue, virality, and the rife commodification of Blackness, Diasgranados’ practice turns toward documentary abstraction—embracing ambiguity and concealment as means of safeguarding Black being. Much of this work was made in Maryland and Virginia, specifically in forests, parking lots, and the fields that border airports. Diansgranados used these sites of assumed nothingness to interrogate the notion of “the anti-spectacle”. The sublime mundane conjured in his work invited viewers to look beyond the screen and consider other meaningful ways of spending time.
Gone Swimming was a love letter addressed to The Void. That feeling of being left with oneself, left with each other... what if we swam in it?
press release
flyer design by John Sampson.
presented in conjunction with The Corner at Whitman Walker Curatorial Residency.
Dreamscapes: Imaginings of a Black Pastoral
July 30 - September 5, 2021
Roots & Culture. Chicago, IL.
Featuring artists Jada-Amina, Namir Fearce, Shabez Jamal, Derrick Woods-Morrow, Shala Miller, POETIK, R. Treshawn Williamson, and Tavon Taylor, Dreamscapes: Imaginings of a Black Pastoral offers a dreamspace for the reimagining of contemporary Black American life and The South post-plantation. This group exhibition invites viewers to think deeply, and carefully, about Black being in America beyond prescribed urbanity.
The participating artists render their imaginings through video, collage, photography, drawing, and sound. Their work highlights the overlooked nuances of Black American life, legacy, and lineage — pulling apart misconceptions of Black rurality, indigeneity, and Southerness while pointing toward the endless possibilities of Earth-bound salvation.
Dreamscapes points toward a queer, liberatory space for reconsidering both the historical and contemporary relationship between Black Americans and non-urban landscapes. It is a joyful ode and a tender offering. It is a celebration of all the ways in which Black Americans have forged fondness for the landscapes they have come to know and forgive, without forgetting.
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images by Collectivo Multipolar.
presented in conjunction with CONNECT Curatorial Residency.