Meet the artists who are coming together for the exhibition.

Lindsay Adams (b.1990) is a Washington, D.C. based writer and painter working across traditional mediums. Embracing her intersectional identity as a black and disabled woman, Lindsay’s work serves as both a reflection and extension of self, challenging narratives of both race and representation, while concurrently questioning her personal feelings of otherness and exclusion. She positions solitary figures within intimate, yet unknown spaces, leveraging both mystery and imagination, allowing the subjects to exist outside of expectation or restriction. By centering each figure with a direct gaze at the viewer, she creates a space for them to demonstrate an unalarmed agency with a keen sense of self, examining how identity, gender, and self disclosure can be represented. Drawing from memory, literature, and research, while also embracing fluid inspiration, Adams creates floral landscapes and still lifes archiving places and times reflective of home, travel, and her ancestral connection to land. With her thick, gestural brushwork, she is in constant consideration of how color and texture can be used to capture the complexity and depth of humanhood, memory, and experience. Leveraging her academic background in foreign relations, sociology, and cultural anthropology, she approaches her work with deep critical thought and social awareness. Lindsay received her B.A. in International Studies: World Politics and Diplomacy and Latin and Iberian Studies from The University of Richmond. Lindsay will be attending the School at the Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, IL for a post-graduate program in Painting in the Fall of 2022.

Aliana Grace Bailey was born and raised in Washington, DC. She is a multidisciplinary artist, designer, socially-engaged art practitioner, and passionate advocate for radical self-love, wellness, and healing. Aliana has held art residencies in Ghana, West Africa, Maryland, Washington, DC, and an apprenticeship at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. She has exhibited in numerous galleries including the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts in Michigan, Frampton Co in New York, the Carrack Modern Art in North Carolina, and Transformer in Washington DC. In 2019, Aliana was the featured teaching artist at Evenings at the Edge: Wonder Woman at The National Gallery of Art in DC. Aliana is a recipient of the Jacob & Hilda Blaustein Foundation Fellowship, the Leslie King Hammond Graduate Fellowship, the Libby Bowerman ’82 Fellowship, and TILA Studios Above Four Fund. In 2022, she will complete a residency with The Studios at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in Massachusetts and Elsewhere Living Museum in North Carolina. She is a 2014 graduate of North Carolina A&T State University, where she double-majored, earning a Bachelor of Social Work and a Bachelor of Art in Visual Arts Media Design. In May 2020, Aliana earned her MFA in Community Arts and a Certificate in the College Teaching of Art from Maryland Institute College of Art.

Nakeya Brown was born in Santa Maria, California in 1988. She received her Bachelor of Art from Rutgers University and her Master of Fine Arts from The George Washington University. Brown’s work has been featured in Time, New York magazine, Dazed & Confused, The Fader, The New Yorker, and Vice. Her work has been included in photography books Babe and Girl on Girl: Art and Photography in the Age of the Female Gaze.

Adjoa J. Burrowes is a mixed media artist, author/illustrator, and educator. She holds a B.F.A. in printmaking from Howard University and an M.A. in Art Education at Corcoran College of Arts and Design at The George Washington University. Burrowes has studied with contemporary artists in Ghana, Nigeria, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo and has presented her work in Mexico, the Netherlands and France. Burrowes is the author of three children’s books and illustrator of over a dozen. Selected book illustrations are in the collection at The Betty Boyd Dettre Library and Research Center (LRC) at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. As an educator she has designed and implemented a series of art and writing workshops and residencies for cultural institutions throughout the nation including the John F. Kennedy Center for The Performing Arts, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the National Civil Rights Museum. Her extensive community based teaching practice includes residencies with at risk and underrepresented youth and adults in multiple settings. Burrowes’ hand pulled prints, sculptures, and mixed media work have been exhibited throughout the U.S. and are represented in collections nationally including the Banneker Douglass Museum of Culture and History, Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, The Southside Community Art Center, and internationally at Art Colle Museum of Collage in Plemet, France, and the Verbeke Foundation in Belgium.

I’m Mahari Kathleen Chabwera, an artist and writer living and working between Maryland and Virginia. I research practices of liberation, spiritual teachings, myths, and Black Women's wisdom traditions to inspire the work I make, and motivate the way I move in the world. I received my BFA in Painting and Printmaking from VCU in 2017. I was awarded the VMFA Professional Fellowship, and the Vis Arts Emerging Artist Award in 2020. I’ve participated in numerous group projects and exhibitions, and curated a few of my own. My interest is in serving the energy of my soul, developing myself through my practice and making awesome tapestry paintings.

Biography not available.

Pat Culbreth was born in Beaufort, SC and currently resides in the DMV area. She began her artistic practice after graduating from Winston Salem State. Her artwork aims to empower Black people by repositioning them within historical narratives and imagery.

Alanna Fields (b. 1990, Maryland, USA) is a mixed-media artist and archivist whose work unpacks Black queer history through a multidisciplinary engagement with photographic archives. Fields’ work has been exhibited at The High Museum of Art, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, MoCADA, Yancey Richardson Gallery, Baxter St. CCNY, Expo Chicago, Felix Art Fair in LA, and UNTITLED Art Fair in Miami. Fields is a Gordon Parks Foundation Scholar and has participated in residencies at Silver Arts Projects, Light Work, Baxter St. CCNY, and Gallery Aferro. She received her MFA in Photography from Pratt Institute and is a Lecturer of Photography at Howard University. Fields has given artist talks at the Aperture Foundation, Light Work, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Parson's New School, Syracuse University, and Stanford University. Her work has been published by Aperture Magazine, FOAM Magazine, T Magazine, and The Atlantic. Fields lives and works between Washington, D.C., and New York City.

b. 1987 Cincinnati, Ohio Adrienne Gaither is a visual artist, whose abstract paintings explore a variety of topics including race, familial ties, emotional health, class, and the politics of geometric abstraction. She has held solo exhibitions at Transformer in Washington D.C., Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA) in Brooklyn, and Union Arts in Washington D.C. Her work has been exhibited in a host of group exhibitions at Cuchifritos Gallery in New York, DeNovo Gallery in Washington D.C., and Prizm Art Fair, among others. She has been commissioned by the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum, Sundance Film Festival, and PepsiCo. Her work appeared in Margo Crawford’s 2017 monograph Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics, in which Crawford writes of Adrienne’s work: “Gaither’s use of abstraction as a means of critiquing the twenty-first century rhetoric of colorblindness is one of the most powerful usages of black abstraction ...” Adrienne’s work has also appeared in D'ailleurs & d'ici! #2 and D'ailleurs & d'ici! #3 by Marc Cheb Sun. In 2018, she was awarded a fellowship from the D.C. Commission of the Arts and Humanities, a position in which she continues to hold. Adrienne holds a Master of Fine Arts from Howard University. She currently resides in Washington, D.C.

Claudia “Aziza” Gibson-Hunter is a mixed media artist. She was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to parents that were ardent supporters of the arts. She graduated from Temple University, (BS), and received her MFA from Howard University. Aziza attended Bob Blackburn’s Printmaking Studio, the New York Arts Students League, and later received a fellowship from the Bronx Museum of Art. She joined “Where We At “, a group of Black women artists in the early 1980’s. Ms. Gibson-Hunter was an administrator at Parsons School of Design and a faculty member of Howard University, and Bowie State University. Aziza was awarded the Individual Artist Fellowship Program Grant, from the DC Commission of the Arts and Humanities in 2020. Her work is in the collections of the Washington DC Art Bank, the Liberian Embassy, Montgomery County, Maryland, Washington, District of Columbia’s permanent collection, and other noted collections. She completed, public commissions for the Washington, DC Department of General Services, The Wall of Unity (2017), and ANCESTORS, (2019). Aziza was a Pyramid Atlantic Denbo Fellow in 2019. She is a cofounder of Black Artists of DC, and a studio member of STABLE, a Washington DC arts community. She is also a member of WOAUA, and Dandelion, Black female artist collectives. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally.

Paula Mans (b. 1986) is a self-taught painter, collagist, and art educator based in Washington, DC. While Paula is a native Washingtonian, she spent many of the formative years of her childhood and young adulthood living abroad in Tanzania, Mozambique, Eswatini, and Brazil. Her experiences throughout the African Diaspora shaped her identity and informed the development of her artistic voice. Living in Washington, DC and Salvador, Brazil has been particularly impactful for the artist. Both cities are Diasporian meccas for Black cultural expression. DC (often referred to as Chocolate City) and Salvador (frequently called Roma Negra, or Black Rome in Portuguese) are famous for their prominent and influential Black populations. Nonetheless, racism and gentrification often render Black people invisible in both cities. In her artistic practice, Paula Mans seeks to create work that deconstructs these pervasive power structures by amplifying the visibility and agency of the Black figure.

Lex Marie holds a BA in studio art with a concentration in painting from the University of Maryland, College Park. Marie’s first solo exhibition Remember? Remember. opened in two separate locations in Washington, DC through Arena Social Arts Club (2021). Marie’s work has been curated into group exhibitions including Rooted in Voyage (Band of Vices, Los Angeles, CA, 2022); We Can’t Predict Tomorrow (Arlington Arts Center, Arlington, VA, 2021); FRESH START by McCall Art Advisory (online, 2021); Women in the Arts on Artsy.com, curated by Latela Curatorial (2020), and a virtual art fair curated by Monochrome Collective in 2020. Marie received the Alma Thomas Scholarship from Washington Studio School in 2019. She lives and works in the metropolitan DC area.

Helina Metaferia is an interdisciplinary artist working across collage, assemblage, video, performance, and social engagement. Her work integrates archives, somatic studies, and dialogical practices, narrating undertold stories and amplifying BIPOC/femme bodies. Recent solo exhibitions include Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA (2022); New York University's The Gallatin Galleries, New York, NY (2021); Michigan State University's Scene Metrospace Gallery, East Lansing, MI (2019); and Museum of African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA (2017). She will present her work at the 2023 Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab Emirates. Metaferia's work is in the permanent collection of several institutions, including Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, NY. Metaferia received her MFA from Tufts University’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts (2015) and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2016). Her work has been supported by residencies including MacDowell, Yaddo, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and Silver Art Projects at the World Trade Center. Her work has been written about in publications including The New York Times, Financial Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Artnet News, Hyperallergic, Artsy, and The Art Newspaper. Metaferia is an Assistant Professor of Visual Art at Brown University, and lives and works in New York City.

Destiny Moore is a 20-year-old black woman of Bahamian descent who was born in Miami Florida. She attended New World School of the Arts (NWSA) where she graduated in 2020 and currently attends Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) as an undergraduate student. In 2020 she was a Young Arts finalist and presidential nominee, Gordon Parks Centennial Scholarship Winner, and recipient of the Miami-Dade County Scholastics Silver Key along with other notable awards and mentions. As an interdisciplinary artist, she applies different forms of art such as painting, sculpting, animating, textiles, and more. Destiny’s work revolves around her identity, race, culture, and opinions on topics of the past, and present. Her goal is to create representational imagery and produce work that gives her a crystalline perspective of who she is.

For the longest time, I have been looking for a way to voice my perception of the things occurring around me. I’m a very detail oriented person and in being so, I find my viewership of specific experiences or moments somewhat clouded. This image was created when I first began stepping back. I remember conversing with my grandmother about black perseverance throughout history and the idea of how black creativity, intelligence and grace kept developing countering those times. She summarized it into “black people make struggle look good” and that saying changed my perception of everything. This image highlights an unwelcome spotlight that’s been placed on the black community. Utilizing pretty fabric and even the time of day(“golden hour”) to create an aesthetically pleasing artwork. I wanted to create an image from the viewer’s perception. You can infer what kind of relationship is in motion here with the gate separating the subject from its viewer(us).

Introduced to photography in 2016, Price witnessed the rapid effects of gentrification around her and felt moved to document its progression so that her fellow DC natives could read a story told by one of their own. But it wasn't until she dreamt of the four black boys with royal blue eyes that her documentation grew from pure interest to powerful storytelling. The dream's subjects rose from the grounds of a historic black community in Washington, DC. Price recollects the boys spoke in a sound language, gifting her a camera and then returning underground. She realized her dream of the "blue-eyed black boys" was a divine assignment to pick up her camera and visually explore adolescence and the black boy experience in Washington, DC. She uses the camera to highlight the youth's beauty, innocence, dignity, plight against stereotypes, and longing for solutions.

Bria Sterling-Wilson is a photographer and collage artist from Baltimore, Maryland. She received her B.F.A in Photography and Digital Arts from Towson University, Towson, MD in 2021. Sterling-Wilson uses found imagery, magazines, newspaper, and fabrics to construct alluring scenes, portraits, and interiors to express the black experience. Sterling-Wilson has exhibited in Brooklyn, New York, Los Angles, California, Washington, D.C, Rehoboth, Delaware, and Baltimore, Maryland. Sterling-Wilson was awarded Young Artist recipient for the Trawick Prize Exhibition in 2020 and received 1st place in the 6th Rehoboth Art League Regional Juried Photography Exhibition in 2021.

Zsudayka Nzinga is a multi-disciplinary fine artist, curator and arts educator from Denver, CO living in Washington, DC. Her work is largely focused on mixed media portraiture of American life including themes of motherhood and culture. Her pieces explore patterns and textures using acrylic, oil, decorative and hand dyed paper, fabric, thread, linocut stamp and ink on canvas. She also makes jewelry using silver, wood, resin and precious stones. Nzinga started out as a spoken word artist and performer. While attending Hampton University and Metropolitan State College of Denver she pursued a journalism degree and self-published 3 books of her work. She spent several years touring the country performing, hosting and curating spoken word and special arts events before focusing on her own visual art. She has since shown her work in galleries and museums all over the country and been featured internationally in blogs and reviews. She has curated multiple exhibitions for both youth and professional artists and recently won a curatorial grant with the DC Commission of the Arts and Humanities. She serves on the board for Freedom School Arts and Entrepreneurship and is currently Vice President of Black Artists of DC as well as a member and curator with the Women’s Caucus for Art. She is a proud mother of 3 children and wife to artist, James Terrell with who she runs their family business selling and exhibiting their art, managing their merchandise line, and assisting teachers and homeschool families with arts integrated education.

Between a diva and an anti-diva, Sydney Vernon spans from painting and drawing to video and performance. Mixing herself and her family history with elements of contemporary culture like magazine clippings and found images, Vernon explores universal concepts while making artworks that trigger your emotions. Tapping into both expression and representation and the tradition of Black abstraction, Vernon’s paintings possess intimate yet extremely powerful energy. In her own words “With my work, I want people to understand how everything I do is connected to living as a Black woman, living in the Internet age, living in the wake of slavery and living in culture while simultaneously trying to create it.”

Born and raised in the DMV, I’ve been painting and drawing for basically all my life and taking inspiration from all the different aspects of black womanhood I grew up recognizing. I’ve always grown up in environments thriving with black folk in their respective communities although I moved around the state quite a bit, but I found comfort and community in the Baltimore art scene while attending high school. I attend Maryland Institute College of Art currently entering my junior year, majoring in General Fine Arts.