Through August 30, 2025 at The Shepherd in Detroit: The Sea and the Sky and You and I, curated by Allison Glenn. For more information, follow this link;
September 9, 2025 – December 31, 2025 at Ella Sharp Museum of Art & History: When the River Flows Over the Same Stone Twice:
When the River Flows Over the Same Stone Twice is a new installation that debuts alongside a series of abstract sculptures that I’ve placed in dialogue with southern Face Jugs (1619–1880s, particularly those from Edgefield, South Carolina), George G.M. James’s book, Stolen Legacy (1954), and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave (c. 380 BCE).
The work honors mothers and other builders—including artist-philosopher Loraine O’Grady, namesake Ella Sharp, and George Brown, from upstate New York, the Black mason whose ‘dry walls,’ aka as ‘stone walls,’ still encircle the Ella Sharp farmstead in Michigan (Hillside Farms).
When the River Flows Over the Same Stone Twice introduces a technique I call Water Prints, in which saturation and evaporation replace brushwork. The monumental textiles—over 72 feet long—is draped and sewn to evoke tidal movement, functioning as a spatial archive of migration, water memory, and technical labor.
Presented adjacent to Tyree Guyton’s 40-year Heidelberg Project retrospective, this work fuses abstraction with social material, mapping migration, settlement, and innovation across both soft and sculptural forms.
Just as Guyton reimagined the city block as canvas, When the River Flows Over the Same Stone Twice treats cloth and clay as sites of philosophical and ancestral recovery, placing the present within the larger context of the past and the future.