CENTER FOCUS (2021)

Center Focus featured the photography of seven members of Black Women Photographers. The exhibition ran from April 11-29 and was accompanied by in-person and virtual programming. Center Focus was the first exhibition of its kind for the collective.

Founded by Polly Irungu, and launched in the summer of 2020, Black Women Photographers is a global community, directory, and hub of over 1,000 Black women and non-binary identifying photographers, spanning over 46 countries and 32 U.S. states.

adrift: the bayou project (2024)

Following the multi-continental success of her immersive film Girl Icon (2019), adrift: the bayou project is a much-anticipated invitation to dive deeper into the creative world of immersive artist Sadah Espii Proctor. Commissioned by Lincoln Center as an inaugural work for their Social Sculpture Project, and the first chapter in a larger body of work adrift: the bayou project is an immersive sonic and mixed-reality folktale that transforms Lincoln Centers Hearst Plaza into a multi-dimensional liminal space that blurs the borders of memory, history, and time.

Born in the liminality of Espii’s dreamspace 7 years ago, glimpses of spirits, and bodies passing through the murky water of a bayou beckoned to Espii for their stories to unfold. The years of research that followed into the pre-and post-reconstruction era United States lives of African - Americans would reveal stories of black fugitivity, liberation, political autonomy and marronage, rich with nuances of separation, loss and reunion. adrift asks you to reflect on the roles that time - place - space - person - image and sound play in the creation of memory and meaning within our lives.

Shifting/\ Gazes (2024)

Shifting /\ Gazes Season I, 2025 International Residency Exhibition

‍With works by Tisha Benson, Ye Cheng, Lafina Eptaminitaki, Gloria Fan Duan, Inbar Hagai, Kei Ito, Evelyne Leblanc-Roberge, Jung Won Lee, Karine Locatelli, Grace Qian, Romilly Rinck, Jiyoung Song, and Thomas Tait.

The New York Art Residency & Studios (NARS) Foundation is pleased to present Shifting /\ Gazes, a group exhibition featuring work from the Season I, 2025 International Residency Artists: Tisha Benson, Ye Cheng, Lafina Eptaminitaki, Gloria Fan Duan, Inbar Hagai, Kei Ito, Evelyne Leblanc-Roberge, Jung Won Lee, Karine Locatelli, Grace Qian, Romilly Rinck, Jiyoung Song, and Thomas Tait, curated by NARS Curatorial Fellow Joyous R. Pierce.

How do we come to know space, not as something fixed, but as something we feel, move through, and reshape in real time? What happens when space is not just a container but something that shifts beneath us, unsettles us, or invites us to play?

Shifting /\ Gazes brings together new and developing works from artists who question the ways we navigate the world, the histories we carry, and the environments we move through. Through brushstrokes, installation, sculpture, breath, and material exploration, their works reorient passive observation, drawing us into a frame of more active engagement. Some pieces make the familiar feel strange, nudging us to look twice. Others play with time, memory, and perception, offering quiet disruptions that ask us to reconsider what we take for granted. Each work invites us to pause, step back, and shift our way of seeing.

The connecting undercurrent of these works is a deeper undoing—a gentle but deliberate unraveling of the systems that shape our understanding of space, identity, and power. The structures we inherit, whether built, social, or biological, are rarely neutral. Here, they are stretched, fractured, and rearranged. Sometimes with humor, sometimes with quiet defiance and always with curiosity. Rather than offering fixed conclusions, Shifting /\ Gazes opens portals of possibility, asking: What else might we see if we allowed ourselves to look differently

FBF MA 10YR

In commemoration of the FBF MA® 10YR Anniversary FBF MA ® Atelier partnered with Soho Works + Soho House to launch a retrospective exhibition [10YR/10DY] at Soho Works at Soho House Meatpacking.

Imagined Encounters (2021)

Imagined Encounters was a solo exhibition of the Korean artists Bang & Lee at Nafasi Art Space in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania along with a series of collaborative workshops between artists and curators in Tanzania and South Korea and a group exhibition of new works created by Tanzanian artists in response to the workshops.

Primarily conducted on Zoom, Imagined Encounters was a result of a series of workshops exploring technology, history, pattern-making and storytelling cross-culturally between Tanzania and Korea. Our sessions were rich exchanges of knowledge, artistic and curatorial production.

Our exchange has manifested into paintings, installations & films - all of which carry the commonalities of our coexistence & interpretations of our relationships with the many patterns found in the universe around us.

We share the same roof.
We are connected under the same galaxy.

Facing Forward (2020)

What does it look like when we visualize a transcendent reality?
To create together: “Donde Quepan Muchos Mundos”
('A World Where Many Worlds Fit')

Facing Forward explores this question through the eyes of artists who create multi - faceted worlds in their work, all drawn from infinite wells of culture from the black diaspora.

Black Women: Seen it before (2019)

The work of Harlem Renaissance artist & scholar Zora Neale Hurston speaks of the adornment of Black women, their embodiment of beauty, strength, tenderness & vulnerability. Women whose very presence cut through atmospheres and refuse to be constrained by weak societal definitions.

Black (w)omen: Seen it before is an ode to Black Women in every moment. An opportunity to see Black Women the way we have always seen ourselves. At rest, in solidarity, in abstract, in the present and the infinite boundless future. CCNY + HAA Black History Month Exhibition features the works of emerging black self-identified, womyn, visual & performance artist Rafia, and documentary photographer Korren Martin. Both artists use unique frameworks to document, depict, piece together and explore past, present and future images of “the self” through a black womyns gaze.

SHOUTER! (w.i.p.)

Shouter! is a multimedia project exploring Black Spirituality and survival through the lens of Trinidad & Tobago’s Shouter Baptist religion & the Gullah Geechee Ring Shout spiritual tradition.
Comprising performance, composition, and immersive technologies, it explores the socio-political and cultural connections of Trinidad’s Spiritual Shouter Baptists and Ring Shouters from the American South.

Shouter! examines the emigration of Black American Marines, or Merikins, to Trinidad after the War of 1812, who were gifted land as free settlers for military service to Britain. Their presence influenced the creation of the Shouter Baptist religion, which through violent sanction was banned under the 1917 Shouter Prohibition Ordinance until 1951. The Spiritual Shouter Baptist religion remains a vibrant locus for African spiritual practices, with Spiritual Baptist Liberation Day becoming a national holiday in 1996

JOYOUS PIERCE

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