Curatorial Statement
by Tamara J. Mason
Navigating the expectations of being mothers, educators, storytellers, and caretakers at a moment when the world felt as though it was collapsing inward, this exhibition brings together four artists who transform personal and collective histories into sites of healing, resistance, and reclamation. Through bold chromatic intensity, layered symbolism, tactile processes, and deeply embodied mark-making, Jihan Thomas, Sherry Shine, DeJeonge Reese, and Linda Fernandez articulate journeys shaped by care, memory, identity, ancestry, and self-possession.
Jihan Thomas’s multidisciplinary practice constructs a visual vernacular rooted in Black surrealism, abstraction, and the landscape of the Black figure. Her work reflects the complexities of Black womanhood, motherhood, disability, ecology, joy, and pain, often holding these states in delicate tension. Drawing from decades of experience as an arts educator and cultural leader, Jihan’s surfaces pulse with texture, pattern, and symbolism—offering spaces where healing is neither linear nor silent, but communal and deeply felt.
Sherry Shine’s fiber-based practice explores memory, history, and cultural preservation through the traditions of quilting and textile storytelling. Drawing upon the histories and lived experiences of the African diaspora, Shine transforms fabric, appliqué, texture, and stitch into layered narratives that honor ancestry, resilience, spirituality, and community. Her quilts operate as vessels of remembrance—preserving stories across generations while inviting reflection, dialogue, and connection. Within each composition, the act of stitching becomes both a creative practice and an assertion of presence, reclaiming histories and voices that have too often been overlooked.
DeJeonge Reese’s interdisciplinary practice explores Black history, ancestry, and identity through material experimentation and embodied storytelling. Working across mixed media, textiles, sculpture, installation, and performance, Reese bridges personal memory with collective histories through archival research, oral traditions, and family narratives. Incorporating materials such as Black hair, burlap, fabric, and found objects, her work honors ancestral labor and inherited knowledge while examining themes of migration, care, survival, and self-definition. Through these layered constructions, Reese reclaims authorship over Black identity and positions the body itself as a living archive of history and resilience.
Linda Fernandez’s work explores identity and home through a diasporic Caribbean lens, merging bright color, pattern, and symbolic design to map personal and collective histories. Drawing inspiration from nature, architecture, and cultural memory, Fernandez reflects on how heritage is carried, reshaped, and reclaimed across borders. Her compositions suggest home not as a fixed place, but as a living, evolving process—one shaped by migration, resilience, and cultural continuity.
Together, these artists offer more than reflection; they assert presence. Whether through stitched histories, expressive gestures, symbolic landscapes, ancestral materials, or declarations of selfhood emerging through image and object, this exhibition reveals healing as an active, creative force. In a time of collapse, these works insist on transformation—on the power of art to hold grief, joy, ancestry, memory, and becoming all at once.
