Top: Curator Shaunda Holloway beside Jean Benoit’s Soul Whisperer. Bottom: Lydia Douglas' Young Brothas, taken on a film camera in 1980s New York. Lucy Gellman Photos; all work by the artists.
Maybe it’s the two boys, sitting on the sidewalk outside the New York Public Library, that pull a viewer in, their smiles magnetic, faces slightly sweat-slicked and beaming. Or the kid suiting up at Get’em Boy Boxing, still baby-faced and holding their boxing gloves up at shoulder level, furrowed brows a promise and a hope all at the same time. Or the protesters photographed across the room, their faces half-basked in the red glow of a stoplight, a single head bent as if in prayer.
Those images—and so many others—build a depth and deep humanity that is at the heart of A Lion Speaks, running at Creative Arts Workshop (CAW) through March 12. Curated by writer and artist Shaunda Holloway, the exhibition features nearly 30 artists working across the African diaspora, with as many takes on Black history, life, and futures as there are minds and hands that went into the show. It marks the latest installment in CAW’s “Made Visible” series, which the organization first launched during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.
It includes a stunning breadth of media, including photography, film, single- and mixed-media sculpture, installation, painting on canvas and on fabric, embroidery, collage and textile art. CAW is located at 80 Audubon St. in New Haven’s eponymously named arts district. Hours and more information are available on CAW’s website; read about previous “Made Visible” exhibitions here, here, and here.
“With the chronic erasure of Black culture worldwide, this was definitely an opportunity for that issue to be addressed,” Holloway said in a recent interview on WNHH’s “Arts Respond,” where she was joined by artists Edjohnetta Miller and Adeyinka Ogunlowo. “I was really excited about being able to bring together artists from different backgrounds, and also having the space to do that … it comes together like a puzzle.”
Top: Leigh Busby's photography from Get Em Boy Boxing. Bottom: Detail, Arvia Walker's Grandma’s Praying Hands.
It’s a puzzle where all of the pieces have fallen affectingly into place, using the entirety of CAW’s two floors (and its street-facing windows, which glow from within at night) while still giving the different artworks room to breathe. From the downstairs entrance to the show, pieces talk to each other across genre and media, telling a story that is so nuanced, emotional and multi-faceted that it warrants multiple visits.
Take, for instance, Grandma’s Praying Hands, a mixed-media installation from artist Arvia Walker that feels, even from across the room, deeply sacred, an altar that defies the neat expectations of a secular gallery space. In the work, which pays homage to Walker’s late grandmother, Deaconess Carrie Mae Walker, the artist has photographed copies of her grandmother’s writing—daily meditations on prayer and scripture—and developed the negatives using the cyanotype technique.
The technique, which has its roots in the mid nineteenth century, relies on ultraviolet light and an iron salt solution. Traditionally, it necessitated sunlight, but now can happen in an artist’s studio under the right conditions.
The result, developed on cotton, is the elder Walker’s looping, large script on a rich, almost-otherworldy blue, an image that Walker recreates on handmade paper and tissue paper, and contains in a gold frame with a length of white muslin. Around the text, she has developed negatives of other photographs, including her grandmother as a younger woman. Beneath the layers of text and fabric, a pair of Carrie Mae Walker’s praying hands sits in the center of a crocheted white doily, the color so vibrant it seems to undulate.
“This is a dedication to her prayers,” Walker said at an opening reception earlier this month. On a small table below, there’s an altar with Carrie Mae Walker’s photo, a dish of her jewelry, bouquets of dried flowers, votive candles and a hand-painted mirror. On the floor above, the artist Marquis Brantley has installed, fittingly, a portrait of his mother. “How they carried me.”
A transplant from South Carolina who became a deaconess in her church, Carrie Mae Walker passed away in September of last year. Before she did, she was “the star of the show” at Reverence: An Archival Altar, an exhibition that Walker brought to the Henry Street arts incubator NXTHVN last year.
Not even half a year later, Walker said that the act of making helps her process the deep grief of her grandmother’s death. On the opposite wall, her photograph Solace, taken during a week of protest for police shooting victims Stephanie Washington and Paul Witherspoon in April 2019, teems with life, even as protesters fall to their knees, and imagine with all their might that another world is possible.
There is so much here—the sheer and awesome power of a Black matriarch, the work of creating as a holy rite, the way grief does not go away, but changes shape and feeling—that feels at once personal and universal. One look at Solace, and a viewer (or at least, this viewer) is back on those streets, which pulsed with protest and prayer for days on end just as the weather was starting to turn warm.
Turn around, and Grandma’s Praying Hands is an ode to Carrie Mae Walker, but also to the recently departed in our own lives, and a reminder to learn from them while they are here, and long after they have gone.
Top: In three paintings by the artist Jean Benoit, there is a sense of joyful movement that comes through the work. Bottom: Dana Monique’s The Dreaded Spoons and Breaking Free.
Around them, and in a testament to Holloway’s curatorial eye, all of the works seem to talk to each other. On moveable exhibition walls, arranged like dominoes on one side of the room, Jean Benoit’s evocative Soul Whisperer and Perspective appear to be listening in, vibing with the other matriarchs as they move through space and time as their whole selves.
Nearby, Demeree Douglas’ #PastandPresent collapses space and time, so bright a viewer can’t help but stop to study the canvas. Back beside Walker’s photograph Solace, Ogunlowo’s Iya Aabo (Protective Mother) is an homage to both his mother and Black mothers everywhere, and the way they have carried their babies joyfully into the future.
Nearby, Dana Monique’s The Dreaded Spoons and Breaking Free, both serigraph prints, paint a contrasting image across two works, one of intense, bone-deep exhaustion and a reserve of resilience that no human should ever be expected to have. Monique, a rare disease advocate who has used her work as a powerful platform for advocacy, is referencing Spoon Theory, a phenomenon in psychology that asserts one’s energy—their number of “spoons”—is finite. Once it’s used up, it takes time to regenerate, a fact that is inherently at odds with the late-stage capitalist machine.
In this country, where white supremacy and patriarchy are intimate bedfellows, that’s especially true for a maker like Monique, who lives at multiple marginalized intersections. Her rest may be resistance, but not if people keep taking it away from her sooner than she can grasp it.
Top: Faustin Adeniran's work in the show includes charcoal and pastel on paper. Bottom: A detail of Marquis Brantley's Covered In Dirt, which is accompanied by an original poem.
Upstairs, that sense of momentum deepens, blooming into a narrative that holds the bitter alongside the sweet, and sometimes encompasses both in a single piece. If works on the first floor talk to each other as they acknowledge past and present (and, in paintings on canvas and fabric by Ogunlowo, the future), works on the second share a focus on history and memory, allowing the pain of forced migration, land theft, enslavement, and continuous social and economic disenfranchisement to coexist with a present that is full and evolving.
Among homages those who have left this world far too soon, and at the hands of racist people and policies—viewers must know not to miss a small portrait dedicated to Zolile Hector Pieterson by the door frame, courtesy of artist Shari Caldwell-Young—Linda Mickens’ Veil of Silence, completed during a 2025 residency at MASS MoCA, is enough to stop a person in their tracks, demanding that a viewer return to the work several times over to take in every detail.
Mickens has never been one to mince words, and she does not do so here: this child is every child gone too soon from gun violence and from genocide across the globe, the first of which is a uniquely American (and entirely preventable) epidemic. She does not need to say what often goes unspoken amidst utterances of hopes and prayers: that Black men and boys are much more likely to die from a firearm in this country than their white peers. She’s done the talking, and so much more, through her art.
Around the sculpture, which sits across from a video monitor playing multiple works on loop (a short film from Iman Uqdah Hameen is a particular win for New Haven history), artists knit together history, vision, and the act of imagining forward. On a wall opposite the video screen, Portia Scott-Thiam’s Origins and Community literally pick up a thread a world away, picturing different African house huts through a series of embroidered images. It feels of a piece with several works by New Haven beloved Fethi Meghelli, who has used found and mixed media to create bright, long sculptures that protrude from the wall.
Certainly, that feels true again in Miller’s Lion’s Power Within Us, brightly stitched on fabric, and enclosed in an embroidery hoop from which people can see other creations from New Haven’s Faustin Adeniran on one side, and a grappling with history from professor and scholar Siobhan Carter-David on the other.
Top: Edjohnetta Miller's Lion’s Power Within Us. Bottom: Work from artist Fethi Meghelli, who immigrated to the U.S. after growing up in Algeria. On the right, his piece Womb evokes the origins of humanity itself, with a tight circle of painted shells that protrudes from both the piece and the wall.
In Adeniran’s work, an explosion of charcoal and pastel on paper, there’s something liberated in the way he creates, a kind of ease to his craft that can only come from years of practice. In Carter-David’s, a viewer must reckon with a horrific, inhumane history of captivity during the Transatlantic Slave Trade, as they realize that the glinting figures in her drawing are bodies, crammed shoulder to shoulder in the hull of a ship. Her title, Black Gold, is chilling for a reason: it has been used across history to describe and dehumanize people, and to talk about exports like sugar or petroleum, which have come only at the immense and unthinkable cost of theft, displacement, and forced labor (it’s a contrast to her sculpture Wicks!, also in the show).
Miller’s work lives between these two worlds—that which is free, loose and expressive in its creation, and that which refuses to forget an industry so driven by greed and profit that it absented human beings of their humanity. That Miller is not only an artist but a teacher, including for hundreds of young kids, feels fitting in this way: she’s ensuring that stories are being told.
“For generations, our stories have been told by people in power, and so often, someone like me is silenced,” Miller said on “Arts Respond,” and a viewer can feel it when they spend time with her work, placed across from a “And I have a lot of lived experiences! I wanted to do a piece that honored the lions in my life, those with courage, resilience and truth. They deserve to be seen, and remembered, and shared.”
A Lion Speaks runs at Creative Arts Workshop, 80 Audubon St. in New Haven, through March 12. It includes work by artists Faustin Adeniran, Jean Benoit, Marquis Brantley Sr., Leigh Busby, Shari Caldwell-Young, Siobhan Carter-David, Robert Cooper Jr., Chelsea DeBerry, Ricardo de Paula, Demeree Douglas, Lydia Douglas, Kayla Hall, Iman Uqdah Hameen, David Jackson, Fethi Meghelli, Linda Mickens, Dana Monique, Rory D.L. Moorer, Aisha Nailah, Adeyinka Ogunlowo, Thelma Raney, Brandon Ricketts, Portia Scott-Thiam, Arvia Walker and Reginald Woolery. On Saturday, March 14, CAW will host a free mixed-media workshop in the gallery with Miller.