Top: Sydney (Syd) Bell's Eye and Neck. Bottom: Bell looks at works by the artist Clymenza Hawkins. Lucy Gellman Photos.
The faces look out onto the hallway, inquisitive, open. On one wall, they are larger than life, soft-eyed and searching for something in the distance. Their scalps, smooth and bare, mingle with splatters of paint. Down the hall, a model leans her head back and beams, her face radiant as the frame freezes. Nearby, two mermaids swim through eelgrass and wild celery, their bodies shimmering in the light.
These women are all part of Beholder, an intimate and thoughtful exhibition running at the Orchid Gallery at the LAB at ConnCORP through October 3 of this year. Curated by Building Fund principal nico w. okoro, the show explores the depth and breadth of Black womanhood, asking a viewer to question, expand, and redefine the mainstream narratives that often surround Blackness and beauty itself.
It includes work by artists Syd Bell, Demeree Douglas, Clymenza Hawkins, Ebony B. Mckelvey, and Alexzandria Robin, criss-crossing multiple mediums and generations in the process. The Orchid Gallery is located on the first floor of the LAB at ConnCORP, 496 Newhall St. in Hamden. Hours and more information are available here.
“Working across collage, drawing, painting, photography, photomontage, and sculpture, these five artists dare to envision a myriad of Black women archetypes, not only as protagonists of their own stories but also as leaders of the Black is Beautiful movement,” okoro writes in an introductory text for the exhibition.
Top: A photograph of Darnita Bailey from Mckelvey's oeuvre. Bottom: Curator nico w. okoro.
As okoro organized Beholder earlier this year, she was delighted by some of the parallels that rose organically among the works. Mckelvey and Davis, for instance, both focus on Black hair, from Mckelvey’s Black Girl photo series to the hairstories that launched Douglas’ career close to a decade ago.
Hawkins and Robin, working in two totally different mediums, are equally fascinated by metamorphosis. Bell, who is more known for her work as a fashion designer but studied visual arts at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School, channels something in her large-scale canvases that resonates with Robin’s dolls as they stare out onto the space.
“In its titling, the exhibition insists upon active viewership, where visitors are asked to lend their unique perspectives to beholding the artworks on view,” okoro writes. “Here, beauty lies not only ‘in the eye of the beholder’—it too resides within each artist’s distinct depiction of and reverence for the art that is Black womanhood.”
That’s evident from the moment a viewer steps foot in the LAB’s long hallway, which leads to a multi-purpose auditorium that was once a school gymnasium, and now hosts panels, back-to-school drives, fairs and performances that fill the space with joyful noise. On one side of the hallway, Mckelvey’s work becomes a sort of welcome to the space, with crisp, vibrant photographs from her Hey Ugly and Black Girl series.
Top: Photographs, both Untitled, from Mckelvey's Hey Ugly and Black Girl series. Bottom: Demeree Douglas' #Retro and #CategoryHair.
In one frame, a model tilts her head back, her shoulders and back exposed as she closes her eyes, and thick braids cascade down, open at the ends. Beneath and around her crown, her skin glows in golds and browns, revealing Mckelvey’s keen eye for light. In the frame beside her, another model throws back a gold-studded head of braids, very much feeling herself as she lifts a hand to her neck.
A bright, floral backdrop bursts into bloom behind her. The image is saturated in color, so much so that a viewer feels like they can sense the model’s breath, the gentle rise and fall of her chest, despite the freeze frame. If the two women could speak, it seems likely that they would call out to the works down the hall, where Black women in oil and acrylic put their heads gently together, rock vibrant and textured hairstyles, and celebrate their bodies exactly as they are.
“My work basically speaks for the unheard Black woman that feels bold, feels resilient, and really tries to show who she is,” Mckelvey said, standing before two of her four photographs that are in the show. “As a Black woman, as an artist, I feel like the work speaks for itself. It’s me embracing women and relating it to my own life.”
“I capture history in a way that I see it,” she later added. That’s especially important for her as Black woman, an artist, and a mom. “And in a way that I will for years to come.”
Beholder’s artists are at turns storytellers, myth-makers, and documentarians, ready to push back against the dominant narratives that have long defined who both beauty and artmaking belong to. These women are not obsessively skinny, they are not overly feminine or fawning, and they are not white. They are also, blessedly, not at all monolithic: from five artists, viewers get at least a dozen different takes on what it means to inhabit a female body and to be a Black woman.
Top: Run Faster by artist Alexzandria Robin. Bottom: Douglas' #Solidarity.
Take, for instance, Bell’s twin canvases Eye and Neck, both from 2022. As her subjects look out onto the hallway, their eyes gentle, they take on a kind of personable, easy human-ness, as if they might start talking to the right viewer. But these eyes also follow viewers, as if they are just a little wary, a little curious, a little on guard at all times.
On the left, the figure in Eye seems sharply focused, her right eye on the viewer as a circle of light envelops the left. On the right, Neck’s subject looks like she might fall back into space, into a vast, swirling sea of bronze color. Her eyes still look out, lids heavy. The longer a person looks, the more details emerge, including the way Bell has mixed acrylic, pencil, and oil pastel into a layered, almost luminescent sea of color.
While she is primarily known for her work in fashion design, Bell said she turns to painting “to clear my mind,” with a love for visual art that’s been with her since her time at Co-Op. In these works, “they’re [subjects are] hairless and there’s no color, but you can still recognize that that is a Black woman,” she said. That act of recognition, like the subject itself, was important to her.
It is also a deeply contemplative show. In Robin’s Loose Woman and Run Faster, dolls that are both placed atop podiums, the artist zeroes in on the body’s physical form, chopping it up, putting it back together and adding small accoutrements that make her dolls more human. Run Faster, for instance, includes soft, black hair and a sunshine-colored woven necklace, an African mask placed gingerly at the doll’s bent knee. “It speaks to movement, identity, and the pressure to perform,” the artist writes of the piece.
“A woman’s body is not neutral,” Robin said in an exhibition talk last month.
In Loose Woman, completed last year, a sculpturesque woman sits up straight on a podium, the head unattached and placed out in front of her like an offering. It’s reminiscent, maybe, of the Greek and Roman sculptures that populate museums across the country, all almost certainly pillaged, all reaching toward some ideal of perfection that doesn’t exist.
But this Loose Woman—a cheeky title, perhaps, because she is only partially strung—looks as though she is made of onyx, her skin smooth and dark. “It takes on the violent fragmentation of beauty standards and the roles women are expected to play,” Robin said on her website.
“A woman’s body is not neutral,” Robin said in an exhibition talk at the gallery last month. She’s so right: it’s hard to look at these dolls and not think of the references that thickly surround them, from Barbie to the Venus de Milo to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. “There are a lot of thoughts put onto that body about what it is supposed to do and how it is supposed to behave.”
Back close to the show’s entrance, Hawkins’ collages become a different sort of invitation, bathed in gem-toned greens and blues. There is Listen, a mixed-media collage she completed in 2024, placed alongside her underwater The Siren Flow, and a woman out in a backyard somewhere, hanging clothes on a clothesline (The Clothesline, which she created last year).
In Listen, perhaps the most meditative of the bunch, a woman sits in a canoe, her head turned out toward the viewer as one hand comes to her face. Lush, green foliage is all around her, a marbled canopy of leaves that is so thick it is more of a curtain. Beneath her, the sapphire water barely moves. Water lilies extend out on either side; trees burst into bloom adobe her. It’s folksy but also fantastical, as if she has whisked her viewers away to another world.
“I got into collage because I don’t know how to draw,” she said in a confessional tone last month, speaking at an opening reception for the show. But nothing in these works is defined by lack: her ability to imagine these lush dreamscapes and bright folk scenes reminds her viewers that another world, or many other worlds, is possible. She has a knack for yoking the mundane and the extraordinary, and viewers leave better for it.
Top: Douglas' #CategoryHair. Bottom: Darnita Bailey and her daughter, Garvi.
So too in Douglas’ Solidarity, #CategoryHair and #Retro, all completed in the last few years. Using a mix of acrylics, found and collected objects, and explosively bright colors, Douglas celebrates Black hairstyles and Black women, from the big, gold hoop earrings and batik print on #Retro to tight braids and bright, raised and confetti-colored beads that are carefully folded into #CategoryHair.
Those conversations, which feel entirely organic, make Beholder the kind of exhibition a viewer can and should come back to many times over. The installation is economical but never sparse, with plenty of room for the works to breathe. The result is a space that allows for, and even demands, deep reflection. A nod to okoro and the ConnCORP team, who also seem to understand that the long run time is a kind of community kindness.
That was true for viewers like Darnita Bailey, who lingered by the photographs at an opening reception last month, and may well return for another look before the show ends in October. The owner of Hairapeutic Salon at 850 State St., Bailey never intended to be the subject of one of Mckelvey’s creations, she said. But when she showed up to style a shoot for Black Girl, Mckelvey saw something that she knew she wanted to capture. The two have known each other since they were girls, and Mckelvey convinced her to pose for the camera.
“It unlocked a boldness in me,” Bailey said, one hand on her 7-year-old daughter, Garvi. “I’m kind of still breaking out of my shyness.”