Inside 211 Park St., nine artists’ worlds were unfolding at once. In a photo triptych on one wall, a family of seven looked out at the camera with huge, easy smiles, hands waving as the youngest crouched and extended their arms to both sides of the room. Nearby, a woman opened her mouth, eyes framed in the square lenses of her glasses and reflected in a mirror, and exhaled. Smoke drifted up through a sea of red oil paint. Towards the corner of the room, a piece of sheer grey fabric asked a viewer to come closer, revealing itself as a photographic exposure in low, dusky tones when they did.
Those images are just a few that artists brought into The Stories We Carry, a group exhibition that ran in the second-floor art gallery of 211 Park St.—that’s known and beloved as the Afro American Cultural Center at Yale, or simply The House—from April 6 to 13. Curated by artist Moshopefoluwa Olagunju, who is currently a fellow with the Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM), the show became a space for self-reflection, expansive celebrations of cultural identity, and meditations on a diaspora.
Artists in the show included Obi Agwam, Tara Fay Coleman, Terrell Halsey, Autumn Nelson, Antonio Scott Nichols, Ana Rucker, Abenda Sohn, Tiara Tiana, and Reggie Woolery. A reception, complete with a tasting menu of chin chin, jerk and roasted chicken, maduros, black eyed pea salad, jollof rice, hibiscus tea and strawberry- and guava-kissed ice cream, unfolded there Friday. Olagunju worked closely with chef Nadine Nelson, who is herself an artist and the founder of Glocal Local Gourmet, to make that menu a reality.
“This is a project I’ve wanted to realize for over a year, and it meant a lot to see it come together in this way,” Olagunju said in an email Thursday afternoon, shouting out members of CCAM including Dr. Lauren Dubowski and Ross Wightman. “Working with the artists, some I’ve collaborated with before and others for the first time, was incredibly rewarding. I’m really grateful to each of them for trusting the vision and being open to building something together. I think all of the artists in this exhibition are exceptional … and I’m excited to see how their practices continue to grow.”
“I’m glad that we were like bringing different voices and artists together to talk about all of these different beautiful things in different ways of being Black and the different ways the diaspora can look,” said Rucker, a multidisciplinary artist who hails from South Carolina, and integrates utilitarian and sometimes discarded objects like synthetic hair into her work.
Tara Fay Coleman, Cultural Relics. Courtesy of Moshopefoluwa Olagunju.
As student guides welcomed people into the gallery, Rucker spoke a bit more about her process. Since 2019 or 2020, she’s worked as a professional artist, with pieces focused on her personal experience with Black hair. Over a year ago, Rucker lost her hair, she explained. At the time, she had locs, and she combed them out and began combining them. She didn't want to discard them. “I was like, ‘No, that’s history. We are going to leave it alone, but we can still honor it by making it into a piece.’”
As she spoke, a speaker pumped tunes into the room. An attendee cheerfully hummed “Abusey Junction” by Kokoroko and “Santo Voy” by Kromo Gucci Rosé as he carefully looked around at each piece of artwork. Gallery manager Kadjata Bah and a team of students bounced around the room, happy to help. Bah’s team included Kehinde Sowemino, Solomon Geleta, and Favour Akingbemi.
Most people came in groups of two as they spoke to one another in quiet, low voices about the artwork in front of them. In one, an oil-on-canvas painting by Autumn Nelson, a girl looked through the mirror to see her reflection as she blew smoke out her mouth. What drew a person to the work, it seemed, wasn’t just the subject, but Nelson’s choice of color, a shade of red so deep that it seemed to glow from the wall. Around the subject’s face, viewers could make out a handheld mirror, and beneath it, rumpled, silky sheets. For a moment, though it looked like being suspended inside a capillary, everything bathed in undulating shades of red.
Nichols, meanwhile, has constructed his work with a deep and sometimes painful knowledge of the struggles of Black people in this country and across the African diaspora. On Friday, much of his work on display drew a viewer in for its layered texture and vibrant indigo color—a medium and shade that has its own historical context. He explained that when he uses it, he is thinking about the history of enslavement in the South, “like indigo fields and thinking about collective consciousness.”
“As I got older, and I'm like 28 now, I started to understand that labor is the only way to create community,” Nichols said.
Elsewhere in the room, attendees drifted towards work by Coleman, a multimedia artist who also co-curated the exhibition Glory at NXTHVN earlier this year. In The Stories We Carry, her work includes pieces from her series Cultural Relics (you wasn’t there), with vintage food stamp coupons affixed to a painted, black acrylic background. Behind the weathered cards, the black paint is luscious, rich, a contrast to the paltry government aid provided for those struggling with hunger and food insecurity.
“I remember my parents were so stressed, and how that stress aged them and impacted their health and they both died much younger than they should have,” Coleman said. “So, I reflect on that, the good things about public assistance and how necessary it is.”
After an hour of close looking, an intimate group of artists and viewers trickled back downstairs, savoring the meal that had materialized in the building’s main room. As they spoke with each other about the art, guests savored maduros, jollof rice, chicken, cornbread, and black eye pea salad. The coconut guava ice cream was a burst of early summer, with refreshing hibiscus tea for anyone who wanted it.
As the event started to wind down, artists and guests hugged and spoke for a few minutes before leaving out into the New Haven streets.
“I am just happy to be a part of this and proud to be Black, proud to be an artist,” Rucker said.
Lucy Gellman contributed reporting.