Past Artists
October 18-December 28
Chantal Gibson is an artist-educator interested in the cultural production of knowledge. Her work explores the overlap between literary and visual art, challenging colonialism and the imperialist notions quietly embedded in everyday things— from academic school books to kitschy souvenir spoons...(read more)
Moses Sun's work expresses blackness across multiple media platforms. He makes drawings on paper and iPad, digital and analogue photographs, sculptures and installations, then samples them --in the hip hop ethos of "grinding" — to output as relief sculptures, digital prints, video animations, games and social media apps...(read more)
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Brenetta Ward is a Seattle-based fiber artist and third generation quilter with formal training in Fiber Arts. Her work has been published, exhibited nationally and included in public and private collections. Brenetta uses traditional quilting techniques, ethnic textiles and African design aesthetics to create Quilted Legacies...(read more)
Storme Webber is a Two Spirit, Alutiiq/Black/Choctaw, internationally-nurtured poet, playwright, educator, and interdisciplinary artist. She creates blues-influenced, socially-engaged texts and images exploring identity, art activism, and the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, memory and spirit...(read more)
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The Deeps & Unknown Senders, C. Davida Ingram
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Join artist C. Davida Ingram on a multi-sensory journey about healing at Wa Na Wari. This exhibit is both a return to the performance installation entitled “The Deeps” with composer Hanna Benn, and an exploration of how survivors heal in “Unknown Senders"...(read more)
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Points of View, by Henry Jackson Spieker, evokes an authentic sense of nostalgia through a playful, thoughtful lens to consider place in his installation at Wa Na Wari. The strategic suspension and placement of materials throughout the Greene family home provides an opportunity for a storied reflection of the space itself. As a viewer, you experience a distorted view of common areas of congregation. Space becomes skewed as does the reflection of the viewer within it...(read more)
We are called to join a circle of Black women as they remember and reflect upon their lives and, in adorning the masks of their ancestral mothers, the stories of Black women preceding them. They move through and archive their own temporal/spatial travels by foot along the James River, from the trail of Enslaved Africans to Leigh Street in the Jackson Ward Neighborhood of Richmond, VA. In this way Nastassja is using her gifts to portray a “larger than life” way of seeing Black women’s path within the African Diaspora, lifting up their collective story of movement from continent to continent...(read more)
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This art – wallpaper by Xenobia Bailey – begins to answer the question: what does it feel like to be surrounded by blackness? That blackness includes these stylized images of black people, as well as other representations, such of ram sculptures, that also re-occur across the wallpaper. Bailey, a Seattle-based artist trained in ethnomusicology and known for a “cosmic-funk” aesthetic, has long made work committed to the haptic, or to touch. ...(read more)
Pieces that have been discarded, torn away, re-defined, re-distributed, or just plain used to death are brought lovingly together to create something new and unlike anything else in existence. Structurally, no two are alike. But all are demonstrative of the universal truth that nothing real can be threatened, and matter can only be transformed ;it can never truly be destroyed. This means that while there may be varying parts, it all comes together to form a complete whole. ..(read more)
There are times when location intensifies an artwork’s meaning. “Some What?” takes an appropriated image from a publication and re-sites it in various places; a storefront gallery, a billboard, and now the lawn of Wa Na Wari...(read more)
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Melanie Stevens
If You’re Watching This, It’s Too Late Now in its seventh iteration, If You’re Watching This, It’s Too Late combines copper etchings of appropriated news media images printed onto transparent chiffon fabric and bitmapped stills ripped from popular mass media which are then screen printed onto patterned and shimmering, heavy opaque fabrics...(read more) 
Jeremy Okai Davis
Selected Works In the work of Jeremy Okai Davis, color use and fidelity to his subjects make them feel alive, but without being too literal...(read more) |
Rachael Ferguson
Sound Piece Recordings of intimate moments of love songs, and original music mixed with anonymous testimonials regarding Black love. Different listening stations will be set up in the four corners of the room...(read more) 
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Alisa Sikelianos-Carter
Selected Works Wa Na Wari is partnering with Virago Gallery to exhibit the work of Alisa Sikelianos-Carter. Sikelianos-Carter's luminous work envisions a speculative Afro-Futuristic dimension where Blackness represents both a breaking open of nothingness and a densely lustrous opportunity for the genesis of a new world...(read more) 
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Howard Mitchell
World Premiere of “Forgive Us, Our Debts” “Forgive Us, Our Debt,” allows us to see through the eyes of a 13-year-old, African American young man, who is unaware that he has a form of synesthesia...(read more) 
Ariella Tai
Video works “i just,” “Adore,” and “hold me.” Ariella Tai is a video artist, film scholar, and independent programmer from Queens, New York. They are interested in the materiality of black bodies and black performance as vernaculars which subvert, interrupt or defy the diegetic cohesiveness of narrative...(read more) 
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Chi Moscou Jackson
New Collage Works Moscou Jackson is a master collage artist. With obvious influences from Romare Bearden and Joseph Cornell, Moscou Jackson’s vernacular is weighted in the repurposing of National Geographic magazines to create surreal cityscapes that ask us to imagine a new world...(read more)
Unapologetic Artists and Creatives (UAC)
Photographic Portrait Series: “The Porch” The Porch” was where we heard the latest gossip, talked politics, cracked jokes, and listened to good music. The CD has been reshaped by gentrification and although sharing intimate experiences on a porch is becoming a past time memory, but its meaning and purpose remains..(read more) 
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