Layers of Joy

Layers of Joy is a celebration of Black art, identity, and community in Minneapolis. The exhibition showcases the work of five early and mid-career artists who examine how layered materiality and artistic practice intersect with the multiplicitous nature of existing as Black. Even as the exhibition highlights the distinctness of their perspectives, it foregrounds how these artists are united through Black joy as a tool for individual expression and community engagement. The exhibition includes work by Leslie Barlow, Alexandra Beaumont, Eyenga Bokamba, Cameron Patricia Downey, and seangarrison. The exhibition is curated by students enrolled in ARTH 3940: Topics in Art History, taught by Dr. Daniel M. Greenberg and Dr. Dwight K. Lewis, Jr.

About the Artists:

Leslie Barlow

Artist Statement
Leslie Barlow is an artist living and working in Minneapolis. Barlow is interested in reimagining our relationship to our racial identities through healing our collective understanding of familial belonging. Barlow believes art and art making is both healing and liberatory through the power of representation, witnessing and storytelling.

Artist Biography
Leslie Barlow received her M.F.A. in 2016 from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. She is director of the Public Functionary Studios Program for emerging artists, where she also teaches and gives public lectures. Barlow is the producer of ConFluenc: A Cultured Multiverse art and science fiction convention, which she founded in 2023.

Alexander Beaumont

Artist Statement
I work with textiles to explore personal and collective preservation, restoration, and expansion. My handmade banners reference the various elements of parades. Often featuring intimate stories, the pieces become acts of reclamation, documentation, and myth creation. My work prods the spaces between our individual and collective parades of self.

Artist Biography
Alexandra Beaumont is a textile artist and dancer. She was born and raised in South Carolina to a Jamaican father and American mother. She studied fashion design at Pratt Institute. Her artistic practice uses fabrics and hand sewing to center themes of personal reconstruction, community, and celebratory display.

Eyenga Bokamba

Artist Statement
My greatest desire is to create work that pivots on an axis of understanding and advances our collective consciousness about what it means to be alive, thriving, and empathetic in today’s world. I see my artistic production as a union between Abstract Expressionism and the critical pedagogy of installation art.

Artist Biography
Eyenga Bokamba is a multimedia artist born in Madison, Wisconsin. A painter, sculptor, and writer, Bokamba completed her B.A. at the University of Minnesota, an M.Ed. at Harvard University, and an artist residency in Lombardi, Italy. Bokamba is a founder at Future Tense Gallery, based in Pennabilli, Italy. 

Cameron Patricia Downey

Artist Statement
The incidental, the precarious, and the misremembered are central to these works which strive to archive, unfurl, make-altar-of and bring fantasy to the Blues of Black life and relation.

Artist Biography
Cameron Patricia Downey is an anti-disciplinary artist born and raised in North Minneapolis, whose work oscillates between photography, film, body, sculpture, curation and otherwise. 

seangarrison

Artist Statement
I am a "non-conformist conforming to non-conformity." I am a self-taught human and soul-taught artist. I am an abstract artist. 

Artist Biography
seangarrison is a native Detroiter currently residing in Minneapolis. He is a writer and Abstract painter in which both disciplines cross-influence the other. He enjoys visual art in its entirety. Abstract art's ability to elicit different responses to “what it is” intrigues him as no answer, in his opinion, is essentially wrong.

Events:

Saturday, November 16, 2024
InFlux Space | Regis Center for Art
6:00 pm Performance by exhibition artist seangarrison
Seating is first-come, first-served. Doors open at 5:00 pm

Friday, November 22, 2024
InFlux Space | Regis Center for Art
6:00 pm Doors open
7:00 – 8:00 pm Exhibition Celebration
8:00 – 8:30 pm Performances
8:30 – 10:00 pm Dance Party

Gallery Hours and Access:

Tuesday – Saturday, 11:00 am – 5:00 pm
Closed November 28, 29, 30 for the Thanksgiving holiday.
Exhibition and events are free and open to the public.
The Regis Center for Art is accessible by U-Card only. Please call 612-624-7530 upon arrival to gain entrance to the galleries through the building’s main entrance located on 21^st Avenue South, directly across from the parking garage.

Related Exhibitions: Art and Artifact: Murals from the Minneapolis Uprising and Viewfinders/ Miradores