Stargazer & Nkisi
legacies and roots

Watershed Art & Ecology, January 11 - February 15, 2025

Commissioned as part of the South Side Community Art Center’s exhibition ReSOURCE: Art and Resourcefulness in Black Chicago, this installation continues my ongoing exploration of the Center’s architecture as a living archive of Black artistic expression. Over the years, I’ve been drawn to the small holes scattered across the Center’s wooden gallery walls—marks created over eighty-five years of artists hanging their work. I began to see these openings not as damage, but as traces of creative labor, portals, and constellations—sites that hold the energy of generations who shaped the space.

In Stargazer, I combine a repurposed drywall jack with a replica of the Center’s Bauhaus-era window coverings, inserting illuminated acrylic into each hole to transform them into points of light. These constellations reference artworks in the South Side Community Art Center’s permanent collection, forming speculative maps that connect past, present, and future while reframing preservation as a creative act. Grounded in Black cosmological thought, the work suggests that memory and imagination are intertwined forces—that the acts of care, repair, and reconstruction can open pathways to new worlds.

Nkisi expands this conversation by reimagining another of the Center’s original window coverings as a power object. Drawing on the Nkisi tradition from the Congo Basin, I filled the existing holes with rusted nails, each bearing the patina of age and use. These nails act as vessels of protection and remembrance, infusing the material with the spiritual charge of those who have passed through the Center’s doors. Supported by a steel easel of my own design, the piece bridges my training as a metalworker with my ongoing study of wood and history.

Together, these works position the South Side Community Art Center as both subject and collaborator—a site where preservation becomes performance and objects become vessels of living memory. They suggest that even the smallest marks left behind can be portals to vast cosmologies of Black creativity, resilience, and collective imagination.

Organized and Curated by Lucas Cowan, AR design by Hoverlay