Justin Randolph Thompson presents Surveying Gravity: A Mirror for Growing Contradictions, a research-driven, performance-based project exploring the remarkable life of the artist’s grandfather, former UMass chancellor Randolph W. Bromery. Bromery was a Tuskegee Airman, geophysicist, and jazz musician whose life bridged art, science, and service. In 2020, UMass renamed the building originally called the Fine Arts Center in Bromery’s honor.
In The Souls of Black Folk, Beach transforms the brutalities embedded in Black life into beauty, illuminating stories of resilience through intricate quilted portraits. His artworks are accompanied by cleansing rituals and performances native to African American spiritual practices. Beach does not avert his gaze from generational trauma; he meets it with tenderness and resolve, opening pathways toward healing and justice.
UMass graduate student Farihah Aliyah Shah embarks on an exploration of cultural, land, and personal memory. Shah was born in Canada and is of Guyanese heritage. She uses photography, video, and sound installation to trace her connections to Canada and Guyana while engaging in postcolonial inquiry.
Painter Luz Harmon reflects on identity and belonging through an engagement with anatomy and reconstructed memory. Inspired by Dante Alighieri’s epic poem The Divine Comedy, the exhibition focuses on the sins of the flesh by reducing figures to sinew, muscle, and bone, emphasizing internal visceral anatomy.
Jeffrey Meris presents drawings from two series — I, Used to Be and Now You See Me, Now You Don’t — that underscore systemic disparities and mischaracterization of Black men in the carceral system.