MORE FROM THE VENICE BIENNALE
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Nick Cave
In the company of greatness. Nick Cave at the opening of In Minor Keys — the 61st Venice Biennale, conceived by the late Koyo Kouoh. Cave has five works displayed in Arsenale and two of his monumental bronzes are installed outdoors. Here he stands with his works Amalgam Origin and Meditation.
Big Chief Demond Melancon
Big Chief Demond Melancon — the first Black Masking Indian to participate in the Venice Biennale — at the opening of In Minor Keys. A tradition born in New Orleans, carried to the Grand Canal. This is what it looks like when culture refuses to be contained.
WHAT’S LEFT UNSAID? UNBOUND NARRATIVES: EMBODIED LANGUAGE AT ATLANTA CONTEMPORARY
Review by Ming Joi
Speechlessness is a seldom experience for a woman of words like me, but what is there to say when the artworks do all the talking / take the words out of my mouth / speak for the silent moments / phrase it in a way my tongue would never try? In Unbound Narratives: Embodied Language, a group show at Atlanta Contemporary, Bethany Collins, February James, a’driane nieves, and Gabi Madrid challenge the unsaid; instead, the inner thoughts, personal vocabularies, and living libraries of women artists are laid bare, stripped of form, and transformed into raw, fluid material.
Curator Karen Comer Lowe organized this exhibition as a complement to the GA Women’s to Watch Book Art Revolution, both shows on view at Atlanta Contemporary until May 17, 2026. In our age of threats to literacy and arts education, being bookish has become an aesthetic weapon; these shows employ visual artists as creative writers, encouraging close reading. Rightfully so, the literary and visual arts have long been complementary learning tools.
For Bethany Collins, words and language are her material. White Noise and Erasure series are early responsive works completed during Collins’s graduate studies at Georgia State. An Alabama native now based in Chicago, Collins experienced the “often-awkward and sometimes-stilted conversations concerning race and racial identity in graduate critiques, studio visits, conversations among friends, or even inquiries from strangers,” during her time in the South. Her chalkboard drawings obscure the hateful messages into delicate abstractions that, from afar, read as a starry night sky or textural TV static. Collins controlled black and white palette reveals the gray areas between words, their uses, and meanings. The blackboard drawings, such as So What Are You? (White Noise) are joined by works on paper of Collins’ Erasure series. The series title explaining the process, Collins erased entries of Webster’s New World Dictionary, rubbing, chewing, and obscuring the definitions of “mixed” and other terms that denote race. The fragmented meanings left legible, “confused” and muddled” for the word ‘mixed’ are remixed as Collins obscures entries from subsequent editions showing how it’s “interesting when language changes over time, similar to identity, it is not fixed,” explains the artist.
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THE UNSEEN HAND: GRACE WISHER AND THE FLAG’S HIDDEN STORY A HIDDEN FIGURE IN PLAIN SIGHT
Before the Star-Spangled Banner became America’s most recognizable symbol, a ten-year-old free Black girl named Grace Wisher helped stitch it into existence. Apprenticed to Baltimore flag-maker Mary Pickersgill around 1810, Grace spent six weeks sewing the flag that would later inspire Francis Scott Key to write the national anthem. When the story was told, however, Pickersgill, her daughter, and her nieces received the credit. Grace — poor, Black, and a girl — was erased entirely.
Historians Daina Berry and Kali Gross have written that Black girls and women like Grace “literally stitched themselves into our nation’s history,” even as mainstream accounts continuously overlooked their contributions. Grace had three strikes against her in a society that marginalized Black women and girls to what scholar Treva Lindsey calls the “margins of the margins.” Her labor was essential. Her name was not considered worth remembering.
That erasure is precisely what makes Glory! Glory! so urgent and so timely. The exhibition, which concluded its celebrated run at Chicago’s Zhou B Art Center in March 2026, is now traveling across Illinois — carrying its message to new communities and audiences statewide. Featuring works by Paul Branton, Nnaemeka Ekwelum, Candace Hunter, Reggie McFly, Nate Austin, and Robert Lewis Clark, the show reclaims the American flag as a site of Black testimony, protest, and public memory.
Where history failed to record Grace Wisher’s hand in the banner, these six contemporary Black artists refuse the same silence — completing, stitch by stitch, what was left undone.
MONUMENTAL: SCULPTURE BY DR. CHARLES SMITH OPENS AT INTUIT ART MUSEUM
Intuit Art Museum (IAM) opens its latest exhibition, Monumental: Sculpture by Dr. Charles Smith, with a free public celebration on Thursday, May 21, from 5–7 pm at 756 N. Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago’s West Town neighborhood. The exhibition runs through April 22, 2027.
A Vietnam veteran and self-taught sculptor, Dr. Charles Smith (b. 1940) has dedicated his life’s work to memorializing the people, histories, and cultural moments the mainstream art world has long overlooked. His practice — rooted in what curators define as “anti-monumentalism” — inverts and challenges the conventions of traditional monument-making, centering instead the lived experiences of African Americans and Black communities across America.
From memorials to Hurricane Katrina victims and the Underground Railroad, to tributes honoring Chicago’s first Black postmaster, Henry McGee, Smith’s expansive body of work spans more than 600 sculptures. Curated by IAM Assistant Curator Christina Stavros, the exhibition draws from the museum’s permanent collection alongside select loans, including several recently conserved works making their return to public view.
The opening celebration is free and open to all, with curators on hand and light refreshments served. Advance register here.
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