Real time legacy building

The first part of this newsletter is a BULLETIN BOARD with upcoming and current shows, projects, book releases and events, that I hope you will come to and share with your communities.

And the second part is ROOTS, WEBS, NETS, and BRANCHES. A written offering, sharing of work, expansion & footnotes of what’s going on in my studio, practice and brain. This part is paid and I invite you to support my work for $5 a month, $50 a year or become a founding member for $150 a year.

ROOTS WEBS NETS BRANCHES BULLETIN BOARDS is my practice, is labor, is my work.

1. BULLETIN BOARD

“We looping from us, to you, from you, to we ….” around the wall of the show is a collaborative mural that Finnegan Shannon and I made. Shared language about access needs and solidarity structures. Hugging the center sculpture with language that loops, arm & arm, stretching to keep us all close. Don’t Mind If I Do, is until for a few more weeks- do not miss it!!

Don’t Mind If I Do

Gallery 400, Chicago, IL

September 23- December 13, 2025

Checklist

Don’t mind if I do is a collaborative experiment demonstrating how temporary changes in power structures create pathways of access for visitors, artists, and staff. Anchored by a conveyor belt that brings artworks to visitors who are invited to sit around comfortable furniture and engage with the objects, the exhibition features artworks by several artists who have influenced Shannon’s practice. The paraded objects, including plastic pill bottles, tissue box covers, and gender-affirming packers, signify illness, systems of support, and play within everyday life.

Embraced for its efficiency and mechanized transport of goods, the conveyor belt is reappropriated as a vehicle for cultivating a more relaxed museum-going experience. It welcomes informality, messiness, and unsettling the hierarchy of objects. Accompanying the exhibition are three solo exhibitions by artists agustine zegers, Sandie Yi, and Finnegan Shannon.

Artists Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Pelenakeke Brown, Sky Cubacub, Emilie L. Gossiaux, Felicia Griffin, Joselia Rebekah Hughes, Jeff Kasper, Finnegan Shannon, Sandie Yi, agustine zegers, curated by Finnegan Shannon and Lauren Leving

Below are two of the fours pieces of mine that are included in this show,

Back in August 2024, I wrote about what it meant to show with and make work for a chosen ancestor, Amaza Lee Meredith, read more about it here in, Together: Building Home with a Black-queer ancestor I never got to meet. The photo below is Amaza with her long time partner, Edna. Gathered around the table, in study and pleasure and awe.

Dear Mazie

September 8, 2025- March 1, 2026*

California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA

*Please keep an eye out for upcoming information about exhibition events and a catalog release (in the new year)!

Dear Mazie, is an exhibition inspired by the life and work of Amaza Lee Meredith (1895–1984), the first known Black queer woman to practice as an architect in the United States. For the exhibition, the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University (ICA at VCU) commissioned eleven contemporary artists, architects, and designers to create responses to Meredith’s multifaceted legacy, plotting her life and work within themes of placemaking, gender, sexuality, and Black love, while also exploring her impact in public education, the arts, and architecture.

Denied formal architecture training due to her race and gender, Meredith nevertheless went on to design landmark structures in her home state of Virginia, New York, and Texas, and to found the fine arts department at the historically Black college Virginia State University. Her contributions paved the way for Black Americans to see themselves in environments where they were so often prohibited.

Inspired by Meredith’s archives, in particular her prodigious and passionate letter-writing, each artist was invited to consider the epistolary form as a conceptual framework for their commissions, which span various media including sculpture, video, painting, installation, and performance. Dear Mazie, thus functions like an exhibition-as-letter, addressed back to the subject at its heart.

Dear Mazie, includes contributions by AD—WO (Emanuel Admassu and Jen Wood), The Black School (Shani Peters and Joseph Cuillier), Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Kapwani Kiwanga, Abigail Lucien, Practise (James Goggin and Shan James), Tschabalala Self, and Cauleen Smith. Dear Mazie, is organized by the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, and curated by Amber Esseiva, Acting Senior Curator, ICA at VCU.

Recently released: A Queer Year of Love Letters

Edited by Nat Pyper

Design by IN-FO.CO, Co-published by Inventory Press & Library Stack

A Queer Year of Love Letters: Alphabets Against Erasure connects font design to queer culture at a time of increasing erasure and suppression of trans and queer histories. Expanding upon a series of openly downloadable fonts whose letterforms derived from the life stories, printed ephemera, and vernacular scripts of countercultural queers from recent decades, this new book showcases their biographies and previously unseen archival materials, as well as digital craft methodology for font design.

Paul Soulellis writes in his essay “What Is Queer Typography?”: “there is no queer typography, only queer acts of reading and writing,” and this book proposes a kind of compendium for that concept. In addition to a new essay from Soulellis, the book features contributions from Silas Munro, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Claire Star Finch, and others. Their essays offer emerging perspectives on queer archival practices, DIY lineages, design and politics, and love as the basis for research. This project challenges the field of graphic design, a field of signs, representations, and meaning making, to extend toward undervalued perspectives and overlooked pockets of visual and semiotic history.

1. ROOTS WEBS NETS BRANCHES

Drawn in my cream colored sketchbook, it reads “Loving fiercely is real time legacy building”