Wednesday Night Live: Art, Sports, & Social Change

Inspired by our newest exhibition, Beyond Boundaries, this Wednesday Night Live program will be a creative evening social complete with drinks and a mixer with icebreaker activities related to themes of the exhibition from 6:30 pm to 7:30 pm. From 7:30 pm to 8:30 pm, join us for a panel discussion titled “Art, Sports, & Social Change”. Moderated by artist Felandus Thames, the panel will feature the following representatives from sports, the arts, and those making change here in Charlotte & beyond:

• Tyrel Kirkham - Chief Marketing Officer, Charlotte Hornets
• Kiah Celeste - Multidimensional Artist whose work is currently featured at the Gantt in Beyond Boundaries
• Dr. Davita Galloway - CEO of DUPP&SWAT and Executive Director of Crownkeepers

Tyrel Kirkham

Tyrel Kirkham is Chief Marketing Officer for Hornets Sports & Entertainment, where he leads the organization's brand strategy, marketing, arena marketing, creative & content, retail and fan engagement functions. He is responsible for advancing a modern, integrated approach that aligns brand, content, retail and live experiences to strengthen the Hornets brand, deepen fan connections and drive business growth across every touchpoint.

Tyrel brings more than two decades of leadership experience across the sports and entertainment industry. Before joining Hornets Sports & Entertainment, he served as Chief Brand & Business Officer for the Big 12 Conference, helping shape the conference's brand and business strategy during a period of significant growth and transformation. Previously, he was Vice President of Brand & Marketing Strategy for the Detroit Pistons, where he led initiatives focused on brand evolution, audience growth and digital strategy, and served as Vice President & General Manager of Merchandise for the Los Angeles Rams during a period of rapid organizational growth.

Earlier in his career, Tyrel held leadership roles with BSE Global and the Brooklyn Nets, specializing in merchandising strategy, and spent several years with the New York Mets in ticketing, merchandising and venue services.

Tyrel and his wife, Adar, live in Charlotte with their two sons, Wellington and Jaxsen, and their French bulldog, Jesse Jac.

Learn more about Tyrel here.

Kiah Celeste

Kiah Celeste is a multi-dimensional artist whose work transcends fitting into one category or medium. After completing a BFA in Photography in 2016, Kiah moved into three dimensional production. In the last decade, she has completed artist residencies and exhibitions within the US and internationally including Paris, Lisbon, Barcelona, Italy, Mexico, New York, Miami and Chicago. In 2021, Celeste received the inaugural 21C Artadia Award in Louisville, KY and in 2025 the inaugural Suzanne Fitzallen Jackson Foundation Residency, accompanied by an unrestricted $25,000 stipend. Her work has been acquired by institutions such as the Speed Art Museum, KMAC Museum and University of Kentucky Art Museum. She has been featured in The New York Times, Hyperallergic, The Wall Street Journal, Burnaway, and ArtForum. Celeste is currently included in ‘Fade’, The Studio Museum In Harlem’s sixth iteration of their groundbreaking “F” show, and Harvey B. Gantt Center in Beyond Boundaries: Black Abstraction in the Elliot and Kimberly Perry Art Collection, a group exhibition at Galerie Claire Gastaud in Paris, and prepares for a solo booth exhibition at the Armory Show in NYC.

Constantly searching and gleaning objects from her urban and industrial environment, Kiah Celeste forages for materials that speak to her. Her freestanding works typically consist of a few components, to which she often incorporates a motif to establish a visual cadence of repetition, balance, motion and variation. Using almost exclusively discarded or secondhand items and minimal hardware, she creates something new and fortuitous from decay. By asserting the cruciality of sustainability in the world, Kiah’s work negates the gratuitous nature of buying new, synthetic materials only to enter into inevitable disorder over time. Although these works are made with primarily synthetic, industrial and household materials, the forms they take on allude to the organic, the surreal and non-function. By adhering to rigorous principles of sustainability and low intervention, she often challenges physics, with compositions which carefully balance through tension, weight, flexibility and gravity. Recent stretched spandex framed works explore the meeting of sculpture and two-dimensionality while retaining foundations in found materiality, tension and physics. These texturally rich compositions highlight the inherent beauty of the objects, while retiring their original practical functions.

With a multifarious identity as a Black and Jewish woman, both feminine and androgynous, and introverted and social, among other seemingly contrasting combinations and in-betweens, the sense of her un-belonging finds respite in the embrace of seemingly disparate materials to create a cohesive whole, finding freedom in self, the world, and creative practice.

Learn more about Kiah here.

Dr. Davita Galloway

Dr. Davita Galloway is a Black Girl, an Aquarius and Creative Entrepreneur. She attended The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Parsons The New School for Design in New York, as well as Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. Davita is the CEO of DUPP&SWAT, an entity with several arms that include: an events venue, retail boutique, as well as a barber/beauty parlor. She is also the Executive Director of CrownKeepers (an arts-based nonprofit) that has contributed millions to Charlotte’s creative ecosystem.

Adamant about the need for genuine expression, Galloway's work and presence is super authentic and has afforded many other opportunities. With that, Davita is a change agent, a creative, host, speaker, costumer, a doer, disruptor and a creator of all things dope. She is a former talk show host (Nita&Vita—which may be back very soon) and Editor in Chief of SPREAD magazine.

More, as a proponent and champion of building community, social equity, entrepreneurship and economic opportunity, Davita enjoys collaboration with impact on those outputs. Fun and hella dope facts, a portrait of Galloway is a part of the permanent collection at the Harvey B Gantt Center for African American Arts + Culture, she is listed as ‘One of 100 Women to KNOW in America’ and, this year, Galloway is the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate.

Learn more about Davita here.

Felandus Thames

Felandus Thames, born in 1974 in Jackson, Mississippi, currently resides and creates in Connecticut. After graduating from Jackson State University with a Bachelor of Arts, where he was honored with the Mississippi Arts Commission's prestigious "Individual Artist Fellowship" in the visual arts category, Thames pursued his artistic journey by earning a Master of Fine Arts in Painting and Printmaking from the esteemed Yale School of Art in 2010. In 2011, he made his mark in the New York art scene by mounting his inaugural solo exhibition at the renowned Tilton Gallery. Thames has also enriched the art world by serving as a Visiting Critic at the Rhode Island School of Design. His artwork has found its way into esteemed collections, including the Mississippi Museum of Art, Mystic Seaport Museum, the San Antonio Spurs, Florence Griswold Museum, and The Studio Museum of Harlem.

Recent group exhibitions featuring his work include "Get in the Game" at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, "Spectrum" at the Museum of the African Diaspora San Francisco, "Unmasking Masculinity for the 21st Century" at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, and “Resistance in Black and White” at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Additionally, his work was curated in the critically acclaimed traveling exhibition “The Dirty South” at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and Denver Museum of Contemporary Art. His work has garnered significant critical attention, with favorable mentions in prestigious publications such as Art In America, Artforum, New York Times, and Hyperallergic. Recently, Thames has received recognition with awards from the Harpo Foundation and the biannually awarded Louis Comfort Tiffany Prize for 2024 - 25.

Learn more about Felandus here.