Repossessions

Curated by Bridget R. Cooks, Ph.D.

Repossessions is a group exhibition inspired by the concept of reparations: the effort to repair the economic and psychological devastation caused by slavery for descendants of enslaved African Americans. The exhibition presents the work of seven Black artists commissioned by The Reparations Project, with the Gantt Center’s presentation expanded to include South Carolina artist Arun Drummond, who created artworks based on documents from the eras of enslavement and sharecropping in the United States. Chelle Barbour, Marcus Brown, Rodney Ewing, Shanequa Gay, Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle (Olomidara Yaya), Curtis Patterson, and Lava Thomas each offer insightful perspectives on the significance of the original documents, which date from the 1860s to the early 1900s. Using a variety of visual strategies, the newly produced artworks contribute to viewers’ understanding of the long aftermath of enslavement and the need for reparations.

In addition to commissioning the exhibition artworks, The Reparations Project collaborated with Reparations for Slavery (R4S) to provide artists with historical objects. While many contemporary reparations efforts are spearheaded by Black politicians and community leaders, The Reparations Project and R4S support descendant families of enslavers in pursuing ancestral healing by repairing generational harm. The two organizations offer a unique perspective on how white Americans can work alongside governments to pursue individual strategies that narrow the wealth gap and repair racialized, caste-based injustice against Black people and their communities.

The exhibition’s title acknowledges the legally sanctioned possession of one human being by another as the foundation of wealth and power in this country. It also names the process of giving Black artists possession of historical objects and their facsimiles, allowing the artists to "repossess" them from the archives of enslavement and to alter their existence. Finally, Repossessions is an indictment of the history of human ownership and its violent, multigenerational, and international legacy, which demands to be confronted and reckoned with to this day.

Click/tap here to download the free companion gallery guide for this exhibition.

The Reparations Project is a multifaceted redress initiative created by the Quarterman & Keller Foundation that seeks to narrow the wealth gap and promote racial repair by centering descendants of those who were enslaved and supporting descendant families of enslavers in pursuing ancestral healing by repairing generational harm.

Randy Quarterman and Sarah (Keller) Eisner created The Reparations Project because, although we believe our federal government must do the work of truth-telling and of paying reparations in a multitude of ways, we also believe that we cannot wait for the government alone and that interpersonal repair must happen alongside federal reparations. Through support for Black education, Black land preservation, and Black art, The Reparations Project seeks to create new models for individuals, descendant-families, and the nation to repair racialized, caste-based injustice against Black communities that began in 1619 and continues today.

Reparations for Slavery (R4S) is a portal for white families seeking to walk the path of racial healing through direct repair. R4S was founded by Lotte Lieb Dula after she discovered plantation business documents that proved her ancestors were enslavers. The organization’s website offers popular education resources that outline the historical basis for the racial wealth gap and demonstrate current disparities across 14 areas of everyday life. R4S provides a unique lens for understanding American history, the nature and source of institutional racism, and how white Americans can begin to repair the damage.

Chelle Barbour began her early foray into the arts as an actress in community college theatre. Working with the director, Dr. MaryEllen Kazmark, Barbour landed lead roles in Summer and Smoke, Show Boat, The Sound of Music, and For Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf. Barbour moved to Los Angeles, where she continued her studies in theatre, fine art, and design, and completed her education at UCLA and USC. Today, Barbour has refined her multidisciplinary art practice to include assemblage, collage, digital video, painting, photography, independent curating, and writing. Barbour’s collage work re-imagines the body of the Black female through the lens of Afro-Surrealism. Whether the images reflect chameleons, agent provocateurs, goddesses, muses, warriors or spies, Barbour’s collage portraiture conveys notions of allegory, desire, fantasy, femininity, fragility, tension, and the inherent complexity of the black female imaginary.

Marcus Brown, a native of New Orleans, is a sculptor, painter, inventor, musician, and educator. Brown holds a MEd from Portland State University and a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute (KCAI) in Missouri. His work has been included in exhibits and performances throughout the United States, Germany, and Poland. Brown currently has public sculptures in Biloxi and New Orleans, including the site-specific Augmented Reality (AR) Slavery Trails (2022) installation, which virtually marks areas where enslaved people worked, were held, and were sold. Brown developed an interactive sound exhibit for the 2022 New Orleans French Quarter Festival. Mentors like the late Lin Emery, John T. Scott, and Jim Leedy collectively instilled in Brown the importance of always learning and experimenting to create your own path. In that vein, Brown developed a form of painting called Electro-sonic Painting in which he paints with sound/data-producing instruments.

Rodney Ewing is a visual artist whose drawings, installations, and mixed-media works focus on his need to re-examine human histories, cultural conditions, and trauma. Ewing’s interdisciplinary practice involves extensive research into overlooked historical objects, individuals, spaces, and events of the Black Diaspora. His layering of images and words creates a platform that demands viewers’ presence and profound observation. Ewing received his BFA from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge and his MFA from West Virginia University. He is a grantee of the San Francisco Art Commission Individual Artist Grant (2016-2020), and his work is in the collection of Tufts University Art Gallery. His art has been included in numerous group and solo exhibitions, including The Drawing Center, New York; the Veterans Museum, Chicago; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions; the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco; the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. He is represented by Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco.

Shanequa Gay is a storyteller, born and raised in Georgia, whose work draws on the environment and spiritual symbolism of the American South. Blending motifs from regional life, she explores identity, culture, and power through storytelling, highlighting formidable female figures and intergenerational relationships. Her practice – encompassing installations, paintings, performance, photography, video, and monumental sculptures – challenges dominant narratives, reclaims space through personal memory and mythology, and creates immersive environments that invite reflection on self and belonging.

Gay's recent exhibitions include Four Women, Museum of Fine Arts Boston (2024); Atlanta Biennial, Atlanta Contemporary (2021); Le Monde Bossale, Montreal (2021); Adorned, McColl Center for Arts and Innovation, Charlotte (2020); and Holding Space for Nobility, Ackland Museum, Chapel Hill, NC (2020). She exhibits her work and secures residencies in the United States, Europe, Japan, and South Africa. She is a Do-Good Fellow recipient, an Emory University Arts and Social Justice Fellow (2020), and a Hudgens Prize Finalist (2022). Currently, Gay is a visiting professor at Spelman College. She was the Visual Artist-in-Residence at Oglethorpe University (2022-23), received the Radcliffe Bailey Award for Excellence in Visual Art (2023), and was named one of five Georgia Women to Watch by the Georgia Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts (2023).

Photo by Chuck Marcus

Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle (Olomidara Yaya) is a multidisciplinary visual artist, writer, performer, and healer. Her practice fluctuates between collaborations and participatory projects with alternative gallery spaces across various communities and intimate projects informed by private experiences of historical events and contexts. Her practice serves as a bridge – merging art, activism, spirituality, and healing as tools for retrieval through Reiki, sound healing, divination, channeling, and mediumship. A term that has become a mantra for her practice is the "historical present," as she examines the residue of history and how it affects our contemporary world perspective.

Hinkle is the recipient of several awards, including the Center for Cultural Innovation’s Investing in Artists Grant, Fulbright Fellowship, Hellman Fellowship from UC Berkeley, Jacob K. Javits Fellowship Program, Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artists Award, SFMOMA 2019 SECA Award, and Social Practice in Art (SPart-LA). Her work is held in the collections of Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, San Jose Museum of Art, SFMOMA, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and University of New Hampshire Museum of Art. Hinkle’s writing has appeared in Obsidian Journal, Artforum, and Among Margins: Critical & Lyrical Writing on Aesthetics. She is also the author of Kentifrications: Convergent Truths & Realities (2018), published by Sming Sming Books and Occidental College, and SIR (2019), published by Litmus Press.

Curtis Patterson is intrigued by the manipulation of three-dimensional space and objects. Many of his massive works share this intrigue with viewers through unique designs that invite participation and spark curiosity. Patterson enjoys producing large-scale works that are accessible to audiences. He frequently embeds subtle surprises in his work as rewards for those motivated to explore and discover. A connection to his ancestral lineage is apparent in several of Patterson’s creations, from small - to large-scale works, whose symbolism serves as an indelible reference to the historical contributions of people of African descent. Patterson pays homage with his sculpture not only to civil rights leaders, musicians, and athletes, but also to lesser-known individuals who have made an equal degree of sacrifice through their social service, domestic work, and manual labor. His sculptures have been exhibited nationally and internationally, including in France, Nigeria, and Sweden.

Lava Thomas was born in Los Angeles. She studied at UCLA’s School of Art Practice and received a BFA from California College of the Arts. She is a recipient of the 2020 San Francisco Artadia Award and the 2019-2021 Lucas Artists Fellowship Award at Montalvo Arts Center. Thomas has participated in artist residencies at Facebook Los Angeles (2020), Headlands Center for the Arts (2018), and the Djerassi Resident Artist Program. In 2015, she received the Joan Mitchell Grant for Painters and Sculptors.

In 2024, Thomas created the first public monument to Maya Angelou for the City of San Francisco. Her work is included in the National Portrait Gallery’s triennial exhibition, The Outwin 2019: American Portraiture Today. It has been exhibited at various institutions, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; the International Print Center, New York; the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco; the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; and the California African American Museum, Los Angeles. It is held in the permanent collections of the United States Consulate General in Johannesburg, South Africa; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia; the M.H. de Young Museum, San Francisco; and the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive. Thomas's work has been written about in Artforum, Hyperallergic, SF Chronicle, The Guardian, KQED Arts, The Art Newspaper, and LA Weekly.

Photo by Brandon Ruffin

Arun Drummond is a contemporary visual artist based in Charleston, SC. His work explores the enduring legacy of the African diaspora, cultural memory, and living history through painting, textiles, installation, and mixed media. Drawing on archival photographs, indigo, reclaimed materials, and found objects, Drummond creates layered works that examine the intersections of land, labor, identity, and ancestral remembrance. His practice reimagines familiar histories, transforming materials into contemporary monuments that honor lives, traditions, and narratives too often left unnamed or overlooked. Drummond is the founder of Drummond Studio Gallery, where he curates exhibitions and cultural programming that support artists and deepen public engagement with contemporary art. He serves on the boards of the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art and Redux Contemporary Art Center. His work has been featured in the museum stores of the Gibbes Museum of Art and the International African American Museum in Charleston.

Bridget R. Cooks, Ph.D., is a scholar and curator focused on African American art. She serves as Chancellor’s Fellow and Professor of African American Studies and Art History at the University of California, Irvine. She has curated several exhibitions, including The Art of Richard Mayhew (2009-10); Grafton Tyler Brown: Exploring California (2018) (Pasadena Museum of California Art); Ernie Barnes: A Retrospective (2019) (California African American Museum); The Black Index (2021-2) (national tour); and Lava Thomas: Homecoming (2022) (Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts and Spelman College Museum of Fine Art).

Her work has received awards from the Ford Foundation, Southern Poverty Law Center, Getty Research Institute, California Humanities, the James A. Porter & David C. Driskell Book Award in African American Art History, and the Henry Luce Foundation. She is the author of Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum (2011). Her articles and essays appear in a wide range of interdisciplinary academic publications and art exhibition catalogs.

Photo by Steven Zylius