Constellations of Belonging unfolds within a moment shaped by surveillance, bodily regulation, and persistent demands that Black women be legible,visible and consumable. The body is monitored,narrated, disciplined, and asked to explain its own presence.

This exhibition considers how artists tend to their inner world under these conditions. Interiority is approached as a political and ethical practice—a site of care, imagination, and endurance beyond public demand. The exhibition takes its structure from constellations: provisional patterns drawn across distance. Belonging, here, is composed across difference, pressure,and time.

Within the gallery, this idea appears through light and weight. Darker works, anchored at a concentrated point within the gallery, function as repositories—holding what has become too heavy, too charged, or too historically burdened to remain invisible. In doing so, they allow other forms within the space to move with greater restraint and quiet, unencumbered by what has already been borne.

This distribution frames fragmentation as strategy. The body, like a constellation, is extended across multiple sites as a means of protection and care. What is held in one place reshapes what becomes possible in another.

Constellations of Belonging invites viewers to consider belonging as a continual practice –made and remade in relation, sustained through imagination, and carried collectively rather than alone.

Debra Cartwright is an artist interested in depicting the relationship between the black female body and American medical history. Themes around her work include re-embodiment, myth creation, violence, theft and intimacy. Her work explores the interior life of Black womanhood through painted and sculptural forms that balance intimacy and autonomy. Her figures exist between protection and vulnerability, often resisting wholeness.

Tiana McMillan transforms clay into fragmented vessels that sit at the edge of collapse and composure. Her work embodies the tension between fragility and persistence—the body as both archive and altar.