Hush Arbor Part I:

Tree Watching

Aziza Gibson Hunter, Niama Safia Sandy, Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, Vetiver

Guest Curated by Maleke Glee

Hush Arbor
An artistic journey through history, making, research, and storytelling by Zoë Charlton.

Hush Arbor is a year-long dialog between artist Zoë Charlton’s creative practice and research and the histories and makers who inform and depict it. This exhibition is in two chapters, Part I: Tree Watching, and Part II: Conditionally Yours. The first chapter, curated by curator-scholar and colleague of Charlton’s, Maleke Glee, brings together artists who’s practice is embedded in the roots of their histories, who’s stories branch from the central question of Charlton’s own work: how does the natural world hold memory, history?

Hush Arbors (or ‘hush harbors’ or ‘brush arbors’) were clandestine mini-maroon spaces: clearings, swamps, and dense cover where enslaved Black people gathered beyond the reach of enslavers to worship, mourn, organize, and speak on their own terms. The land itself was the condition of possibility. It absorbed sound, provided shelter, and made autonomous community life legible only to those who were meant to be there. A conversation held under that name, between a curator-scholar, the artists, and the work we have all brought to this program, feels like the right way to close the arc.

These two exhibitions are distinct, though connected. Like separate musical motifs weaving together a new melodic counterpoint, these exhibitions build on each other. Tree Watching sees the work through communal storytelling, and Conditionally Yours carries that story forward through Charlton’s artwork. Like all research, these exhibitions create new knowledge from many perspectives, while ultimately focused through Charlton’s unique lens.

Tree Watching

Tree watching refers to the meditative practice of observing trees. Across cultures, trees have long been understood as custodians of history and portals to the spiritual realm. Here, we also acknowledge trees as watchers of our personal and collective lives—another kind of archival medium, legible only to those who revere them.

Tree Watching presents the work of Aziza Gibson-Hunter, Vetiver (Vonne Napper), Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, and Niama Safia Sandy, artists united by their engagement with and reverence for the natural world. Their practices consider both natural and psychological landscapes, allowing the physical and metaphysical to meet through land stewardship, medicinal knowledge, foodways, socio-political histories, and the cultures held by the land’s inhabitants.

While trees may look different from one place to another, they grow according to a shared logic: at different paces, to different heights, bearing different fruit, yet remaining rooted as they reach upward toward the sky. Similarly, these artists draw on their cultural and aesthetic lineages to ground practices that bloom toward personal enlightenment, higher consciousness, and self-actualization.

Tree Watching blurs the lines of witness—between observer and observed, memory and presence, rootedness and transcendence. In this suspension, submission to the spiritual becomes possible. We are reminded of Indigenous ways of being and thinking with ourselves, with one another, and alongside the earth.

Gallery 2
June 5 — November 29, 2026