All Out / All In

All out: of time, of money, of energy, of our hands. All in: our homes, our heads, one life, to the fire. Is there a way through, instead? The nine artists in All Out / All In try to find it, exploring the increasingly arbitrary boundary between public and private spaces, identities, and rituals — with a particular emphasis on the potential of the home as a space for healing in the face of renewed (and overdue) attention on it as a political one.

On the first floor, Rose Nestler’s fabric sculptures emphasize the ways in which women perform (or are made to perform) power (or lack thereof) through articles of clothing, while Aisha Tandiwe Bell’s traps mark the delicate balance between protecting what you have and cooperating in power structures that keep you where you are. On the second floor, Jamea Richmond-Edwards’ mixed media collages reject reductive readings of Blackness and indigenous heritage, insisting on a nuanced, humanizing view of the ways in which these identities intersect with one another in the lives of real people. On the third floor, Mark Fleuridor reflects on the domestic spaces, elders, and rituals in his Haitian community that have carried him through to today, Nyugen Smith simultaneously reckons with the Caribbean’s colonial past and looks towards imaginative possibilities — magic, festivals, languages, geographies — for its future, while Lee Edwards looks at the timeless consumption of violence against Black bodies in America. On the fifth floor, Natalie Baxter’s eagles deflect the weird masculine energies of Americana, her ribbons emphasize the comical overexpectations of motherhood, and her quilts take a simple delight in the material possibilities of a traditional form. On the sixth floor, Liz Nielsen’s site-specific light installation offers a space to reflect on how the ideas in an otherwise relatively figurative show might take root in our inner overlapping otherworlds of lonelinesses, losses, longings. And on the seventh floor, Jen Dwyer’s sculptures and paintings take that moment of reflection and point towards ways to sustain it — offering an unabashed love letter to the daily rituals which restore and replenish us, celebrating the quiet, remarkable ways we make it through.