Wall sculptures occupy a unique place between two-dimensional imagery and full spatial presence — part painting, part object, part architecture. In the hands of Black artists, the wall becomes not just a surface but a site: for memory, resistance, reclamation, and formal invention.
This exhibition brings together a selection of wall-based sculptures by Black artists who use the medium to press against the surface of dominant visual narratives. Working across wood, metal, fabric, clay, found objects, and synthetic materials, these artists explore themes of identity, diaspora, labor, and abstraction. The works hover on the edge of painting and sculpture, collapsing the distance between material and meaning.
Historically, Black artists have been excluded from the formal art historical canon — particularly in categories like minimalism, conceptualism, or modernist abstraction. But here, we see a lineage that expands and challenges those very frameworks. Artists like Betye Saar, Jack Whitten, and Noah Purifoy laid groundwork for contemporary makers, fusing personal and political content with radical experimentation in form. The wall sculpture becomes a language for negotiating place and body, race and space.
Many of the works on view reflect a tactile relationship with materials: stitched leather, rusted tin, hand-worn wood. These surfaces remember. They carry cultural codes, geographic references, and personal histories. Some pieces lean into abstraction, using repetition, geometry, or color to evoke rhythm and restraint. Others employ figuration or text to speak directly to social realities. All assert the wall not just as a background — but as a threshold.
There is a quiet refusal in many of these sculptures. A refusal to be framed neatly, or contained by easy narratives. They jut, hang, sag, and spill — challenging the viewer to come closer, to slow down, to reckon with presence.
“In Relief” proposes that sculpture on the wall is never flat. It holds weight — visual, conceptual, cultural. And in the hands of Black artists, it becomes an instrument of both defiance and beauty.