Please join MoAD to celebrate the opening of Rachel Jones: !!!!! and Unruly Navigations along with the Emerging Artist Program exhibition on Tuesday, March 26 from 7pm - 8:30pm. This member-only reception will give a preview of these exhibitions with cocktails and hors d'oeuvres.

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!!!!!, guest curated by Erin Jenoa Gilbert, features twelve new paintings created by Rachel Jones especially for the acclaimed British artist's first solo museum exhibition in the United States. The abstract works continue Jones' use of mouths and teeth to symbolize encounters between Black interiority and outward expression, celebrating the artist's gesture as its own communicative medium.

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Unruly Navigations, curated by Chief of Curatorial Affairs and Public Programs Key Jo Lee, features twenty-two artworks from ten international artists tracing historical, familial, and/or individual migrations, capturing trajectories across time and across geographies, and refusing the tyranny of linear narratives, or stories told in a way that eliminate inconvenient or troublesome truths in favor of cohesion. Instead, the works presented in Unruly Navigations favor methods and materials that privilege heterogenous and contingent, multi-sensory and embodied knowledges as a means of asserting authority over the expansion and deepening of our collective understanding of history, the present, and the future.

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Participating artists include Myrlande Constant, Morel Doucet, vanessa german, Nadine Hall, M. Scott Johnson, Samuel Levi Jones, Anina Major, Oluseye. Winfred Rembert, and Nafis M. White.

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The 2024-2025 Emerging Artist Program winners are Mary Graham, Zekarias Thompson, Corinne Smith, Jessica Monette, and Soleé Darrell. Mary Graham's Value Test: Brown Paper will be on view in the MoAD Salon. Value Test: Brown Paper is an exhibition of portraits depicting fictional Black women rendered in oil on brown paper bags. The eponymous “paper bag tests” were historically conducted amongst the Black upper classes to gauge entry into elite spaces, granting access only to those lighter than the brown paper. Through this work Graham reflects on colorism, classism, and power, and their roots in white supremacy.

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