Rise Through Everything: Geometry, Rhythm, and Gesture

Rise Through Everything: Geometry, Rhythm, and Gesture brings together artworks by 16 visionary modern and contemporary Black artists who have reimagined the possibilities of the medium of paper. Featuring 10 recent additions to the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields permanent collection, this exhibition juxtaposes works by emerging voices with those by established figures to show how this group of intergenerational innovators have expanded the expressive potential of printmaking, collage, photography, and drawing.

Organized around three interconnected themes, geometry, rhythm, and gesture, this dynamic display explores how artists of the global African diaspora use structure, layering, patterning, and expressive poses of the body to create works that challenge conventions while marking memory, identity, and creative possibility. Derrick Adams’s Parlay 1-4 (2024) combines printmaking and collage in four exuberant and abstracted figures inspired by the joyful designs of the 1980s Black fashion designer Patrick Kelly. Ayana Jackson’s photograph, Consider the Sky and Sea (2019), uses the artist’s own body and captivating movement to reimagine the dark history of the Middle Passage into an Afrofuturist utopia. Alongside Kelly and Jackson are expressive prints by Chakaia Booker and Sam Gilliam, a monumental, collaged portrait by Yashua Klos, and a hard-edged watercolor by Indianapolis’s own Shamira Wilson.

The powerful works in this exhibition reveal that paper is far more than a material support—it is a dynamic platform for the expression of cultural knowledge, lived experience, and radical acts of self-definition. Spanning space and time, the diverse compositions in Rise Through Everything: Geometry, Rhythm, and Gesture challenge perceptions while honoring the multiplicity, brilliance, and enduring power of Black creative expression.