Making Space

The word “space” contains multitudes. It can imply our physical surroundings, the place in our minds where imagination lives, or an idea of distance or time. It can mean a quiet moment of rest or the vast, seemingly empty space between galaxies. How do we, as humans, exist in space? How does space exist in us? The seven artists included in Making Space use different means to explore this concept in a variety of contexts. 

For Howardena Pindell, space is possibility. Pindell has used circles in her work for decades to reference nature, outer space, and microbiology. The circle also refers to a key memory from the artist’s youth, when she and her family stopped for a cold drink at a root beer stand in Northern Kentucky. Their chilled mugs had big red circles on the bottom, marking them for use only by Black people. In her handmade paper works, Pindell appropriates the shape, using small paper circles to build textured abstract compositions that evoke lunar surfaces, the deep ocean floor, or the reaches of deep space. Pindell builds entire worlds using a symbol intended to marginalize her and remind her of the spaces where she was not welcome.

Water delineates space, acting as a natural border and creating vital gathering places. Michelle Samour’s installation of sculpted branches and accompanying animation (made in collaboration with Sue Rees), uses the trope of the divining rod—a ‘Y’ shaped branch used by a dowser to locate groundwater—to speak about the politicization of water access. Samour’s ongoing work about her Palestinian ancestry investigates the Israeli government’s control of water in the occupied territories. Though this piece is specific to Palestine, the lack of access to clean water is endemic around the world. 

In a performance scheduled for this fall, choreographer and dancer Souleymane Badolo—whose activism in response to the water crisis in his home country of Burkina Faso has led to the repair and construction of numerous wells there—and dancer Abdoul Aziz Dermé will manipulate Samour’s divining rods in a live performance, with Rees’s animation projections helping create an atmosphere in which both dancers and divining rods become seekers pursuing an essential and often elusive life force. 

Emily Noelle Lambert combines paintings, found objects, and ceramics to evoke the feeling of moving through a landscape that is untethered from reality. Her canvases spill onto the floor, confusing our perception of space, and totemic hand-built ceramic sculptures become abstract figures in an extraordinary setting. Lambert’s work is influenced by plein air painting but is not bound by reality, instead using bold color and strategic mark-making to conjure the joy and possibility inherent in the world that surrounds us.

Mika Obayashi’s installation takes inspiration from the physical museum space itself, using simple materials to create a shift in scale between cosmic and intimate. Obayashi works in sculpture and fiber, using colored thread to create a beam-of-light-like shape that envelops a small-scale model of the museum’s Union Station building. Our perception shifts from the macro to micro as we imagine ourselves as both the source of the beam and as miniature beings inhabiting the Lilliputian version of a local landmark.

Beverly Acha’s pastels and oil on canvas use an abstract visual language that she initially developed through observing her day-to-day surroundings, referencing architectural structures, scientific diagrams, the botanical world, and landscape. Acha’s works express memory and sensation as richly-hued forms that vibrate with energy, creating a charged atmosphere with deceptively simple means. She asks us to examine our own awareness of the spaces around us and how we make sense of time, memory, and movement.

Similarly, Lauren Watrous’s intimate drawings translate physical space, feeling, and memory into records of personal significance, but with completely different results. Watrous spends days or weeks working at a particular site, exploring her surroundings through changing light, time, and weather. The attention she gives to the mundane details of everyday life—plates resting in a sink, a soft pillow wedged against the arm of a couch—prompts the viewer to pay close attention as well. We follow her eye and hand as she describes her environment with tenderness and care, creating space for observation and appreciation of simply being.

Deborra Stewart-Pettengill’s wire mesh sculptures and paintings on paper investigate the intricacy of botanical form and texture and the delicacy of biomorphic structure. The open weave of the hanging sculptures and the repetition of form conjure a breath-like rhythm, allowing the viewer to enter a meditative space. Other seemingly chaotic constructions use strategic thickets of dense material to draw the eye deeper and deeper. While sculpting these forms, Stewart-Pettengill used the shapes to develop paintings. The resulting pieces are meditations that explore transition, mutual dependance, multiplicity, and coalescence. Both the sculptures and the works on paper require slowness and a willingness to be led into a space of contemplation.

In a world that has become more frenetic and destabilizing by the day, the artists of Making Space encourage us to take a moment to reflect on how we move through the world around us—how the space we occupy is part of us and what it means to be open to sensation and imagination.

— Sarah Freeman, curator

RELATED AUDIO WITH ASL-ENGLISH TRANSLATION

Beverly Acha
Emily Noelle Lambert
Mika Obayashi
Howardena Pindell
Michelle Samour
Deborra Stewart-Pettengill
Lauren Watrous

RELATED EVENTS

July 12, Saturday, 5:30 p.m. — Opening of Five New Exhibits
August 2, Saturday, 2-4 p.m. — Workshop: Collage Logic
August 16, Saturday, 1 p.m. — Exhibit Tour: Making Space
September 12, Friday, 7:30 p.m. — The Water Runs Through It: Tools for Water

RELATED RESOURCES

Installation Views
Howardena Pindell Is Still Breaking Down Barriers for Black Artists — New York Times (6/9/25)
Ask the Artist!