Every crossing leaves a mark.
Between Worlds, curated by Larry Ossei-Mensah at The Ely Center, brings together twenty-five artists selected through an open call whose work explores the spaces where identities, histories, materials, and worlds meet. Working across painting, photography, sculpture, video, installation, and mixed media, the artists consider migration, memory, spirituality, ancestry, belonging, and transformation.
Across the exhibition, abandoned family photographs are painted back into being; diasporic landscapes are reunited across time and ocean; prophetic figures are constructed from gifted clothing and jewelry; e-waste and perishable materials become contemporary reliquaries; and botanical forms, archival fragments, paper, aluminum, ceramics, and paint become vehicles for histories in motion.
Between Worlds is less interested in resolving the in-between than in asking what it might mean to inhabit it. What do we carry when we move? What remains when we arrive? And what becomes possible when we allow ourselves to be changed by the crossing?
BETWEEN WORLDS:
Curated by Larry Ossei-Mensah
Larry Ossei-Mensah is a Ghanaian-American curator, cultural critic, writer, and co-founder and President of ARTNOIR, a global cultural platform dedicated to supporting and celebrating artists and creatives of color. For nearly two decades, his internationally focused curatorial practice has connected artists, institutions, and audiences across geographies, with projects spanning North America, Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
Ossei-Mensah has organized exhibitions, public programs, and cultural projects in cities including New York, Detroit, London, Athens, Rome, São Paulo, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, and Manila. He has worked with artists including Firelei Báez, Sanford Biggers, Amoako Boafo, Rashid Johnson, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Sonia Gomes, Kehinde Wiley, and Esther Mahlangu, among others. His projects have been presented at institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, the Museum of the African Diaspora, MASS MoCA, the Denver Art Museum, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, the Seattle Art Museum, the ICA San Francisco, the Storm King Art Center, and the Metropolitan Museum of Manila.
He previously served as the Susanne Feld Hilberry Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit and Curator-at-Large at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Across his institutional and independent practices, Ossei-Mensah explores identity, belonging, history, power, and the ways contemporary art can create connections across cultural and geographic boundaries.
Through ARTNOIR and his broader curatorial practice, he continues to build platforms that expand access, foster exchangeand create new possibilities for artists and audiences globally.