"UNAPOLOGETICALLY HERE" ART EXHIBIT CLOSING EVENT- CHASHAMA GALLERY

For the "Unapologetically Here" exhibit closing event at Chashama’s One Brooklyn Bridge Park gallery, SHEER partnered with three wonderful black female photographers: Rashida Zagon, Natiah Jones, and Tianna Howard to use the gallery as a conceptual "Open Studio" featuring:
A portrait station by Rashida Zagon
Natiah Jones’s debut photography portrait book Remarkability: Portraits & Insights of Inspiring Human Beings published by The Jones House
Tianna Howard's debut display of film photography prints
Check out the final portraits by Rashida Zagon below featuring the Pantone Color of the Year “Viva Magenta.”
Learn more about Remarkability: Portraits & Insights of Inspiring Human Beings via The Jones House and purchase here.
Check out more of Tianna Howard’s photography here.
Thank you to everyone who showed up and showed love! Looking forward to the next exhibit.
Photography by Avery Savage
There are certain projects that don’t just speak to identity but ask us to feel through its politics. Patricia Encarnación’s Tropical Limerence, part of The Shed’s Open Call: Portals exhibition (on view through August 24), is one of them. Across ceramic forms, layered video essays, and filmed testimonies, the installation asks us to confront how colonial desire continues to shape how Global Majority communities are seen, consumed, and misinterpreted. Through conversations held in the Dominican Republic, Martinique, Puerto Rico, Barcelona, and New York City, Encarnación creates an embodied archive that blurs the lines between artwork and altar, vulnerability and theory, fracture and sovereignty.
Photography by Avery Savage
For our third feature in The Shed’s Open Call: Portals series, we step inside the world of Haitian-Canadian artist Laurena Finéus. As she prepared for the opening preview, we caught rare behind the scenes moments while she put the finishing touches on Together, We Could Have Made Mountains, her first textile installation that weaves Haitian migrant stories into a landscape of dreams, sacrifices, and shared histories. Alongside the installation, her paintings incorporate soil, mica, and natural pigments, transforming each piece into both a vessel for memory and a living archive of migration.\
In our conversation, Laurena reflects on migration as resistance in the face of racial violence, the coumbite tradition of coming together in mutual support, and how working with textile and ceramic beads became a ritual of care, preservation, and possibility. She speaks to the balance between rupture and refuge, grief and futurity, and the grounding practices that keep her rooted while navigating institutional spaces.
Photography by Avery Savage
As part of our ongoing collaboration with The Shed to spotlight artists from the Open Call: Portals exhibition (June 27–August 24), SHEER spent time inside the immersive installation of visual artist, writer, and producer Marwa Eltahir: 99 Names: My Liberation Is Tied To Yours.
Her installation creates a sacred, sensory space for reflection. Modeled after majlis-style communal seating found along sub-Saharan caravan routes, the work invites audiences to rest on woven rugs beneath sheer white curtains, surrounded by sound, stillness, and prayer. A projected film plays in a loop, opening with the Azan and unfolding into spoken word narration and original composition.
Photography by Avery Savage
SHEER had the chance to visit the Brooklyn studio of fashion designer and artist Mel Corchado ahead of her exhibition debut. Mel’s practice is rooted in slowness and intention. Whether she’s sewing by hand, gathering with community, or experimenting with unconventional materials like sugar, her work invites us to think beyond product and into process, care, and cultural memory.
Her installation for Portals, titled $TICKY $IN$, features garments made of hardened sugar. These glimmering, fragile structures explore the material’s ties to colonial labor, Puerto Rican identity, and the shifting nature of time. In person, they feel less like clothes and more like quiet vessels of transformation.
Photography by Shalaina Joy
As we approach the Affordable Art Fair Spring Edition opening this Wednesday, March 19th in NYC, we are excited to spotlight Alanis Forde, one of SHEER's exhibiting artists. Alanis is a figurative portraiture and surrealist artist who lives and works in Barbados. She works mainly with oil paint and collage on traditional canvas. The use of unrefined brushstrokes, dotted textures, patterns and vibrant colors allows the viewer’s eye to be in constant motion and transports them into a paradisiacal dystopia.
Photography by Kalynn Youngblood
As SHEER prepares to exhibit at the Affordable Art Fair in NYC opening Wednesday, March 19th, we are proud to showcase Asari Aibangbee’s stunning fiber works that explore themes of personal evolution, joy, and cultural lineage through rich textures and vibrant hues. Joining a roster of exceptional artists, Asari, continues to push the boundaries of contemporary art, using color, craft, and collective memory as tools for transformation.
Photography by Nabila Wirakusumah
I first stumbled across Nia Winslow’s work, totally by accident, and there was a piece titled “Secret Keeper” which I couldn’t believe was entirely paper because of the intricacies and detailing of the bobos and barrettes that took me back to my childhood. While digging deeper into her catalog I was shocked to realize her art is entirely collage and paper-based. The level of detail and intention behind her work is so incredibly impressive and even more so once I learned she was self-taught and only started making art in 2019!! Nia’s collages connect the Black and African diaspora by portraying our shared experiences from the seemingly mundane to the more poetic while simultaneously using unique strips of paper to also highlight we are not a monolith and to honor our diverse range of cultures.
Photography by Jordan Carter
The star motif has become Destiny’s iconic artistic signature which she describes as “symbolic of the light that exists in Black people that refuses to be dimmed.” Through her thoughtful and colorful large-scale oil paintings, Destiny highlights Black folk in community with one another, centered around the idea of hope as an act of resistance against oppressive systems in America. Destiny’s work not only honors the resiliency of her ancestors who came before her, but serves as a beacon of hope in the midst of the work that is still left to be done.
Photography by Avery Savage
To close out The Shed’s Open Call: Portals series, we’re spotlighting Chelsea Odufu, a multidisciplinary artist whose work spans film, photography, sculpture, performance, and design. Her installation Gold with a Mind of Its Own explores the lasting imprint of the gold trade in Côte d’Ivoire through movement and visual language, using the body as a tool for reflection and resistance.
Now living between Abidjan and New York, Chelsea brings a global perspective to everything she creates, shaped by movement across mediums, across continents, and across dimensions of Black identity.