Inspired by family research into her great-great-great-great grandfather Luke Valentine’s service as a free Black militiaman in the American Revolution, Martha Jackson Jarvis has created mixed-media works that imaginatively retrace his journey from Virginia to South Carolina during the Revolutionary War. The result is a tour de force in abstract painting with 13 grandly scaled works on paper, and a focused group of smaller works inspired by the meditative form of the mandala.

Contemporary ceramicist Michelle Erickson draws from historic ceramic techniques to create works that expose the persistence of racism and exploitation in post-colonial countries.

Erickson is a second-generation American and grew up near Colonial Williamsburg, where she studied the clay bodies and glaze formulas of ceramics imported to the American colonies. These works were integral to a vast network of investment, mercantile exchange, and material movement under English Colonial oppression.