August 28 – December 19, 2026

Thresholds brings together the work of Aisha Tandiwe Bell, Portia Cobb, Stephen Hamilton, and Daniel Minter to dynamically explore the depth, complexity, and resilience of Black cultural memory. The artists work at a threshold between the seen and unseen, the present and the ancestral, and the place left behind and the place arrived at. Working across several media, they present their work alongside African works from the Haggerty Museum's collection to create a “call and response,” a participatory exchange in which one voice calls out and others answer in turn. Building on a shared yet continually unfolding cultural memory, where the past remains active and unresolved, these practices become sites of inspiration, critical reflection, and renewal.

Aisha Tandiwe Bell is a multimedia artist who explores her own diasporic identity as something plural and always in process, giving form to the many selves and masks that Black women carry. Portia Cobb creates videos, photography, and mixed media works rooted in her Gullah Geechee maternal heritage by gathering oral histories and rites that resist what she calls "forced forgetting." Stephen Hamilton weaves, dyes, and carves by hand using methods he studied in Nigeria, building monumental painted textiles grounded in Yorùbá thought that reclaim craft knowledge. Daniel Minter carves and assembles wood, metal, and found objects within Black Atlantic spiritual traditions, describing his art as a "technology" for reaching the ancestral strength and knowledge.

To encounter the works of these artists in dialogue with works from the Haggerty’s collection is to meet at a threshold where history is a living archive, embodied and rearticulated in the present.

Organized in partnership with the Indigo Arts Alliance, an artist residency and incubator in Portland, ME committed to the artistic development of Black and Brown Artists.

Support for this exhibition is generously provided in part by Lilly Endowment Inc.