An immersive installation curated by Pamela Nanét.
October 2 to November 1, 2026.
Hi, and welcome home. My name is Pamela Nanét, and I am the curator of Home: Black & Brown Only.
I am a cultural curator and a transcultural marketing strategist, and I have spent most of my life moving between communities. I was born in Mexico City and grew up in Queens, New York. I spent long stretches in Florence, Chicago, and Oaxaca before settling here in Milwaukee for the second time. I am fully bilingual in English and my native Spanish, and I have learned that most of what matters in a family is said in the language people use at home.
For more than fifteen years I have worked in graphic design, marketing, brand communications, and event production. I studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, and I hold a master’s degree in museum and exhibition studies, with a concentration in social justice, from the University of Illinois Chicago. That training, together with my life experience, has shaped how I think. I design and pay attention to spaces that hold people, and then I ask what those spaces are saying, and who they are saying it to.
This is not my first exhibition. In 2015 I curated 43 Voices at Arts @ Large in Walker’s Point, a response to the disappearance of forty-three students from the Ayotzinapa teachers’ college in Guerrero, Mexico. Twenty-three artists from around the world showed their work next to twenty students from Reagan High School here in Milwaukee. I learned then that an exhibition can be a place to grieve out loud, and a place where the people who are usually talked about get to do the talking.
Home comes from the same instinct. It was built by local Milwaukee artists and a few friends, with no budget and limited marketing support. At the end of the show, on Mercadito Day, the furniture will be sold like an estate sale, and this house will be taken apart the way so many of our homes have been. I want you to carry that with you as you walk through.
Thank you for coming.
HOME is not an exhibition hung on white walls. It is a home, built inside a gallery by Black and Brown artists, where the art lives with the furniture, the books, the table, and the bed. For many of our families, home is an archive, a survival strategy, a place to heal, and a place to imagine together. This show holds all of that, and asks visitors to take off their shoes and step inside, or to walk past on the outside path and watch, the way so many of us are watched every day.
A home is something you build, and it is also something that can be taken from you. HOME was built with no budget and limited marketing support, using our own hands, our own furniture, and whatever we could find.
The show will be on view Gallery Night October 16th at 5pm and on November 1, the furniture is sold like an estate sale, and the house comes apart.
Pamela Nanét. Curatorial Direction, Spatial Design & Bilingual Audio Tour
Conhg Lopez Ausencio. Mixe artist from Oaxaca, working in woodblock printmaking and painting, based in Milwaukee for about twenty years.
Aida El-Hajjar. Palestinian American artist working in painting, printmaking, felt, and mixed media.
Anthony and Louie Brewer. Father and son painters who work side by side in a shared studio. Louie is growing up as an artist in real time, learning from his father’s hand and finding his own.
Ash Ernesto. Painter and textile artist whose embroidery carries forward the work of our grandmothers.
Nicole Acosta. Artist and creator of The HOOPS Project, an archive of portraits and stories about hoop earrings begun in 2019.
Shana Lucas. Quilter whose work draws on generations of seamstresses in her family.
My Role and Process
I conceived, curated, and designed HOME, the first and only installment of Black & Brown Only in this building. I recruited the artists, designed the identity, planned the floor, wrote and recorded the bilingual audio tour, built the catalogue, and coordinated a volunteer install. Artists contributed their work, their labor, and personal objects from their own homes. My dad and my brother helped me build the entrance wall from cinder blocks and Cream City bricks borrowed from a pile by the train tracks.
I laid out the house using the feng shui bagua map, anchored at the front door. The library sits in the knowledge corner just inside the entrance, the bedroom falls in love and partnership, and the center of the house, where we gather, belongs to health.
DATES
Opening Night, Friday, October 2, 2026.
Gallery Night MKE, Friday, October 16.
Mercadito Day and closing, Sunday, November 1.
Curatorial Assistant: Ash Ernesto
Some of you may be wondering how I decided where everything goes. I used a map from feng shui called the bagua.
The bagua comes from Chinese tradition. It is built on the eight trigrams of the I Ching, arranged around a center, and each area is tied to a part of life: knowledge and self-cultivation, career and life path, helpful people and travel, family and ancestors, health at the center, creativity and children, wealth, reputation, and love and partnership. In the version that became popular in the United States, you lay the map over a floor plan starting from the front door.
I anchored the map at our entrance and followed it closely. That is why the library sits just inside the door on the left, in the area of knowledge and self-cultivation: the first thing you meet when you come in is what we know. The bedroom, in the back right corner, falls in love and partnership, the most intimate part of the map. And the center of the house belongs to health, which is where we gather.
Feng shui teaches that the way a space is arranged changes the way energy moves through it, and the way people move through it, too. I wanted this house to slow you down, to turn you toward each other, and to make you notice what is usually kept in the back. My grandmothers worked from patterns. This is mine.
Thank you for coming home with us. Black & Brown Only will keep moving after this. Wherever it lands next, you are welcome there.
About the floor plan
Photography is NOT permitted.
Two Ways to Walk the Space
Visitors can experience HOME more than once, and in two ways:
A) Left – Walk the path along the white wall, do not stop, avoid crossing over the bricks or
B) Right – Take off your shoes/put on the foot covers, take your time, and come inside
Read the transcript: Before you go any further, you have a choice. There are two ways to experience this home.
The path to your left is for passing through. It lets you walk by without stopping and without holding up anyone behind you. It is also the way to the restrooms, so if you are just here for the bathroom, that is your path too.
The second way is to come inside. Inside, the home is meant to be lived in. Some of the pieces are interactive. Some of them are furniture. You are invited to sit, to slow down, and to be present. Before you enter, you can take off your shoes or put on shoe covers. Either one is fine. What matters is the act. It gives you a minute to sit and prepare yourself the way you would before walking into someone’s home, with respect for the work and for the labor you are about to become part of.
The second way is to come inside. Inside, the home is meant to be lived in. Some of the pieces are interactive. Some of them are furniture. You are invited to sit, to slow down, and to be present. Before you enter, you can take off your shoes or put on shoe covers. Either one is fine. What matters is the act. It gives you a minute to sit and prepare yourself the way you would before walking into someone’s home, with respect for the work and for the labor you are about to become part of.
The Plant Wall
The entrance wall, built from cinder blocks, Cream City brick, and plants, holds the library, and a portrait that greets you at the door.
Left – The Outside Path
Along the white wall, the institution’s idea of neutral. Visitors here see the house from the outside, the way we are so often watched.
Along this path you will walk beside a white wall. For me, this wall represents the institution. It is the gallery’s idea of neutral, the standard that keeps imposing itself on how art should look, how it should hang, who it is for, and what it is worth. I left it untouched on purpose. What it means to you is yours to take hold of.
Take this path as an outsider. You are the person looking through a window at a house. You can see the life inside, but you never actually step into it.
Many people of color live with the feeling of being watched all the time, by people who stand outside our lives and look in. In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois called it double consciousness, “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.” Sometimes it feels like being an animal in a zoo, behind an invisible wall we did not build. That is not only a metaphor. At the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, Indigenous people were put on display for paying crowds.
So notice where you are standing right now. Who decided that for you?
One last thing. Please don’t take photos or video. This is a home, not a spectacle. Be here instead.
Natural Intelligence, 2026
Ash Ernesto. Oil on canvas, 10″ x 8″
Not for sale
On this side of the wall, facing the outside path, Ash Ernesto’s Natural Intelligence sits on a small easel. From inside the house, you can only catch it at a distance. This one truly belongs to the passerby.
At first glance it looks almost like a circuit or a screen. Then you start to notice nature interlaced through it, in harmony. We are living in the age of artificial intelligence, and this painting reminds us that there is power in merging both worlds: the intelligence of the body, of the land, and of what our elders knew, alongside the tools of the technological age. That merging can be a battle just as much as it can be a gift, depending on how you wield it.
The Wall
The entrance wall, built from cinder blocks, Cream City brick, and plants, holds the library, and a portrait that greets you at the door.
Christina, 2022
Nicole Acosta. Photography, 4″ x 7″
Not for sale
As you come in, look to your right. One of Nicole Acosta’s portraits is waiting for you. The woman in it wears a black T-shirt that reads Sangre Indígena, Indigenous blood. She is the only one in this house who looks straight at you as you walk in. She is greeting you, and she is letting you know, unapologetically, whose house this is.
Now look to your left. This entrance wall is also our library. It is full of books by people of color, written for the diaspora: bell hooks, Isabel Allende, Gloria Anzaldúa, and many more. This corner is where the knowledge lives, and I mean that literally. In the feng shui map I used to lay out this house, the area just inside the door, on the left, belongs to knowledge and self-cultivation. There are books all through this house, and each one was chosen for the room it lives in.
The wall went through several iterations. Lloyd Flow Johnson suggested building it from cinder blocks and adding plants. My dad and my brother helped me with the cinder blocks and laid out the Cream City bricks, which came from a pile lying outside the building by the train tracks. We asked to borrow them.
The Concept Behind Home
Thoughts, and themes for you to carry throughout your visit
Once you are inside, you are part of the installation. The people on the outside path will watch you as they look in. They will watch you sit, read, rest, and talk. That is intentional. Many people of color live with the feeling of being watched all the time, by people who stand outside our lives and look in. In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois called it double consciousness, “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.”
The idea behind Home is simple. Instead of hanging work on white walls, we built a house. For many Black and Brown families, home is more than shelter. It is an archive, a survival strategy, a place to heal, and a place to imagine together. It holds joy, grief, discipline, tenderness, music, prayer, and dysfunction, all at once. Here, the art is not separated from that life. It is lived with.
The show was originally called Homecoming. I changed it to Home because a home is something you build, and it is also something that can be taken from you. This is the first and only Black & Brown Only exhibition in this building. When it closes, the series moves on, the way so many of us have had to. If you want to know why, you can find that story in the last track.
“Black and Brown” is a relationship, built on shared histories of displacement and of deciding for ourselves who we are. The boundary around this space is not about keeping anyone out. It is about refusing to be extracted from, and about claiming the right to define our own space.
Here are a few questions to carry with you as you walk through the home.
What have you inherited that you never asked for, and what have you chosen to keep?
Where do you feel watched, and where do you feel safe enough to stop performing?
If you had to pack up your home tomorrow, what would you carry first?
Please don’t take photos or video. This is a home, not a spectacle. Be here instead.
The Threshold
Take a seat, take your shoes off, or grab a pair of foot covers.
A loveseat facing the white wall, and a question:
is it ever going to be enough?
The entrance is the threshold between the public and the private. Have a seat. Take off your shoes, or slip on your shoe covers.
If you take your shoes off, line them up beneath Aida El-Hajjar’s From MKE to Palestine. You and your shoes have now become part of the work. A row of shoes at a door tells you that someone is home. Empty shoes have also become one of the ways the world marks the people who are gone. Under this piece, they say both things at once.
The loveseat you are sitting on sits beneath another of Aida’s paintings, Wake Up!: a woman crying, holding her child. Look at how the shape of the figures follows the outline of the loveseat under them. Look at the posture, too. If it feels familiar, it may be because it carries the memory of Michelangelo’s Pietà, carved at the end of the 1490s, where Mary holds the body of her son across her lap. The Pietà is probably the most famous image in Western art of a mother holding what she has lost. Aida gives us that same weight, that same anguish, in a mother who is not a saint in a basilica. She is someone’s mother. And the title is not addressed to her. She is already awake to her grief. It is addressed to us, and to everyone who keeps watching and walking past.
I placed you here, facing the white wall, on purpose. I am inviting you to literally sit with the reactions of the people passing by outside.
Beside Aida’s work hangs Conhg Lopez Ausencio’s woodblock print never is enough. Conhg is a Mixe artist from Oaxaca who has made his life in Milwaukee for about twenty years. His print speaks to Aida’s Of Softness and Survival, a work in felt that I read as a subconscious self-portrait, a figure caught in reflection. Look at that title: softness and survival, at the same time. Together these pieces ask a question I have asked myself many times. Is it ever going to be enough, all this biting off more than we can chew?
From MKE to Palestine, 2025
Aida El-Hajjar. Mixed media, 48″ x 36″
Not for sale
Of Softness and Survival, 2026
Aida El-Hajjar. Felt, 14″ x 19″
Not for sale
Wake Up!, 2024
Aida El-Hajjar. Acrylic, 24″ x 30″
Not for sale
never is enough, 2024
Conhg Lopez Ausencio. Woodblock print on paper, 22″ x 28″
$450. Inquire.
Inquire: [email protected]
human resources, 2023
Conhg Lopez Ausencio. Acrylic on canvas, 32″ x 48″
$4,500
Inquire: [email protected]
On this Cream City brick pedestal leans Conhg Lopez Ausencio’s painting human resources. Notice which way it faces. Its back is turned to the outside path. The only way to see it is to come in.
Human resources is the name of the office that turns people into labor, into headcount and output. Conhg answers that name with everything we actually carry. Look closely: books stamped Laws, Medicine, Science, Math, and Agriculture. A hammer. A hard hat beside a helmet marked with a red cross. Ladders, scaffolding, and machinery, and a raised fist pulling a root from the earth, with color bursting out of it. Hidden in the buildings, you can find 414, Milwaukee’s area code.
Now look at what it stands on. Cream City brick was made from the clay of the Menomonee Valley, the valley right outside this building, and it gave Milwaukee its nickname. This city was built out of it. But the people in this painting were mostly kept at the edges of what it built.
In 1920, the Pfister and Vogel tannery brought about a hundred Mexican workers to Milwaukee, first as strikebreakers. They were los primeros, the first Mexican community in the city, and they settled in Walker’s Point. They were paid less than white workers and given the job of lowering hides into chemicals that burned their eyes, noses, and lungs. By 1930 the community had grown to more than four thousand people. When the Depression came, many were pushed to return to Mexico, and it fell to under fifteen hundred.
Black families came north in the Great Migration to work in Milwaukee’s foundries, tanneries, and factories, often in the hottest and most dangerous jobs. Housing discrimination held them inside a few blocks of the North Side, in Bronzeville. In the 1960s, freeways were cut straight through it, destroying homes and businesses and scattering the people who lived there. This same valley became a line between the Black North Side and the white South Side. In 1967, the NAACP Youth Council and Father James Groppi marched across the Sixteenth Street Viaduct, over this valley, night after night, for fair housing, and they were met by crowds throwing rocks and bottles.
So this painting stands literally on the city. The workers this country calls resources were also its lawyers, doctors, scientists, farmers, and builders, even when no one would let them be. That is the knowledge this corner holds.
The Dinner Table
A dinner table set for one, with a cloth stitched with all four seasons, and a napkin embroidered by our grandmother.
On this walnut dinner table, the only piece purchased specifically for this show, lies El Mantel, a cloth embroidered by hand by Ash Ernesto. Ash is my brother.
Ash is deeply inspired by our grandmothers. Both of them use a needle and textiles to provide for their families. When our paternal grandmother passed away, our aunt knew my brother and I would be the only ones to truly appreciate the table napkins, placemats, and pillow covers she had made for special occasions. Since then, Ash has been exploring what used to be their way to provide, and turning it into art and self-expression. That is what legacy looks like to me. A skill that meant survival for one generation becomes a voice for the next. The needle passes from a grandmother’s hand to a grandson’s, and it keeps talking.
Beside Ash’s mantel is a napkin my grandmother embroidered with her own hands. And the table is set for one. I did that on purpose. One of my favorite things in the world is sitting at the table with my family. Not every family gets to do that. Borders, deportation, war, incarceration, double shifts, and distance keep so many of our families from ever sitting down together. So this place is set for whoever is missing from yours.
Ash is deeply inspired by our grandmothers. Both of them use a needle and textiles to provide for their families. When our paternal grandmother passed away, our aunt knew my brother and I would be the only ones to truly appreciate the table napkins, placemats, and pillow covers she had made for special occasions. Since then, Ash has been exploring what used to be their way to provide, and turning it into art and self-expression. That is what legacy looks like to me. A skill that meant survival for one generation becomes a voice for the next. The needle passes from a grandmother’s hand to a grandson’s, and it keeps talking.
Beside Ash’s mantel is a napkin my grandmother embroidered with her own hands. And the table is set for one. I did that on purpose. One of my favorite things in the world is sitting at the table with my family. Not every family gets to do that. Borders, deportation, war, incarceration, double shifts, and distance keep so many of our families from ever sitting down together. So this place is set for whoever is missing from yours.
El Mantel, 2024
Ash Ernesto. Hand embroidery on cotton, 32″ x 30″
Not for sale
Generational Legacy
A space that speaks about fathers and sons, and a Mixe king.
Most of the legacy in this house is told through women: grandmothers, mothers, and the work of their hands. This black wall tells it through fathers and sons.
It holds the work of Anthony and Louie Brewer, a father and son who paint together, and above their corner, a painting by Conhg Lopez Ausencio, rey condoy.
I made this wall to honor the men in my life, who have been paternal, caring, and supportive, even when they could not always be around. Care is not only women’s work, and it was never only women who carried it.
On the iPad, you can watch Louie Brewer’s process, and you can see in real time how much of his father Anthony’s influence has been passed on to him: the way he explores his creativity and decides what comes next. Knowledge moving from hand to hand while you watch. The studio easel, the used palettes from each artist, the round rug, and Pepe the dog’s bed are theirs, too. This is a working studio, and it is a household.
Now look up. In Mixe tradition, King Condoy and his sister were born from the same egg. His sister, Konk Anä, went to live in the sky because she could not understand humans. Condoy stayed. He taught his people to farm and to govern themselves, and he defended them so fiercely that the Mixe still call themselves los jamás conquistados, the never conquered. When his time came, he did not die. He withdrew into the mountain Zempoaltépetl, where people say he is still present, only unseen.
Look at the painting. A Mixe man with long black hair looks straight at you, calm, under a sky split open by lightning. Behind him are pine forests and mountains. He holds out an ear of corn in one hand and a handful of dark fruit in the other, the harvest he taught his people to grow. A serpent coils in front of him.
Conhg told me the turkey is a sacred and special food for his people, prepared for ceremonies. A thin white donkey stands on the other side. Before there were roads, he explained, the donkey was their main animal for carrying loads. At his feet grow calla lilies, the flowers Diego Rivera painted again and again, heaped in the arms of Indigenous vendors. Here, no one is carrying them. They grow at his feet, and he offers us what he holds.
A king who is also a teacher. A protector who never really leaves. Some fathers are like that. Not always in the room, and still holding up the mountain. Below him, a father teaches his son in real time. Above them, a people’s first teacher keeps watch over both.
And notice that across the house, at the dinner table, a grandson picked up his grandmother’s needle. On this wall, a son picked up his father’s paint. Le
Warm Dinner, 2026
Louie Brewer. Water, Acrylic, Mixed media, 23” x 35”
Not for sale
Untitled, 2026
Anthony Brewer. Mixed media
Acrylic, Plaster, on Infrastructure Canvas, 18” x 30”
$1,100
NEEDS UPDATING, 2026
Louie Brewer. Water, Acrylic, Mixed media, 23” x 35”
Not for sale
rey condoy, 2017
Conhg Lopez Ausencio. Acrylic on canvas, 32″ x 48″
$4,000.
Inquire: [email protected]
Living Room
Where love and family live: dinner with dabke in the background, and family portraits in hoops.
As you move into the living room, you are also passing the restrooms. They are free to use.
This is where love and family live. The living room is the place for gathering, for arguing, for the long visit that was supposed to be short.
The couch faces Aida El-Hajjar’s Seeds of Love. It is a regular family dinner, and the grandparents look straight back at you. Aida told me that in her culture, everyone’s grandfather drinks laban ayran, a cold, salty yogurt drink that comes in a small red and white bottle every family knows. In the background, people are dancing the dabke.
The dabke is a line dance from the Levant, danced arm in arm, stamping the ground together. Its name comes from the Arabic word for stamping, and one of the stories of where it began is about home itself. In Palestinian villages, houses had flat roofs of packed earth, and each season the neighbors lined up, arms over shoulders, and stamped the new layer of clay into place. The work song became a dance. Today it is danced at weddings, harvests, and every kind of gathering, and in the diaspora it is one of the ways people carry the land with them. As a dancer, I love that this house holds a dance that started with building a house.
At the entrance, Aida gave us grief. Here, she gives us an ordinary dinner, and that is the point. Too often, the only way the world is willing to see Palestinians is in mourning. This painting insists on the rest of the story: the grandparents, the table, the drink, the dancing in the background. And look at the title. Love is something you plant, and someone planted it before you got here.
On the coffee table you will find books about the diaspora that makes us a community. Pick one up and sit for a while.
On the dressers and stands you will see portraits by Nicole Acosta, set out the way families set out their photographs. They come from The HOOPS Project, an archive Nicole started in 2019 that has now gathered more than one hundred people from Milwaukee, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and beyond, from Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian, and other global majority communities. Each portrait holds a story about hoop earrings: who gave them to you, who told you to take them off, and why you put them back on. The project has grown into a stage play and a book in progress. In Nicole’s words, “The hoops are the thread. The stories are the medicine.”
Hoops have been worn by our mothers and grandmothers for generations. On our bodies they have been called too loud, too much, and unprofessional. On other bodies, they get called fashion. Nicole’s portraits treat them as what they are to us: an inheritance, a kind of armor, and a way of saying I am here. These portraits also mark the line between the living room and the bedroom. The family is watching the door.
Seeds of Love, 2026
Aida El-Hajjar. Acrylic, 30″ x 40″
Not for sale
Lisette, 2022
Nicole Acosta. Photography, 4″ x 7″
Not for sale
Nneka, 2022
Nicole Acosta. Photography, 4″ x 7″
Not for sale
Mya, 2022
Nicole Acosta. Photography, 4″ x 7″
Not for sale
Bedroom
The most vulnerable room in the house, resting in plain view. Nicole’s Quinceañera portrait sits by the mirror.
The bedroom is the most vulnerable room in any house. It is where we rest, where we are unguarded, and where we are most ourselves.
On the bed is Shana Lucas’s quilt, Plain View. Quilts are one of the oldest archives of women’s labor: warmth made from scraps, time made into something you can hold. Shana’s process is a fusion of tradition and contemporary artistry, inspired by generations of seamstresses in her family. The quilt honors the hands that shape our stories, and the resilience, dedication, and artistry passed down through every generation of her family. Notice the title, too. You are resting here in plain view of everyone passing on the outside path.
Above the bed and Plain View hangs Clytie, by Ash Ernesto, in oil and textile. In the Greek myth, Clytie loved the sun god Apollo, and he did not love her back. She sat on the ground watching him cross the sky until she turned into a flower that follows the sun. This painting shows the beginning of that transformation.
Look at how these two pieces speak to each other. At their base, both are textile, and both come from families of grandmothers who worked textile with their hands. Both are about being in plain view. Clytie spent her devotion out in the open, where everyone could see her, and the one she watched never looked back. So much of our labor lives the same way, in plain view, holding everything together, and still unseen. The quilt keeps you warm. Clytie keeps watching. Neither one asks to be noticed, and both deserve to be.
Now stand at the foot of the bed and look into the oval mirror on the vanity. You will see your own reflection between two portraits by Nicole Acosta: one from The HOOPS Project, and her own photograph from her sweet sixteen, a girl on the edge of becoming who she is. Her hoops rest on the vanity in front of you. For a moment, you are in the family photos too.
Julia, 2022
Nicole Acosta. Photography, 4″ x 7″
Not for sale
Clytie, 2026
Ash Ernesto. Oil and textile on canvas, 20″ x 16″
Not for sale
Quetzalcoatl, 2024
Conhg Lopez Ausencio. Woodblock print on fabric, 36 x 48 in.
$1,200.
Inquire: [email protected]
Red Velvet Chair
A phone for messages to your ancestors, or spill the tea, facing the ofrenda across the walkway where everyone can see you.
At the other end of the bedroom, a red velvet chair faces out, toward the ofrenda. On the side table beside it is a phone.
Pick it up. You are welcome to record a message to your ancestors, to someone you have lost, or to anyone you never got to say it to. Or you can just spill the tea.
I placed this chair here for a reason. Across the walkway is the ofrenda, and the back of the house, where the labor lives. Women’s labor, especially, the work that is never counted, is a cornerstone of our homes. It is not always obvious, but it is always present.
And because the chair faces the walkway, you will be seen by people passing on the outside while you speak. Your comfort is compromised. That is the point. It says a lot about how hard it is to share our deepest thoughts when we are always under pressure, always performing, always being watched. So if you can, say it anyway.
Back of the House
Unacknowledged labor
From inside the house, look out toward the ofrenda and the kitchen, the washer and the dryer. From here they feel a little far away, almost ethereal, and they are also a constant reminder of the hard work that holds everything up, and of how often our worth is measured by how productive we are.
The washer and dryer are in the back of the house on purpose. The back of the house is where the labor we are stereotyped into has always lived: the laundry, the kitchen, the cleaning, the work that keeps a home or a restaurant or a hotel running while someone else sits out front.
But the kitchen is also where the movidas start. In Chicana Movidas: New Narratives of Activism and Feminism in the Movement Era, the scholars Dionne Espinoza, María Eugenia Cotera, and Maylei Blackwell write that a movida, a move, can mean “the strategic and tactical but also the undercover, the dissident, the illicit.” They found Chicana organizing happening in “backrooms and bedrooms, hallways and kitchens,” the places no one was watching, where women made their moves anyway.
Black women said it too. In 1980, Barbara Smith cofounded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press with Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, and others. Smith explained the name like this: “The kitchen is the center of the home, the place where women in particular work and communicate with each other.” Revolutions do not start in the front room. They start back here, usually with a woman at the stove.
Aida El-Hajjar’s Mashallah, a portrait of a grandmother with olives, lives in this kitchen. Mashallah means “what God has willed.” It is what you say when you see something beautiful, to give thanks for it and to protect it. In Palestine, the olive tree is a symbol of sumud, steadfastness. Some of those trees have stood for centuries. The harvest belongs to the whole family, and the curing, the pressing, and the storing of the oil have so often been women’s work. An olive tree is a pantry, an inheritance, and a way of saying we were here, and we are still here.
Remember the story from the bedroom, too. When the Mexica told how people were made, it was a woman at a grinding stone who did the work. From the metate to the olive press, the labor that makes us human has always happened back here.
The Ofrenda
For our ancestors, for families torn apart by a border, and for those we will meet again.
The ofrenda honors all of our ancestors, and the loved ones we have lost. The show runs so close to the Day of the Dead that it could not live anywhere else in this house.
On the altar is Ash Ernesto’s El Desierto, painted in acrylic, with touches of gold. Look at the group of cacti. Ash told me they are a family, and that they represent us, our family. But in this space, they honor entire families that have been torn apart over a border that insists on dividing us, and the people who lost their lives on the journey. In religious icons and retablos, gold is what marks something as sacred. Here, that gold is given to the desert, and to the ones who never made it across.
Beside the altar sits Ash’s chair, Herencia, which means heritage. It is built on a small wooden chair, and it is a montage of Frida Kahlo’s paintings. Ash used real scissors and real flowers to give the piece texture. And to bring out Frida’s hair, he used mine. So part of me is on this altar, too.
Frida turned pain that was supposed to stay private into something the whole world had to look at. On an altar for the people we have lost, she stands in for the women whose suffering was never counted, and for the ones who painted it anyway.
Conhg Lopez Ausencio’s mi cultura, my culture, lives here too. It is a black and white woodblock print with one color: a red star. Look at the face in the center. It is split down the middle. The left half is a living man, bearded, with one eye open and looking right at you. The right half is an ancestral mask, carved like stone, with a ringed eye and fangs like Tláloc, the rain god. One face, two times at once. That is what culture feels like from the inside: the person you are today, and everyone who came before you, sharing the same skin.
Across the top runs the stepped fret pattern from the walls of Mitla, in Oaxaca. The name Mitla comes from the Nahuatl Mictlan, the place of the dead, the same land of the dead Quetzalcoatl crossed in the bedroom to bring his people home. Around the face, Conhg carved the animals that belong to this altar. There are two hummingbirds; the Mexica believed fallen warriors came back as hummingbirds. There is a grasshopper, a chapulín, and in the corner sits a hairless dog, a xoloitzcuintle, the dog who guides the souls of the dead across to Mictlan. Behind it all, the red star, a symbol of revolution that in southern Mexico belongs to the Zapatistas.
In Mexico, black and white relief printing has long been an art of the people: cheap to make, easy to share, passed from hand to hand and pasted on the walls of the street. Culture works the same way. It is what cannot be taken from us, what crosses borders in our hands and in our mouths when everything else gets left behind.
El Desierto, 2025
Ash Ernesto. Acrylic and gold acrylic on canvas, 20 x 16 in.
Not for sale
mi cultura, 2024
Conhg Lopez Ausencio. Woodblock print on paper, 22 x 28 in.
$450
Inquire: [email protected]
Herencia, 2026
Ash Ernesto. Multimedia on wooden Montessori chair, 24 x 14 x 15 in.
Not for sale
Programming
Opening Night, Friday, October 2. Gallery Night MKE, Friday, October 16. Mercadito Day, Sunday, November 1: the closing, run as an estate sale, where the furniture and objects that built the house are sold and the home comes apart.
This is the first and only Black & Brown Only exhibition in this building, and I want to tell you plainly why.
I have given this space more work than was ever acknowledged. As an artist, I was displaced from it. When we began asking for things that were well within our rights, we were told we were “no longer a good fit for the space.” I am not sharing this to start a fight. I am sharing it because it is part of the story of this house, and because many of you will recognize it.
Most spaces are built with a certain community in mind, even the ones that call themselves open. Even an art house. Here, there was room for some kinds of art and not others, and the performing arts of our communities, our music and our dance, never quite fit the picture. That feeling of not belonging is not new to us. It follows us into schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, and galleries. It is one of the oldest stories in our lives.
So I did what our families have always done. I built a home anyway. When it closes, the series moves on, the way so many of us have had to, and we will build it again somewhere with room for all of us.
Sources and references
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903.
Espinoza, Dionne, María Eugenia Cotera, and Maylei Blackwell, eds. Chicana Movidas: New Narratives of Activism and Feminism in the Movement Era. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018, 2. Quotations and page number as given in Richard Cruz Davila’s review in Nexo (Julian Samora Research Institute, Michigan State University), Spring 2019.
Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, founded 1980. Smith quotation via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchen_Table:_Women_of_Color_Press; see also Barbara Smith, “A Press of Our Own,” Frontiers 10, no. 3 (1989).
Acosta, Nicole. The HOOPS Project. https://www.atsocanicole.com/about-the-project.
Leyenda de los Soles: Quetzalcoatl, Mictlan, and Cihuacoatl. https://www.mexicolore.co.uk/aztecs/stories/origin-of-people.
Legend of King Condoy. https://www.viveoaxaca.org/2020/06/LeyendaReyc.html.
Ovid, Metamorphoses, book 4: Clytie and Helios.
Kahlo, Frida. Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair, 1940; The Wounded Deer, 1946.
Rivera, Diego. Calla Lily Vendor, 1943.
“Mexicans,” “Bronzeville,” and “Cream City Brick,” Encyclopedia of Milwaukee, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, https://emke.uwm.edu.
Dabke origins: “Palestinian Dabke: History, Steps & Meaning,” Falastin, https://falastin.me/blogs/discover-palestinian-traditions/palestinian-dabke-history.
Laban ayran: “Ayran,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayran.
Michelangelo, Pietà, 1498 to 1499, St. Peter’s Basilica.
43 Voices (2015). https://pamnanet.com/43-voices-exhibition/.