In deep gratitude to everyone who shared time with me and my work on Friday at Rockwood Museum for We The People.
Sia, Kori, Brian, Di. I love y'all. Lauren, thank you for the invitation and your never-ending belief in my practice. Ryan and Kristen for your patience as you herd artists, lol. And congratulations to @yikuigu , @yesterdaynite , and @mickathurin on such an incredible show.
Artist chat on May 15th. Work is on view until September. 🫶🏽
Who holds the reins of my desires if not my hands?
My hands-my body’s gates of tenderness, the tools of my wonders, be they violent or gentle, be they both.
— Natalie Diaz, These Hands If Not Gods
A morning of thinking about hands. The way they are never neutral. How often they decide before I have a chance to say anything at all.
They reach. They steady. Press into the center of myself to remind me where I begin. Draw a blade through paper to call it form, close around a face and call it love. Learn the weight of a body leaning in.
To bless without spectacle. To mend what I can and to leave what must remain broken.
The heat, contact, friction, choosing, holding, gather, devotion, practice, repetition.
The enormous and important work of our hands.
I’ve been thinking a lot about visibility while curating (my first exhibition!) Constellations of Belonging. About the demands made on Black women’s bodies to be visible, consumable, legible and how much effort it takes to remain intact in that process. Grateful to Debra and Tiana for their trust and brilliance as their work runs toward interior life, toward obscurity, toward what’s held quietly under pressure.
I am pressing on thoughts of my own visibility in this deeply digital moment and this process clarified a great deal about my own practice, what it means to be an artist, what I care about, why it matters who I am making work for and what I understand myself to be in stewardship of.
I hope if you’re in or around the area you’ll stop by on February 6th from 5-9 at The Delaware Contemporary in the Riverfront in Wilmington ♥️
Images: @daniellevennardphotographer
A glimpse of my work, Singular, on show at The Reverb Hotel in Atlanta. A deep thank you to @downtownatlanta and even more to my lovely, @ljacksonharris . Thank you for your intention and care for the work, always ♥️
Look up through January 31, 2026.
I am thinking about practices of unseeing, which is to not look away but to look otherwise. As a way to resist an extractive gaze, to consider presence without spectacle.
37 years a daughter. Nearly 18 years a mother.
The complexity of Black motherhood has always moved subtly, quietly through my work. In the tending, the remembering, the slow reassembling of self.
To mother while still being someone’s daughter is to live in translation. I am in translation.
Giving You the Best That I Got opens today at Art + Practice in Los Angeles.
Deeply grateful to @lookatdominique for the invitation and the care.
A heartfelt thank you to everyone who shared time and space to stand with me, and with the work. To be held, even briefly, in a practice that so often feels precarious, unfinished, and trembling at the edges means more than I can name.
And an extra special thank you to my best friends Di, Sia, and Kori. Thank you for your hands and hearts, I love you dearly.
All of you hold me in ways that steady this whole thing.
There is an art to seeing oneself not as fixed or flawless but as layered, unfinished, revealed and obscured thing all at once.
The work that has emerged from this practice are the quiet, daily attempts to witness myself not through perfection, but through what is revealed in the fragments.
—
The Fragment Holds More Than the Whole presented by The Delawarr Division of the Arts
New works by Shefon N. Taylor
Mezzanine Gallery, Wilmington, DE
Opening May 2, 2025 | On view through May 30
An exploration of archival abstraction, rememory, and the complexity of seeing.
Sitting with a quiet doubt today, of not enough —
not enough time, not enough space,
not enough material to gather the weight of a thought,
not enough clarity to see,
not enough light to follow,
not enough of a hand to cradle what forms,
not enough courage,
not enough faith that what I’m building will hold
Surely, somewhere, I have enough.
The archive repeats itself—in image, in history, in story. Thinking about collage as rupture, as irreverence.
If destruction is devotion. Wondering what we make of absence—the way it shifts, resists, makes space where there should be none.
My relationship to this work has shifted so much. If the archive exist as a living thing I feel called now to interrogate, disrupt, refuse to meet it on its own terms.
To intervene, to let go of nostalgia and press against it, to be more than a witness.
