About the Exhibition

The Weight of Softness is an exhibition about love as liberation—embracing its fullness: joy, fear, confusion, and clarity—and affirming that the softest parts of us often carry the greatest weight. For Black women, softness has long been coded as weakness, yet in truth it is a radical force: a site of power, a strategy of survival, and a source of beauty.

This exhibition gathers the work of Black women and femme-identifying artists whose practices illuminate love as an expansive, transformative act. Their paintings, mixed media works, and sculptures testify to the power of intimacy — the closeness of family, the vulnerability of partnership, the continuity of ancestry, and the sustenance of community. By centering softness, they remind us that tenderness is not the opposite of strength but its foundation.

The artists here render softness in many forms: the quiet intimacy of a mother and child, the embrace of lovers, the abstraction of color and form that gestures toward care and connection. Some works take on the tactile layers of fabric, stitched surfaces, folds, and textures that recall the labor of care and the adornment of the body. Others lean into the symbolic, transforming the very idea of being held, supported, or uplifted into visual form.

For Black women, softness has never been an indulgence; it is a radical gesture in a world that too often denies it. In these works, softness is weighty because it holds memory, lineage, and the capacity to imagine futures that are freer and more loving. Here, softness is not a retreat from struggle but a way of moving through it—constantly shaping and reshaping what liberation looks like.

The Weight of Softness honors love as a transformative force: one that sustains families, builds communities, and endures across generations. By embracing the paradox of strength within vulnerability, the exhibition invites us to reconsider how softness carries us, liberates us, and ultimately remakes us.