In the Life: Black Queerness — Looking Back, Moving Forward

Detroit’s Carr Center is about to open a landmark exhibition exploring intimacy, kinship, and the reinvention of history through the lens of Black Queerness.

John Edmonds, Two Spirits, 2019.

From September 5 through October 11, 2025, In the Life: Black Queerness – Looking Back, Moving Forward brings together an intergenerational group of artists whose practices span photography, painting, drawing, and archival intervention. Co-curated by Patrick Burton and Wayne Northcross, the exhibition reframes community through chosen kinship and familial memory, offering a vision of Black queer life that is as layered as it is expansive.

The lineup includes April Bey, John Edmonds, Alanna Fields, LeRoy Foster, Clifford Prince King, Richard Lewis, Felicita “Felli” Maynard, Zanele Muholi, Vernando Reuben, Tylonn J. Sawyer, Pamela Sneed, Bre’Ann White, and Anthony Peyton Young. Each contributes a perspective on intimacy, resilience, and the ways history continues to shape the present.

One of the exhibition’s touchpoints is John Edmonds’s series Caress (2022), where quiet black and white photographs stage charged encounters between Black bodies and African sculpture. Some of these objects Edmonds collected on a formative trip to Ghana while others were produced for the tourist market. He describes the images as “quasi-documents” that act as spaces where cultural inheritance meets diasporic memory and where the intimacy between subject and object opens onto questions of care, control, and desire.

Tylonn J. Sawyer, Cut: Kara Walker, 2017.

Building on ideas first explored in his Mother/Child series, Edmonds reimagines the maternal body as both sanctuary and site of tension, a place where comfort, submission, and longing coexist. His portraits challenge stereotypes of Black masculinity by reframing African sculpture as both ancestral touchstone and personal muse. The result is an invitation to consider the ways history is held, caressed, and reimagined in the present.

Edmonds (b. 1989, Washington, D.C.; lives and works in Brooklyn) has exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum, Foam Amsterdam, and the Cincinnati Art Museum, with work held in the collections of MoMA, the Guggenheim, and the National Gallery of Art. A recipient of the Foam Paul Huf Award and the UOVO Prize, his practice continues to expand the possibilities of contemporary portraiture.

In the Life: Black Queerness – Looking Back, Moving Forward opens September 5 at the Carr Center in Detroit and runs through October 11, 2025. It is both a celebration and a reframing, a chance to witness how Black queer artists across generations hold memory, intimacy, and community as acts of resistance and renewal.