JUN 25 - OCT 8
Into the Pluriverse
CURATED BY NORDIA SIMMONDS
Into the Pluriverse is an interdisciplinary, group exhibition that incites the co-conspiracy of many ways of being human. The term pluriverse is a Zapatistan term that illustrates a commitment to and the concept of a world in which many worlds fit (Malandonado-Villalpando, 2022). Through the particularity of Afro-Caribbean diasporic worldmaking practices, the exhibition seeks to trouble ways of being that think of nature as necessarily perfect and untouchable, to highlight queer/multispecies kinship, Black arboricultural practices, and ancestor veneration as vital to temporal (re)negotiation. It proposes the artworks of Jessica Taylor Bellamy, April Bey, and Nia Lee as tools of interrupting systems of oppression and erasure. This program is presented through the generous support of Accelerate Resilience Los Angeles (ARLA).
Closing Reception
October 8, 2026 | 7 PM - 9 PM
As global imperialism continues to disconnect us from our relationship to our natural environment, each other, and spirit, and the green energy reforms fail to disrupt the settler-colonialist imaginary of pristine and idyllic natural environments--which destroys Black bodies and justifies ongoing land theft—this project explores the intervention of art-based world-building practices in connection to geographical, historical, material, and spiritual matters.
ARTISTS
Jessica Taylor Bellamy
April Bey
Nia Lee
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Jessica Taylor Bellamy (she/her) is an artist of juxtapositions: image and text, abstraction and figuration, handmade and mass-produced, reality and fantasy, sunshine and noir. A native Angeleno, the artist’s work is rooted in her observations living at the edge of a precarious paradise of shifting ecological tensions. Working across painting, printmaking, video, and sculpture, constructing dreamlike compositions, Jessica uses fragments of mass media, newspapers, bureaucratic documents, and mail. She combines these with personal markers such as signatures, letters, and fingerprints. These materials are interwoven with hand-painted imagery of luminous skylines, sunsets, and shifting cloud formations. Her practice is rooted in “bridging a distance” between past and present, public and private, and material and memory, and a sustained interest in how archives live through their physical traces: keepsakes, paperwork, and photographs that circulate, accumulate, and transform over time.
April Bey (they/she) grew up in the Bahamas and now resides and works in Los Angeles as a visual artist and art educator. She is currently a tenured professor at Glendale College. Bey’s interdisciplinary artwork is an introspective and social critique of American and Bahamian culture, feminism, generational theory, social media, post-colonialism Speculative futurism/surrealism and Blerd culture. Bey’s two-dimensional mixed media works and installations are from her ongoing Atlantica series. Bey incorporates fur, glitter, vinyl and woven textiles--materials rich in queerness--to craft icons around the images of real-life figures from her community.
Nia Lee (they/she) is a Los Angeles-based artist and writer whose practice materializes Black Food Futurism through sculpture, installation, ritual, and communal performance. Their work explores Black memory, domestic labor, taste, and spirit as portals for ancestral connection and speculative possibility. Nia’s work moves fluidly between material experimentation and multisensory worldbuilding and creates artworks and experiences that merge archival histories with embodied, future-facing imagination. Nia’s work attends to care, liberation, and the architectures that shape Black life.
Nordia Simmonds (they/she) is a queer Afro-Caribbean diasporic philosopher and activist by way of Jamaica, Bronx, New York, and Central Florida. Nordia holds a Masters of Arts in Depth Psychology with a specialization in Community, Liberation, Indigenous, and Eco-Psychologies (CLIE) from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Her curatorial approach is both a care practice and pedagogical tool that expresses consideration for all persons and art pieces involved in any given project whilst acting as an interlocutor to relay messages between the audience and the artwork. They enlist decolonial feminist frameworks in their work to support non-hierarchical and non-binary thinking. For her, this project is at once an offering, meditation, and practice of a worldbuilding without borders.