Sovern is proud to present Tender Disruptions, a collection of work created by Aanii Tate and Alyssa Newsham during our 2026 Youth Artist-in-Residence program. 

Archival codification is never an accident. Archives are shaped by who held the camera, the pen, and ultimately the power to decide what mattered enough to remain in books or official government documents. 

Working in parallel, Tate and Newsham turn to the records of their own ancestral histories to intervene and interrogate the archival inheritance handed to them by colonial powers. They ask the viewer to question the settler and colonial gaze, reimagine intimate moments that were flattened by power imbalance, and reflect on whose stories are preserved and legitimized and at what cost.

Tate crafts delicate redactions of widely circulated images of her Diné lineage, photographs that were presumptuously made by settler photographers exploring the Southwest United States in the late 1800s. Her interventions are acts of refusal and care, offering the subjects of these images protection and respite, and an acknowledgment that their capacity for consent was obfuscated by white settler intentions.

Newsham’s assemblages trace her Creole roots through family histories, especially through plaçage, the extralegal unions that shaped intimate life in colonial Louisiana. Working in the gaps of the records, she brings up ethereal stories of desire, negotiation, and survival vulnerably underlaid with passion, persistence, and resilience.

Subversive and confronting, Tender Disruptions becomes an act of reverence. The work tends to the archive as a site of both harm and repair, honoring ancestors by returning to them the dignity and fullness that the record denied.