Gallery Aferro: Dignity and Beauty

Main Gallery
February 23–May 24

Curated by Edwin Ramoran

Visionary artists and changemakers Evonne M. Davis and Emma Wilcox founded Gallery Aferro in Newark’s Ironbound neighborhood in 2003, then moved downtown three years later to 73 Market Street. Considered the oldest alternative space in New Jersey, Aferro prioritized cultural work engaging with Brick City’s social inequities, economic struggles, and transformative change. In January 2024, after twenty years of supporting art and artists and organizing hundreds of innovative exhibitions, residencies, and community-engagement and educational programs, Davis and Wilcox have announced the closing of their ambitious enterprise.

“Aferro was experimental, expansive, and multivoice in tendency; animated by belief in radical generosity, risks, trust, and exchanges of ideas,” Davis and Wilcox wrote. “As working people, we aimed to create and share resources, and upend conventional notions of who art is by or for. Connections made across difference and between generations were an important part of our work year after year, and we believe that the full impact and meaning of this work will be ongoing. It doesn’t end, it gets passed on.”

To honor Gallery Aferro’s twenty-year legacy, this exhibition brings together artworks by a select group of alumni from the fellowship programs that served specific cohorts with financial support, studio space, and exhibition opportunities. Within this progressive, creative community, the Lynn and John Kearney Fellowship for Equity was awarded to women of color, while the Sustainable Arts Fellowship was given to artists who are parents. The alumni represented here are Katrina Bello, Anjali Benjamin-Webb, Ruth Borgenicht, Amy Faris, Krystle Lemonias, kara lynch, Bud McNichol, Lisette Morel, and Steve Rossi.

With their life-affirming, transformative, and occasionally somber themes of family, loss, memory, and place, these artworks reinscribe the sense of unity associated with fellowship. They underscore the central message in Gallery Aferro’s mission statement for the advancement of “human dignity and beauty,” pushing for the kinds of intersectional, empowering, and empathic changes inspired by an ethos of care, community, liberation, and love.

This exhibition is supported by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, a state partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Steve Rossi, Sidewalk Alchemy, 2011, Inkjet prints and gold leaf, framed 22 x 52 x 1 ½ in.