Kyle Bellucci Johanson: To Be For Forbears

To Be For Forbears is an exhibition organized around historical projects of struggle and survival across generations. Who and what are we made of, and what do we make of that? The show gathers five artists whose practices examine inheritance through photographs, drawings, diagrams, objects, and testimony passed down across time, borders, and language.

To forbear is to endure, to hold something in reserve. The exhibition works to animate a dialectic between carrying forward, and being constituted by what and who one carries.

Andre Keichian traces queer identity and migration through the figure of his Armenian grandfather, who fled the genocide across Western Asia and came to rest in Argentina, using sea and mountains to think beyond bodies and borders. Cristhian Varela compiles three generations of histories shaped by U.S. commercial intervention in Central America, voiced through story, song, and prose, with labor as a unifying force between displacement and perseverance. Nate Young begins with a fugitive, his grandfather fleeing the Jim Crow South on a stolen horse, and works outward into the paradox of freedom, fugitivity, being, and nothingness. Nyeema Morgan enacts repetition as both devotion and undoing: drawing as a practice that accumulates, resists, breaks down, and begins again. Yun Hsiang Wang meditates on the loss of both of her grandmothers through the rituals of mourning she has inherited and those she is actively constructing, a transcultural practice of slow, intentional remembering.

Working across photography, moving image, drawing, and sound, these six artists transcend nostalgia through negotiations with the broken, the partial, the untranslatable. They ask what non-aligned futures we might imagine and construct with loss and lack, rather than privileging their negation. To Be For Forbears invites visitors to think and feel through their own oral and material inheritances and to consider what they are in turn building.