Beachum Collection Exhibition

Kelvin Beachum is a veteran NFL football player who, with his wife, Jessica, uses art to illuminate American history and contemporary life. This exhibition at YDS features pieces of abstraction, figuration, and mixed media representing themes of identity, power, and the Black experience. Yale Divinity School thanks Jessica and Kelvin Beachum for sharing these selections from their collection.

Below is the catalogue for the Beachum Collection Exhibition January 2025.

Alteronce Gumby

Through Gumby’s fluorescent and chromatic spectrum of iridescent color, the artist engages the viewer and expands the notions through which we perceive form and color, the subjectivity of identity, and the materiality of earth and cosmic space. Alteronce is currently in production for his first documentary feature, COLOR, exploring the many facets of its abundant spectrum experienced around the world.

(Via Alteronce Gumby Studios) “Color is a preoccupation for most painters. For Bronx-based artist Alteronce Gumby, it’s an obsession.” —Vogue

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Barkley L. Hendricks

Barkley L. Hendricks was an American painter and photographer who revolutionized portraiture through his realist and post-modern oil paintings of Black Americans living in urban areas, beginning in the 1960s and 1970s.

Hendricks’ depictions of the Black figure exude attitude and style. The artist culled subjects for his hagiographic portraits from sartorially minded friends and acquaintances he encountered around the world. Steeped in pop culture and balanced with exquisite detail, the cast of characters in Hendricks’ work inhabit an unconventional realism united by painterly mastery.

Hendricks was first a photographer before taking up painting. Beyond his portraiture, he also made distinct works on paper and painted landscapes and still lifes. Throughout his career, Hendricks refused to be boxed into a medium, and his practice is commanding, bold, and without limitations to media or form.

(Via the Estate of Barkley L. Hendricks)

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Dominic Chambers

In The Night is Our Friend, two subjects are resting on the other side of this wall. In this moment, we as viewers are granted permission to rest, following in the footsteps of the subjects who have afforded consent through their own choice to do the same. The consistent theme of respite in Chambers’ work is only matched by the equally consistent remnants of magical realism. This element takes shape as the two spirits that reside on the opposite side of the wall. These two [secret] self-portraits, or dancing spirits as they are affectionately referred to by Chambers, are the artist’s silhouettes. In conversation with Chambers, he reflects on his relationship to color and the effect it has in all art — including the relevance of chiaroscuro, a technique in art emphasizing dramatic contrasts between light and dark.

“I consider myself a student, and I consider the process of making art as an intellectual activity. The idea that museums exist because they hold intellect in the objects that they house is powerful. When I approach a painting, I have to think about the message I want to convey. My job is to offer my perspective as not all perspectives are told.” —Dominic Chambers

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Felandus Thames

The passage of race through time forms the dazzling core of Felandus Thames’s art. His work tries to absorb the bits and pieces of quotidian life—the detritus that remains from the passing of historical time. The historical transformation of racial representation is accordingly the subject of Thames’s passionate contemplation. Thames traces the historical iterations of racial representation in everyday life.

Thames’s art performs an important symbolic act. His works, or rather, his repeating lips, eloquently voice the racial questions of our times. What, for instance, is the visual language of race after the age of civil rights, or racial representation in the time of Obama? Is there such a thing as post-racial art? If so, what does it look like? How does one visualize race when the concept itself has, in some instances, become banal and virtual? That is, how does one represent race today when no single image proves equal to the power and coherence of, say, the slave ship? Thames’s art provides us with a good place to start because it compels us to be creative in grasping the slippages of racial representation across time. About such matters Thames certainly shows himself, even this early in his career, to be an old master full of new tricks.

—Charlie Samuya Veric

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Kenny Rivero

“Faith has always been a comforting way to ‘prepare for dying,’ as a way to cope with that perpetual fear. The work often references a parallel world that may be the after life—it’s almost dreamlike, combining so many aspects of my life and subconscious. The scenes are loosely familiar but feel like something is ‘off’ and not quite realistic. The more mystical aspects of my own spiritual practice are where my faith comes into the paintings. In my community growing up, my aunt was a well-known reader of Barajas, a Tarot-like divination tool that uses a Spanish card deck, where you can communicate with the ancestors. The work speaks directly to that, knowing that I’m part of a legacy that has an ability to connect with spiritual energies.”

—Kenny Rivero

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Kenturah Davis

Fundamental to my interest in portraiture is a manner of approaching portraits as vessels capable of carrying and projecting meaning. Rather than paint images, however, I write them, inscribing the histories that entangle us. The repetition and layering of text to the point of illegibility signals the complexities of how we absorb and embody ideas conveyed through language. Understanding that language interferes as much as it aids us in shaping our perceptions, I’ve followed the path of the written line to a woven one to further my investigation outside of figuration. Unconventional looms and other structures incorporate forms and materials that suggest, and occasionally embody, a liminal space. I make forms that blur distinctions like movement and stillness, opacity and transparency, and levity and gravity. While remaining committed to portraiture, my expanding sculptural practice finds strategies outside figuration to explore concepts around the mysterious, the illegible, and the space of things at the edge of perception.

—Kenturah Davis

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Kevin Beasley

Kevin Beasley creates sculptures and installations made from found materials, personal artifacts, and cultural ephemera. The use of resin helps to bring form to these materials, creating shapes similar to the bodies that might have once inhabited them as a way to preserve memory and highlight their personal and cultural meaning. His pieces explore themes of power, labor, Black identity, and family. The work invites viewers to explore conversations on culture, politics, and history while reflecting on the deeply personal nature of the materials to bring humanity to the forefront.

“As materially oriented as I am,” Kevin Beasley says, “it’s all because there is a context for those materials.”

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Leyla Faye

Faye’s Tug o’ War introduces voluminous figures, molded in strength. Black ink and white negative space compete for balance within the confines of Faye’s composition. Faye’s technique illuminates an account of social discourse. Movement under the constraints of limited space gives way to the push-and-pull of fingers, hands, and arms. An emotional discomfort permeates this elegantly impactful scene.

Faye’s interest in realism coupled with her exploration of varying aesthetic styles help to shape surrealist qualities in her figuration as she explores themes of authenticity and belonging.

Leyla Faye, Lemonade Braids, 2020Oil and Acrylic on Paper, 8 x 8 in.

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Mario Moore

Joy and Pain is a painting of Moore’s nephew. As he created the work, he notes the unequivocal conflict, teetering between a desire for his nephew to experience a childhood with excitement and joy while privy to the unavoidable suffering he will undoubtedly face at the hands of a society rooted in deep patterns of traumatizing the Black body. The police car in the background of Moore’s composition highlights a reality for many: they are ever present and always looking.

“Joy and Pain deliberately is thinking about Black boys’ lives and Black people’s lives and how you can exist in one body having happiness and giddiness and being a child with hopes and goals, the beauty of life and aspirations, but at the same time in that same body, you have to deal with that trauma you are alerted usually at a very young age and as a young boy.”

—Mario Moore

An image of a photograph of the artist’s great uncle, a soldier in the Civil War after being enslaved in his youth, is prominently displayed in the center of the composition. It leans against the iconic DC comic book featuring the battle between Superman and Muhammad Ali with Batman and a host of 1970s celebrities within the crowd. Off-centered, we see the artist himself in the reflection of the gold rimmed vanity mirror, his gaze off site, guiding viewers to the movement of the burning incense above. Viewers are brought back to the composition by way of the Will that freed Moore’s family from slavery, bound to the table from the weight of a silver watch to mark the importance of time. Moore completes his still life with a bowl of water, which serves as a pathway between two worlds. The water’s stillness, shaped by the folds of the 6th Unit United States Cavalry flag, binds each element in unity. Moore’s work reflects dual histories within one frame, exploring a complex personal narrative of two worlds where recognition of the past is essential to moving forward.

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Tomashi Jackson

Balancing her artistic practice with research, Jackson creates work on the stories of displacement and dispossession, particularly within Black and Brown communities in New York. Inspired by the investigative journalism of Stephen Witt and Kelly Mena, Jackson brings further light to the Third-Party Transfer program, a system used to justify sudden foreclosures of properties that have been fully paid for. Jackson’s research-based practice investigates historical and present-day disenfranchisement. Using archival references, Jackson tells the story of the 1955 Brown v. Board of Education II Supreme Court decision that ordered the integration of schools “with all deliberate speed,” a year after Brown v. Board of Education declared segregation unconstitutional. Wake Up Everybody illustrates the account of Brown II and its legacy. Diagonal maroon and lime hues intersect with delicate urgency as they make space for the horizontal and vertically connected lines beneath them. Connectivity and strength feel prevalent in the construction of Jackson’s work as much as geometry and abstraction do.

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Torkwase Dyson

Torkwase Dyson integrates architecture and infrastructure to radically engage with form as power, particularly in how Black and brown bodies compose, perceive, and negotiate space. Responding to the spatial tragedies of enslaved people who hid or stowed away in architectural spaces to attain their freedom, especially Anthony Burns (hull=curve), Henry “Box” Brown (box=square), and Harriet Jacobs (garret=triangle), the shape system is a compositional tool to articulate an infrastructure of resistance in geometric abstraction. (Via Pace Gallery)

“In this moment of environmental precarity we will need to be both liquid and mountains, bird and lava. And it is the density of Black grace that will always be the thing that keeps us in our own humanity. Thinking through the histories of Black liberation, these are the victories that fortify my being in the objects I make. It’s time for a new relationship with abstraction, an illegal abstraction developed out of the condition of new world-building toward liberation and revolution.”

—Torkwase Dyson

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Tunji Adeniyi-Jones

Dance, described by Adeniyi-Jones as a means of communicating across all boundaries and dialects, serves as a mechanism and medium for language. Centering the figure at the forefront of identity and diasporic perspective, Adeniyi-Jones makes use of colors as pathways to non-instructive tones and emotional undertones where viewers can feel and express their own sentiments, void of direction. Bold tones, expressive forms, and fluidity come alive on paper.

The mythology of ancient West African Kingdoms is prevalent in the narratives of Black Harlequin V and Play Cloth. Abstracted figures, rich in identity from the Yoruba diaspora, dance through each composition playfully, with movement contrasted to colorful patterns within the cloth that surrounds each body.

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Vaughn Spann

Spann considers greatly the passing of time and the transience of life. Thus, without creating nor really imposing subjects he deals with loss and sometimes death, symbolic or real, but also with a form of resurrection, a joy that explodes formally on the painting surface. He immerses himself in materiality and movement, pushing the viewer to consider his works as much in a form of pause, or even contemplation, as in the dynamism linked to the expressiveness of gesture.

—Marie Maertens, writer and critic

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