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Curated by Jasmine Gabrielle Washington, Rich in What They Can’t Measure examines value beyond systems that rely on visibility, productivity, and quantification. The exhibition brings together artists whose practices center care, labor, intimacy, interiority, and inherited knowledge—forms of wealth that resist easy measurement yet sustain life, culture, and community.
Historically, Black life has been assessed through extractive frameworks that flatten complexity and render care invisible. This exhibition pushes against those logics, asking what becomes possible when worth is understood through presence rather than proof, relationship rather than output, and endurance rather than efficiency.
Across photography, video, installation, and material gesture, the works gathered here attend to the body as archive and infrastructure. They honor acts of holding, carrying, tending, remembering, and refusing—gestures often dismissed as informal or immeasurable, yet foundational to survival and self-determination.
Rich in What They Can’t Measure invites viewers to slow down and reconsider how value is assigned, who is allowed fullness, and what forms of abundance exist beyond institutional recognition. The exhibition asserts that what sustains us most—care, memory, intimacy, and interior life—has never required permission to exist.
The artists featured in Rich in What They Can’t Measure work across painting, photography, sculpture, and mixed media to examine interior life, memory, lineage, and the labor of becoming. Each practice resists easy legibility, attending instead to forms of knowledge that are felt, inherited, embodied, and lived.
Featured Artists:
Together, these artists attend to the body and assert voice as archive and infrastructure, insisting that what sustains us most cannot be measured, extracted, or reduced.
Curatorial Statement
Rich in What They Can’t Measure is a group exhibition I curated as part of my ongoing research into Black visibility, language, and the politics of perception. It exists in direct response to systems that demand legibility, productivity, and recognition as conditions for value.
I am interested in how worth is shaped—and distorted—by frameworks that privilege what can be measured, optimized, and made legible, while dismissing care, interiority, and relational labor as excess or invisible. These systems do not merely overlook complexity; they actively flatten it. They determine not only what is seen, but what is preserved, rewarded, and allowed to endure.
Featuring work by four recent MICA graduates whose practices resist easy reading, this exhibition centers forms of knowing and wealth that exist beyond metrics, extraction, and institutional validation. Across photography, video, painting, installation, and material gesture, the works gathered here attend to the body and assert voice as archive and infrastructure—holding memory, lineage, and lived knowledge without offering them up for consumption.
This exhibition is the first public program under Use Your Voice (UYV), a philanthropic cultural platform I founded to center humankind across difference, beyond dominant systems of value and measurement. Envisioned as an annual offering, Rich in What They Can’t Measure begins from the lived experiences and perspectives of Black women, while refusing containment within a single narrative or frame.
This exhibition does not ask to be proven. It refuses the demand to translate itself into comfort or clarity. Instead, it asks what becomes possible when we stop measuring ourselves by systems never built to hold us—and begin to recognize value in what has always sustained us.
What is held here—care, memory, intimacy, interior life—has never required permission to exist. This exhibition does not grant it legitimacy. It insists that it has always been legitimate.
Guest Collaborators for Programming:
Together, they contribute to conversations that extend the exhibition beyond the gallery walls—centering reflection, care, and lived experience as essential forms of knowledge. Their presence supports dialogue around ancestry, visibility, value, and interior life, helping create spaces for collective listening, exchange, and community engagement.
About Soft Gather™
Aliana’s fiber-based, communal art practice, Soft Gather™, creates trauma-informed healing installations for Black communities through color and textiles. Founded in 2023, these immersive spaces invite gathering, reflection, rest, and connection through weaving, crochet, rug tufting, sewing, macrame, and upholstery—all informed by the community it’s serving. Each installation lives in community spaces for extended periods—from therapy suites to wellness centers—adapting to evolving needs. The practice extends through Soft Gather™, Quiet Flame, a series of intimate gatherings for the quiet, introverted Black women and gender-expansive individuals seeking to explore their quiet power, connections, and fiber play. This is a space of being together without the pressure to be “on.” Soft Gather™, Quiet Flame honors that our reserved nature isn’t something to overcome—it’s a form of strength, a sustained inner fire that burns with intention.
Outside of teaching yoga, Diamond enjoys exploring herbalism, traveling abroad, and a good laugh. In her free time she likes to experiment with tea blending, nurture her plants, reset on a trail somewhere, and generally stay open to learning and new experiences.
Wealth In Wellness LLC is a Baltimore-based yoga business offering classes, workshops, and private experiences. Rooted in psychology and education, our work emphasizes well-rounded and diverse yoga practices featuring mindfulness, yoga philosophy, and integration of wellness into everyday life. Our vision (G.E.M.) is to: Gather in community, Encourage healthy change, and Move towards feelings of freedom. Guided by the belief that wellness in all forms is a birthright, Wealth In Wellness creates reflective spaces where movement, creativity, and healing intersect. Offerings take place in studios, online, or in community settings while partnering with local organizations to amplify mental wellness. There is wealth in your wellness.
She descends from a long line of “take-no-stuff kind of folk” from Maryland, North Carolina,
Virginia, Georgia, and beyond. She is forever grateful for all of their sacrifices, brilliance, dreams, fortitude, and prayer of which she is a direct result.
She is a founding member of the Black queer woman and femme-led artist collective BALTI
GURLS (2014-2018). In her decade of working in the arts she has supported creative endeavors at organizations such as BCAN, BLACK MATTER, BlackStar Projects, Black Femme Supremacy Film Festival, and Retrospect Studios. Currently, she supports programmatic efforts at The Luminal Theater.
In 2021 she launched ZUZU HAUS, an audio project dedicated to exploring the unique
relationship Black folks have with their home spaces, past and present. Currently she is working on two new projects: a zine entitled NINE HUNDRED & TWENTY FIVE SUNS that explores the practice of “ancestral oracle deck making” as a catalyst for grief processing and reckoning with personal and inherited archives. And a short film