Exhibit Info
This Exhibition Is No Longer Showing
Title:
Celestial Bodies : Precolonial Black African Queer Identity
Dates:
06/30/2025 - 09/03/2025
Location:
Reading Room
About:
The “Celestial Bodies” exhibition tells a small yet fascinating piece of the story of the African continent’s rich, queer and gender-nonconforming story. The exhibition features a collection of five, 24″x36″ acrylic paintings on canvas that represent real-life figures and deities from indigenous African spiritual systems. Included in the exhibition also are four masks cut out of wooden panel board, each measuring roughly 20″ high and 8″ wide. This exhibition seeks to understand how Africans of various cultures and ethnic groups not only viewed but celebrated individuals and narratives that we would recognize today as within the LGBTQIA+ realm.
About the Artist
Artist Bio
Rashad Malik Davis is an author, illustrator, educator and dreamer. He is a graduate of Tufts University where he majored in anthropology and minored in Mandarin Chinese. Davis is the illustrator of the best-selling children’s book “Sunne’s Gift: How Sunne Overcame Bullying to Reclaim God’s Gift.” His debut venture into publishing his own work, “Carefree, Like Me!: Chapter 1 – Root the Brave,” won the 2017 Best Indie Book Award in the Children’s Category, and his second book, “Carefree, Like Me! Chapter 2: Sacra the Joyous”, followed in 2018. The seven-part series has themes of cultural diversity and inclusion, fantasy, empathy and emotional literacy throughout, and is inspired by his own life experiences with his real-life best friend Nina, his connection to his spirituality, and his love of adventure tales. He is represented by Sera Rivers of Spielburg Literary Agency. For additional information, visit ramalikillustrations.com.
Artist Statement
As a child, artist Rashad Malik Davis struggled with reconciling his Blackness with his Queerness. Everything in his environment told him, explicitly or otherwise, that the ways in which he loved were wrong. But how could the universal truth of love be wrong? This created a schism in his psyche. How could he hold his Blackness and his Queerness together in peace? How could he make room for the multitudinous pieces of him that begged and cried out for expression? For many years, he let half of himself metaphorically die.
It wasn’t until college when Rashad began exploring Queerness through an anthropological lens that he began to see his identity as not only ancient, but also important. He saw the ways in which Queerness was held in high regard, normalized, relied upon, and revered in many indigenous cultures the world over. And he saw the ways in which colonialism wrought havoc upon ecosystems that were in balance with not only nature but the cosmos itself. This exhibition is a reclamation of Rashad’s power but also of the historical narrative. This is a reclaiming of his magic, too.
He searched the cosmos and dusted off the history books to put it on canvas so you can see our – and hopefully your – magic too.
Artist Website
https://www.ramalikillustrations.com
Social Media
Instagram: @ramalik_illustrations
Twitter: @RashadMDavis