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Meditations: Black Expression, Abstraction, and the Spirit – Live!

A MOCRA Voices series focusing on Black creative expression, abstraction and spirituality

Release date: July 28, 2025

“Meditations: Black Expression, Abstraction, and the Spirit” explores the intersection of spirituality and the artistic practice of Black creatives encountering ideas within the wide lexicon of abstraction. 

On May 3, 2025, MOCRA welcomed artists, curators and art historians in a public conversation on these topics. After each participant presented about their individual practice and research, the group engaged in a lively discussion that included audience questions. 

This program was made possible through generous support from the Regional Arts Commission. 

Part 1

Part 2

Related episodes

Season 1 Introduction

Felipe Luciano and Malcolm Mooney

Lauren Kelley and Summer Sloane-Britt

Chester Higgins and Leslie King-Hammond

Credits

Producer: David Brinker
Creative Director: Bentley Brown
Videographer: Matt Peterson

Featured in This Episode

A shoulder-length photograph of an adult man with auburn hair in tight curls, close cropped along the sides, a moustache and a well-trimmed, triangle-shaped beard, gazes calmly straight ahead. He wears a blue and green flannel shirt and sits in front of a brown and beige swath of fabric with an abstract design.

Bentley Brown

Bentley Brown is a multidisciplinary artist, curator and doctoral candidate at The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and is based in the Bronx, New York, and Phoenix. His research at the institute explores the pioneering role of Black artists and Black creative spaces within New York City’s contemporary art movements of the late 1960s through the mid-1980s. In his artistic practice, inspired by African American cultural production, abstract and figurative expressionist approaches to the artistic process and the desert landscape of his native Phoenix, Brown uses the mediums of canvas, found objects, photo-collage and film to explore themes of Black identity, cosmology, and American interculturalism.

A shoulder-length photograph of an adult woman with tightly braided black hair wearing dangling earrings and a floral-lace pattern top, holding a floral-print wrap draped across her left shoulder. She stands in front of a canary yellow background and smiles warmly.

Dail Chambers

Dail Chambers is a St. Louis-based visual artist, creative consultant and grower. Her visual art practice is a multimedia exploration in genealogy, women’s narratives and social environmental art. She has received numerous awards and fellowships throughout the United States. As a homeschooling, teaching artist mother, she has traveled internationally, creating curriculum lesson plans to enhance and motivate inter-generational learning environments.

A shoulder-length photograph of a man with textured black hair, a moustache, and wearing black-rimmed glasses. His face is dramatically illuminated from the left and he looks intently straight ahead, his right eyebrow slightly raised. He wears a black crew-neck shirt. The room in the background is out of focus.

Damon Davis

Damon Davis is a post-disciplinary, Emmy Award-winning artist based in St. Louis. He is co-director of the critically acclaimed documentary Whose Streets? chronicling the Ferguson uprisings. Davis is known for his work designing the recent monument to Mill Creek Valley in downtown St. Louis as part of the Brickline Greenway. His work has been nominated for the Peabody Award and is featured in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Davis is a Firelight Media, Sundance Labs, TED and Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow.

A shoulder-length portrait of a woman with textured black hair, closely cropped on the sides, stands in front of a brick wall. She wears glasses with a blue tortoise-shell pattern, gold earrings, a gold chainlink necklace, and a black top with a floral-print jacket. Her smiles slightly gazes with a pleasant expression.

Bukky Gbadegesin

Olubukola A. Gbadegesin is an assistant professor in art history and African American Studies at Saint Louis University. She has published in African Arts, History of Photography and Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled "Picturing Modern Selves in Colonized Places: Photography as a Strategy of Power in Lagos, Nigeria." Her broad research interests center on photography, portraiture, politics of representation, and print culture in Africa and the Diaspora.

A shoulder-length photograph of a young adult woman with auburn-tinted black hair pulled back in a pony tail that drapes across her left shoulder. She wears a heather-gray turtleneck sweater and large gold hoop earrings. She stands against a caramel-colored background. Golden light dramatically illuminates the left side of her face and leaves the right side in shadow.

Summer Sloane-Britt

Summer Sloane-Britt is an art historian and curator based in Los Angeles. Her research centers on the intersection of photography and liberation movements through a global lens. Her dissertation explores the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) photography department, emphasizing their innovative contributions to the 1960s Black Freedom Movement. She has held positions at the National Gallery of Art, the Grey Art Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Duke University Press, Open Book Publishers, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Museum of Modern Art have published her writing. She received her Ph.D. in art history in 2025 from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She serves as the program director of the Billie Holiday Theatre's Black Arts Initiative and in the fall will begin as assistant professor of contemporary U.S. art history at Occidental College.

A shoulder-length photograph of a young adult woman with plaited black hair drawn into a light yellow band behind her head. She wears a sleeveless cream-colored top and stands looking slightly down at the camera with an intent gaze. In the background, out of focus, is a painting with a woman in profile who is positioned just to the right of the subject's head.

Sydney Vernon

Sydney Vernon lives and works in College Park, Maryland. The question of what her work is has a simple answer: Drawing. She uses drawing materials to sketch through thinking, documentation and preparing for what's next. She sketches through theory, fine art, mutual aid, and love, mapping the relationships between empire and collapse, dignity and survival. Her practice is one of integrity, pleasure, and legitimacy — not because institutions define it as such, but because she does. Most recently, Vernon has shown at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., Kapp Kapp in New York, and 125 Newbury in New York.