Fall 2025-Spring/Summer 2026
“Momma Loves Jazz” and “Welcome to the Mothership: They Gather in Their Names”
WHAT: “Momma Loves Jazz” and “Welcome to the Mothership: We Gather in Their Names”
WHEN: June 7-July 26, 2025
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 7, 2-5 p.m.
The paired exhibitions feature artists Carla Sue Lyles and Jakayla Monay, respectively. Artist Stacey Allen, director of artistic programs for the Anderson Center for the Arts, who curated the exhibition, sees both of these works through the lens of non-linear time.
“As Black mother artists, we’re constantly negotiating what to hold on to and what to let go,” Allen explained.
“Jakayla’s imagined future and Carla’s reflections on the past speak to one another in ways that remind us that healing isn’t separate from dreaming. They are part of the same process,” Allen said.
“Monay builds a world full of possibility. I see Jakayla and her work as the future. Her artistic voice provides visual storytelling that creates a realm with Afro futuristic leanings, but with comfort and familiarity, reminding us of the beauty of who we are, as is.
“Carla Sue’s work is deeply personal and grounded in healing. This work also serves as an archive of Southern Black culture and how expressive and material culture shapes our lives,” Allen continues.
Monay, a visual artist who focuses on photography and film, explores Black life, highlighting moments that often go unnoticed.
“I’m interested in what comes after pain and sorrow,” she said, “the quiet recoveries and everyday joys that help us keep going. Through my images, I touch on memory, love and how we find our footing again.”
Lyles describes her work as exploring the intersection of healing, memory and matriarchal legacy through layered storytelling. As a self-taught artist and designer, she leans into fabric, sound and archival materials to create pieces that honor Black womanhood, resilience and the sacred act of remembering.
“Whether through stitched words, vinyl records or collaged photographs, each work is a form of reverence—toward my lineage, toward softness and toward the radical of healing in public,” she explained.
“I believe that art should feel like an embrace—personal yet collective, grounded yet expansive.”
WHAT: “As It Is”
WHEN: August 16-September 27, 2025
OPENING RECEPTION: August 16, 2025
“As It Is,” the Community Artists’ Collective’s upcoming exhibition, showcasing the works of JajaH, opens Saturday, August 16, with a reception, artist talk and musical performance from 4 to 7 p.m.
Artist JajaH, aka Joshua Gray, describes his work as exploring themes of self-awareness and inner transformation.
“My art is rooted in the practice of Vipassana meditation, a path of insight and self-awareness. Through painting, I translate the inner stillness, clarity and transformation that arise in deep meditation. Each piece reflects a moment of presence and introspection—an invitation to pause, breathe and look inward,” he explained.
“In a world of constant distraction, I aim to create space for reflection and connection with the inner self.”
JajaH began drawing at age 12 and studied art at the High School for Performing and Visual Arts and the University of Houston, where he became active in the city's street art and mural scene. A former member of Project Row Houses and co-founder of the Annunaki Artist Collective (2012–2016), JajaH has exhibited widely, including his 2018 solo show “The Light Machine.” That same year, he began practicing Vipassana meditation, which now deeply influences his murals, portraits and performances.
The exhibition continues through September 27 and will include a meditation sound bath on September 13 at 11 a.m.
WHAT: “What Would I Not Give”
WHEN: October 11-November 22, 2025
OPENING RECEPTION: October 11, 2025
Visual artist and educator Jean Shon’s “What Would I Not Give” opens October 11 from 4 to 7 p.m. at the Community Artists’ Collective. A poetry reading, delivered by poets Icess Fernandez, Reyes Ramirez and Anthony Sutton, will happen from 5 to 6 p.m.
Shon is a visual artist and educator working at the intersection of images, text, installation and photography. Her work lingers between the thresholds of legibility and illegibility, rupture and relation, and fact and fiction in order to sustain connection through loss. She often employs family and community artifacts as immediate vessels to the intimate and familiar. Through subtle manipulation and regeneration, the work is pared down to its essence, asking us to redefine our relationships to a being, a space, a notion, a thing. She, in turn, is creating a new archive—a speculative one based upon her evolving relationship with the material. Rather than being reduced to static archival relics, her work opens up space to reconstruct memory in perpetuity.
As a second-generation daughter, designated memory keeper and family link—Shon is perpetually negotiating the burden of debt, guilt, and obligation with her kin. Her work is a testament to this struggle: piecing together fragments and residue in order to understand, honor and carry forward who and what came before us.
The exhibition continues through November 22, concluding with an artist talk from 2 to 5 p.m.