Saturday, November 21, 2026 through Saturday, January 9, 2027; Opening Reception November 21 from 3-5 PM
Rooms We Carry is an immersive exhibition exploring the everyday spaces where Black life, culture, memory, and community are made and carried forward. Centered around three familiar spaces—a living room, kitchen, and barbershop/hair salon—the exhibition considers these rooms not simply as domestic or social spaces, but as sites of care, storytelling, transformation, and collective memory.
The living room becomes a space for gathering, celebration, vulnerability, and family history. The kitchen explores food as a language of nourishment, connection, and inheritance, inviting visitors to contribute their own family recipes and stories toward a community cookbook. The barbershop and hair salon serve as spaces of transformation and sacred trust, where conversation, style, music, and care intersect.
Bringing together visual art, sound, textiles, food, film, oral history, and participatory programming, Rooms We Carry asks what makes a space feel like home—and what we carry with us when we leave it. Throughout the exhibition, visitors will be invited not only to experience the rooms but to contribute to their ongoing story through workshops, conversations, screenings, cooking, hair care, and storytelling.
Rather than presenting Black culture as something static or historical, Rooms We Carry centers the living, evolving traditions that continue to shape how Black communities gather, care for one another, remember, and imagine the future.
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CURATED BY
Cori Smith
CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS
Jalen Ford / Toure
Brandie Fields / O’SHAE
Nikki Justice
tiffany m johnson
Casha Mills
Glenn North
Cherline Philogene
Sonié Joi Thompson-Ruffin
Brittany Shyne
Harold Smith Jr
Exhibition Details
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Casha Mills
Casha Mills is a multidisciplinary artist, poet, and performer and a native of Wyandotte County, Kansas. Working across painting, poetry, mixed media, and performance, Mills creates work rooted in Black identity, memory, healing, and the stories we carry with us.
Her visual practice blends contemporary portraiture, pop art, and Afrofuturist influences with bold color, symbolism, and language. Often moving between the personal and the collective, Mills explores the ways history, culture, family, and lived experience shape how we understand ourselves and the spaces we inhabit.
Mills is the author of This May Hurt a Little (2023) and has exhibited bodies of work including Faces of a Goddess, Mamas, Madams & Moneymakers, and In His Element. Her creative practice extends beyond the gallery through poetry, performance, improv, and arts-based youth programming, reflecting her belief that art can be both a record of who we have been and a space to imagine who we are becoming.
Harold Smith Jr
Harold Smith is a multidisciplinary artist whose primary practice is painting but also includes writing. photography, and filmmaking. A retired public school teacher, his work focuses on the simultaneously complementary and contradictory, internal and external narratives that Black men in America must navigate, not only to flourish, but to survive. Harold is a recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a Charlotte Street Visual Artists Award, a James Baldwin Residency Fellowship at MacDowell, and a Byron Cohen Travel Grant through Charlotte Street. He has attended MacDowell, Art Omi, and Escape to Create Residencies. A resident of Kansas City, Kansas, Harold also writes for KC Studio magazine and has produced the UrbanKore Art Exposition which empowers artists from the urban core.
Jalen Ford / Toure
Toure is a Kansas City–based multidisciplinary artist, barber/owner at Klassic Guy on 9th, and creative director. His practice moves between fashion, grooming, photography, events, and visual storytelling, exploring identity, community, and the relationship between people and place. As the founder of OTBS (Off To A Bad Start), he creates collaborative spaces where artists, musicians, designers, barbers, and creatives can connect and build culture together. His work is rooted in the belief that everyday spaces and experiences can become meaningful forms of creative expression.
Nikki Justice
Nikki is a ceramic artist, illustrator, and painter from Kansas City, Missouri. As a multidisciplinary artist, she loves to blend different mediums into a single piece, layering ideas to tell fuller, richer stories. Her work often explores themes of nostalgia, the tension between organic and geometric forms, and the intersectionality of being a black queer woman. They hold a Bachelor of Science from Northwest University with a major in Interactive Digital Media and dual focus in computer science and digital imaging. Her work has been featured in galleries & boutiques around Kansas City and she was a featured artist for the 2026 Parade of Hearts season.
Brandi Fields / O’SHAE
O’SHAE is a Kansas City–based DJ and art director whose work brings music, visual storytelling, and atmosphere into conversation. Before stepping behind the decks, O’SHAE developed her creative practice through art direction, learning to build worlds through imagery, concept, and emotion. DJing gave those worlds a soundtrack. Today, that foundation informs her approach to music selection: considering how a song feels, what memories it holds, and how it connects to the people and stories around it. Her genre-fluid sets move between familiar favorites and unexpected discoveries, creating connections across sounds without losing the thread. Rooted in curiosity and a love of a good blend, her practice invites listeners to hear something they know differently and find something new to carry with them.
After a spinal cord injury changed her relationship with movement, O’SHAE found liberation in DJing. Sound became another way to express herself and connect with others. Across her work, she approaches music as a storytelling medium, building experiences that make room for memory, feeling, discovery, and connection through shared listening.
Sonié Joi Thompson-Ruffin
Sonié is a co-founder of the African American Artists Collective. She serves on the Kansas City Museum Foundation Board and Curatorial committee, she served ten years as curator in residence for the American Jazz Museum’s Changing. She has conducted workshops and lectures about African American fabric art at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and exhibited her work at the David C. Driskell Art Center, Spencer Museum, and the Holter Museum, among others.
Glenn North
Glenn is the Director of Inclusive Learning & Creative Impact at The Museum of Kansas City. Prior to that he served as the Executive Director of Bruce R. Watkins Cultural Heritage Center and Museum. He is a Cave Canem fellow, a Callaloo creative writing fellow, a recipient of the Charlotte Street Generative Performing Artist Award, and the current poet laureate of the 18th and Vine jazz district.
Cherline Philogene
Cherline Philogene is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, and writer. As a Haitian immigrant, she uses fiber-based processes such as quilting, weaving, and beading to tell stories that celebrate the African diaspora while critiquing how hegemonic imperial forces affect the Global South. She blends Afro-Caribbean symbols and iconography with personal and collective histories to open conversations about a liberatory future for all, across lines of race, class, sex, gender, and beyond.
Philogene spent her formative years in Óboy, Haiti, with her mother before immigrating to Miami, Florida, to join her father. She currently maintains her practice between Miami, Florida, and Kansas City, Missouri. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Fiber, with minors in Entrepreneurial Art and Design Studies and Social Practice, from the Kansas City Art Institute.
In May 2026, Philogene, in collaboration with Men Beni, led an indigo workshop honoring Haitian ancestors who were forcibly enslaved to harvest the indigo plant. The workshop helped our ancestral spirits reconcile their relationship with the indigo plant, heal, and reconnect with the earth. In her practice as an artist, collaborator, curator, and facilitator, Philogene brings forward art and cultural catalysts to make ideas available to audiences. Through this, she creates a trialogue between the audience, the artist, and the institution.
Brittany Shyne
Brittany Shyne is an award-winning filmmaker and cinematographer based in Dayton, Ohio. Working across narrative and nonfiction, her films explore the complexity of everyday life, examining themes such as personal histories, alienation, and cultural modernization. Utilizing observational techniques and poetic language, her work weaves together frameworks of race, class, culture, and family lineage.
Her debut feature, Seeds, premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, where it received the esteemed U.S. Documentary Grand Jury Award. The film went on to receive numerous honors, including the Maysles Documentary Center’s Albie Award, IDA’s Emerging Filmmaker and Best Director Award, and Cinema Eye Honors for Best Debut Feature and Cinematography. The film was also nominated for two Critics’ Choice Awards and the Independent Spirit Award for Truer Than Fiction. Seeds was shortlisted for the 2026 Academy® Awards. Currently, she’s a BAFTA Breakthrough fellow.
tiffany m johnson
tiffany m johnson is a Black and queer research and land based artists interested in creating spaces (and a world) where Black people can exhale. She uses archives as tools for public intervention, community preservation, and political education to challenge historical narratives, center understudied subjects and rebuild human-to land relations. Currently she is working to redefine her curatorial practice through the lens of the solidarity economy and use her home for artistic activation and as a working communal space.
In 2024, she completed the two-year Research and Development Lab+ Outside the Walls fellowship with Threewalls. As a fellow, she developed Uncounted and Counting, a multi-flag public installation at Rainbow Beach Park that speaks to the survivor-led anti-violence movement history in Chicago. For the exhibition, a spiral fuels and fills, at 500 Capp Street in San Francisco, she featured a sound piece and poetic essay that intertwined historical, archival, and artistic sources to blur the lines between South African apartheid, the development of safari culture, and Western art. During the 2022 Anchor Curatorial Residency, she developed the group exhibition Finding Ceremony to examine the tension between safety, care, and (in)visibility of Black and Brown lives in public space. tiffany attended SOAS, University of London, for her Master’s in Migration and Diasporas Studies. In 2023 and 2024, while in residency at The Luminary and the Center for Afrofuturism, her studies continued through the ongoing independent research project on Black fugitive presence in ecological histories in the Midwest. As of 2026, tiffany’s cultural work has been published in two art books.
