For this exhibition, the curator has put the labels for all of the artwork pieces in one place in the gallery, along with a map. For the purposes of this guide, we will include the labels with each piece.
Moving forward into the gallery, the first piece forms the entry. The walls of this room are a maroon-purple color. The hallway’s walls and ceiling are covered in a collaged installation sculpture creating a canopy.
This first work in the gallery is Blood and Breath, by Alicia Piller. On the left wall, large riblike structures of off-white cardboard wrapped in dark green fabric reach upwards, with dried branches attached to the ends. Newspapers about political and social events and historical photographs of Black women are collaged onto these ribs and the surface of the skeletal canopy. Tulle and fabric printed with images of trees drapes from the ceiling and blocks the light from the windows.
The wall label reads:
Alicia Piller (b. 1982, Chicago, IL USA)
Blood and Breath, 2025
Mixed media
Blood and Breath merges organic and synthetic materials to explore the interplay between violence and vitality, grief and growth. Covered in latex and resin, sustainably sourced manzanita branches and found objects from the artist’s own archive and the Los Angeles landscape ascend into a textile canopy imprinted with historical and contemporary images of activists. Local manzanita trees thrive in nutrient-poor soils and can tolerate extreme drought, freezing temperatures, and intense fire. This living archive, accompanied by a soundtrack of deep brown noise, positions the forest not only as a site of memory and mourning, but as an emergent space for new futures—where bodies, land, and legacy are entangled in both rupture and repair.
This is the end of the wall label.
Moving forward into the gallery, the next thing you will approach on your left hand side is the curatorial text. The curatorial text reads:
“Flesh of the Forest” is written in all caps, lime green against the maroon walls. To the right, the exhibition dates read: August 28 - December 13.
Flesh of the Forest brings together nine contemporary artists from the African diaspora whose work engages with the forest as a rich, multilayered site of history, memory, sensation, and feeling. Through sculpture, painting, film, and installation, the first emerges as both a surreal landscape and a reservoir of ancestral knowledge where the visible and invisible coexist. In this exhibition, danger, whimsy, enchantment, vulnerability, abundance, and darkness precipitate alternate ways of seeing, hearing, being, and knowing that are at once historical, speculative, and ecological. The works on view also imagine new forms of human and nonhuman interaction that dispense with exploitative entanglements between empire and land. Taken together, the works in Flesh of the Forest constitute alternative forms of life and living at and after the edge and end of the world.
This exhibition is curated by Tiffany E. Barber, Assistant Professor of African American Art in the Department of Art History at UCLA.
Below the exhibition description, a list of the featured artists’ names is written:
Jonathan Barber, Sydney Cain, Jerome Dent Jr., Mario Lewis, Simphiwe Ndzube, Josèfa Ntjam, Alicia Piller, Reuben Telushkin, Reyson Velásquez.
This is the end of the text on this wall. Turning to your right, there are two works on the next wall, with the entry to the next room between them.
The left-hand piece is Land Circuits (Warriors) by Sydney Cain. The piece features a white background on a landscape canvas, with a black form taking over the bottom half. This form is organic and abstract, and from a distance might appear to look like vegetation. However, up close, you are able to see faces, disguised within the brush. A closer look reveals a top layer of graphite markings, numbers and lines making up a mathematical tree diagram.
The piece to the right of the doorway is I Am Everywhere (Sassafrass).
The piece appears on a portrait-oriented canvas, painted in a similar style to the previous piece. A large black form takes up the majority of the canvas, on the bottom half portion. Human-like forms can be made out in the abstract form. The upper half of the canvas appears ashy with messy splatters, and ethereal light hints of jewel tones of magenta and green.
The label for these pieces reads:
Sydney Cain (b. 1991, San Francisco, CA USA)
Land Circuits (Warriors), 2024.
Acrylic, pigment and soft pastel on wood.
Private Collection, Courtesy of Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco CA.
I Am Everywhere (Sassafras), 2021.
Acrylic, pigment and soft pastel on wood.
Collection of Aryn Drake-Lee, Courtesy of Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco CA.
These two paintings from the artist’s The Forest is the Water series center on themes of Blackness, vulnerability, and liminality. The dark tonal palette and ethereal brushstrokes of each canvas evoke ritual and resilience. Darkness and apparition here are both material and metaphor. Line and contour blur and dissolve; Blackness is at once present and absent, luminous and vast, yet details are not easily discernible. The forest in these works is a site of fugitivity where danger and enchantment intermingle, and where Blackness is both rooted and radically unbound.
This is the end of the label.
Entering the main gallery space through the doorway, the room is dark and the walls are covered in dark green fabric drapery. Moving counterclockwise on your right, the third piece is a video projected on the wall.
Matter Gone Wild, by Josèfa Ntjam, is a surreal and abstract film that blends performance, poetry, and digital collage. The film features Ntjam embodying hybrid, plant-like figures that shift between forms within a surreal landscape of roots, plant textures, and microscopic organisms. A distorted, echoing voice, sometimes human or mechanical, recites poetry about revolt, memory, and survival. It portrays a hypnotic and ritual-like atmosphere. In the background, there is ambient noise, electronic rhythms, and natural sounds such as rustling leaves and flowing water. Throughout the film are references to African independence movements. Rather than following a clear narrative, the piece takes the viewer into a sensory world that is symbolic of rebellion and rebirth.
The label reads:
Josèfa Ntjam (b. 1992, Metz, France)
Matter Gone Wild, 2023.
HD video, 19 minutes.
Written and directed by Josèfa Ntjam, in collaboration with Sean Hart and Nicolas Pirus. Co-produced by Aquatic Invasion Production, Fonds [SCAN], Fondation Pernod Ricard. Courtesy of the artist.
Matter Gone Wild pictures an interdimensional forest network where ancestral memory merges with cosmic, quantum matter in and out of time, inviting viewers into a Black eco-futurist vision beyond the present. Fragmented voiceovers and suspended forms of matter float untethered amid extraterrestrial environs and characters where deep space and deep sea fuse. The forest here is both a physical place and a metaphysical proposition—an alternate universe for reclaiming presence, rewriting origin stories, and dreaming new futures.
This is the end of the label.
This is the last piece on this wall. Moving counterclockwise to your left, two drawings are suspended from the ceiling, hanging several feet from the wall.
The right-hand work, Spectacle, features the body of a Black man with the head of a silvery blue unicorn sitting amongst the dense foliage of a forest, with flames consuming the bottom right corner of the canvas. He is sitting down with his arms draped over his bent knees, wearing a pair of Jordan sneakers, black shorts, and a white T-shirt.
The left-hand work, Untitled, shows the shirtless body of a Black man with a white unicorn head, decorated with various boxing medals and awards, as well as a red pair of boxing gloves. The background shows a lush forest with bright orange flowers behind him.
The label reads:
Jonathan Barber (b. 1992, Oklahoma City, OK USA)
Spectacle, March 2025.
Untitled, August 2025.
Soft pastel.
Made entirely of soft pastels, a medium considered tedious because of the skill and patience required to master it, these two portraits juxtapose the strength and softness that constitutes young Black male identity in the digital age. Combining algorithmic and analog methods, the artist uses Photoshop to collage, edit, and subvert stereotypes and found images from the Internet. The fantastical, ornately-rendered hybrid figures—part horse, part human—perform mundane actions not typically afforded to Black male subjects—sitting, frolicking, posing—amid lush yet otherworldly landscapes.
This is the end of the label.
Moving counterclockwise, several artworks are arranged as a collection in the corner of the room.
There are three large artworks hanging from the ceiling layered in front of each other from the corner out, hanging on frames of floating salvaged wood planks. On the floor in front of the large works, smaller paper drawings are propped up in rows.
The collection of artwork is Forest Notebooks by Mario Lewis.
The farthest back artwork in the corner is a dark blue sheet of canvas, with a large circle of white specks of paint over a faint grid pattern. The white paint resembles stars.
Hanging on the middle wooden planks is a larger piece of white canvas, covered in patterned pen hatch marks to form abstract mathematical and architectural patterns at diagonals, with triangles and lines of negative space creating isometric designs. A smaller drawing of an abstract black circle on light blue canvas hangs next to it.
At front, a yellow square sheet of canvas is painted with off-white and beige paints to create a circle containing naturalistic branch or mold-like patterns. A red horizontal line cuts through the middle of the circle to meet a small concentric red circle at the center.
The small drawings on the floor have minimalist abstract black and blue designs in pen, some natural and some geometric.
The label for these artworks reads:
Mario Lewis (b. 1968, Trinidad & Tobago)
Forest Notebooks, 2023.
Ballpoint pen, emulsion paint, synthetic canvas, paper, salvaged timber.
Forest Notebooks is a multimedia, site-specific installation based on field notes that Mario Lewis penned by candlelight and moonlight during his retreats to the forests of Trinidad where he lives and works. Precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic and inspired by nature, science, and personal encounters, Forest Notebooks comprises molecular and material constructions, hand-drawn and fabricated, that map sustainable possibilities for collective living in the near and far future. The artist also works hand-in-hand with soil and climate scientists, farmers, architects, and other artists to develop zero-waste systems for carbon sequestration, soil remediation, and agroforestry, using his field notes as blueprints.
This is the end of the label.
Moving past this piece to the left, the next piece stands in the middle of the floor.
The next piece, a 2-sided sculpture, is Free the Land by Reuben Telushkin. It has a rectangular wooden frame enclosing a quilt that is wrapped between two motors, creating a scroll. Brightly colored yellow 3D-printed gears form the visible-inner workings. The quilt features squares of green and yellow, including some camouflage and keffiyeh fabric. The sculpture is equipped with a motion sensor, and the quilt begins to rotate as you enter its vicinity. Four pieces of thin yellow wood are inlaid across the outer frame in an intersecting diamond shape.
The label for these artworks reads:
Reuben Telushkin (b. 1988, Holyoke, MA USA)
Free The Land, 2024
Kinetic sculpture
Free the Land combines digital fabrication; kinetic sculpture; deconstructed camouflage and keffiyeh textiles as abstractions for earth, territory, and empire; and traditional craft via quilts. The piece’s title references a slogan attributed to the Republic of New Afrika, a Black Nationalist organization started in Detroit after the 1967 occupation of Palestine radicalized the Civil Rights movement and young African Americans began to view themselves as an occupied internal colony. A wooden frame cycles a quilt on a loop driven by a motor, mobilizing the concept of land as a site of struggle at and after the dawn of the digital age where the commodification of surveillance technology, mineral extraction, and global resistance converge.
Moving past this piece to the left, the next piece is a film projected on the wall with benches and headphones to listen.
This film is titled El Secreto del Rastro by Reyson Velásquez. A young Black girl dressed in a white skirt and top with a ruffled crimson collar dances by the light of a campfire in sporadic close ups of motion and rhythm. She narrates that she wished she had “learned the secrets of her ancestors” as her late grandmother warned her to. Then she wakes, in a boat on a river in the daytime with a tall man with dark skin, who is navigating. On the shores of the river, they see people in modern clothing strewn zombielike on dilapidated houses. Entering a house, a woman shows her several men lying in an afflicted cursed state— one vomits a toad and announces that “Moro Cuco” is dying. She fixes mixtures of herbs and water before seeing a vision of a younger girl, herself, leaning over one of the men. She and the tall man navigate down the river once more to a house with a deathlike woman laying outside, with cracked grey skin. With a blow of powder, the girl revives her, but spots a dark ominous figure in the foliage with dreadlocks covering a scarred face. Chasing the figure through foliage, lush greens obscure and immerse the camera with a frantic energy. The girl gets turned around and surprised by the sorcerer figure, who curses her with a yellow powder smeared on her eyes. The world becomes filtered in chromatic aberration, images or hallucinations of the house are overlaid on the forest, dream world overtaking the real. The tall man finds the girl unconscious and carries her to a group of native people. They explain that Dorodoro has cursed her soul. At night, they begin a ritual with burning fibers in a circle around her body, and ritual markings drawn within — her eyes are filled with a white light and we see her experience in the dream realm. In an alternate forest, she wakes to see memories of her young self and grandmother. Then, running in chase, she dives into a portal with a blip, transported to a house swathed in purple light. With disorienting cuts, she fails to find an exit until she finds the sorcerer sitting and smoking herbs. He asks her for gold, then she refuses and blows a powder. Stomping in it, she begins to move her body in a dancelike but strained motion, and her motions begin to control the sorcerer. Her arms strain with power to go outward, bringing the sorcerer’s arms out, until they are bound by the spirits of the cursed men. She overcomes the sorcerer, his skin drying and eyes going blind. She finally wakes in the forest in daylight, holding a bag she stole back from Dorodoro. Figures of her younger self and grandmother smile in the distance, and then walk away as she smiles back with melancholy.
The label for this film reads:
Reyson Velásquez (b. 1983, Quibdó, Colombia)
El Secreto del Rastro (The Secret of the Trail), 2019
4K UHD video, 22 minutes
A coming-of-age story, El Secreto del Rastro follows a young Black heroine who must confront unknown and threatening forces and figures in the Colombian rainforest of Chocó. When a nefarious conjure figure disables her vision, she must connect with ancestral African and indigenous knowledges and the dream realm to conquer it. The short film blurs the line between reality and ritual, positioning the forest as both a site of mourning and revelation. The secrets of the forest are not a wilderness to be tamed, but a living archive that pulses with history, survival, and radical promise.
Turning around from the wall, in the center of the room, on a table are the next pieces.
This piece, titled The White Box by Jerome P. Dent, Jr., features six small glass sculptures presented on 2 organic flat slabs of live-edge wood, one layered over the other. The top piece of wood holds 4 flat black smooth stones, while the bottom holds 2 more. Looking closely, some of the stones have small bright blue spots inside. All of the stones are shiny and reflect the spotlights that illuminate them.
The label for this piece reads:
Jerome P. Dent, Jr. (b. 1984, Los Angeles, CA USA)
The White Box, December 2023
Black cullet, Oceanside system 96 glass
The six black glass sculptures on view here play with color, texture, light, form, and transparency, inviting viewers to contemplate the layered nature of perception and identity. These experimental and abstract works express the artist’s interests in horror, science fiction, race, and embodiment. The etchings, indentations, and scars signify the various forms of danger and violence one might encounter in the forest, especially those for whom Black skin is a vulnerable surface and membrane.
Next to that piece in the center of the room is another sculpture.
The next piece is a sculptural work titled Secrets of the Field, by Simphiwe Ndzube. The sculptures look like six wire-framed cornstalks growing from piles of mulch on the floor. The cornstalk forms are covered in a brown soft claylike texture that appears to be cracking in some places. Leaves lead up to the tops of each stalk, where small branches shoot out in a star shape, and the stalk is topped with a small grey form. One of the stalks is purple and blue.
The label for this piece reads:
Simphiwe Ndzube (b. 1990, Natalspruit, Johannesburg, South Africa)
Secrets of the Field, 2021
Metal, air-dry clay, acrylic paint, glue & mulch
From the artist’s collection.
Melding magical realism, South African history, and art history, the forest of weathered cornstalks on display mirror changes in the artist’s own practice and life and challenge fixed boundaries between species, time, and reality. Typically installed outdoors at Ndzube’s Highland Park home, the decomposing stalks represent past bodies of work that are slowly giving way to new investigations into abstraction and figuration. Against the backdrop of ecological crisis and catastrophe, these cornstalk sculptures alchemize the hyperlocal effects of erosion, decay, and climate change at the personal and atmospheric level.
This concludes the screen reader guide