Join us on Friday, April 11, from 6:30 to 8:00 PM for an Opening Reception celebrating the concurrent exhibitions David Antonio Cruz: hauntme & Joshua Parks: Born in We—African Descendants of the Atlantic World.

The College of Charleston community and current Halsey Institute Members receive free admission to the Halsey Institute’s Opening Receptions. Not yet-Members will be asked for a suggested $5 donation. Learn more about membership here. 

David Antonio Cruz: hauntme

David Antonio Cruz is a multidisciplinary artist exploring the intersectionality of queerness and race, celebrating chosen family, and honoring not just where we consider home but who we consider home. Incorporating literature, language, and sculptural elements, his work engages portraiture as a place of permanence and as a form of resistance to normative conventions. Cruz’s exhibition at the Halsey Institute will expand on his recent explorations in drawing and installation featuring new and recent work.

Cruz’s drawings are created with layers of ink washes under silhouettes of maps, foliage, and whispers of wax pencil figure drawings, inviting viewers to spend time getting to know the people and place within and revealing more with each careful look. These drawings often reappear as wallpaper and textiles in the background of his playful paintings of chosen family, which center Black, Brown, and queer bodies in the art historical canon of Baroque seated portraiture, a genre from which they were often erased. Culminating with an offering for the viewer to sit and linger, immersed in Cruz’s work through a site-specific installation, the exhibition highlights companionship as wayfinding to empowered authenticity and safe harbor in the people we choose to surround ourselves with.

 Joshua Parks: Born in We—African Descendants of the Atlantic World

Joshua Parks is a southern-raised Black image-maker and cultural worker with Gullah Geechee and Gulf Coast Creole heritage. His work analyzes Afro-descendant communities in the Atlantic world, their relationship to land and water as the basis of subsistence, autonomy, survival, and collective memory, and how these elements influence social and cultural development. The Halsey Institute is proud to present Parks’s first solo museum exhibition.

In his practice, Parks puts intentional relationships and storytelling first, using image as his medium for communication. This exhibition explores the interconnectedness among communities of African descendants in the Lowcountry, the Caribbean, and West Africa through photography, film, and sounds of the Atlantic World. Bridging past and present, he presents a continuum of culture across time and space underscoring the resilience and ongoing evolution of African and Afro-descendant identities all while confronting and transcending the enduring legacies of slavery and colonialism. Dispersed throughout this global representation of shared histories, Parks will incorporate archival family photographs and artifacts engaging the viewer with the context of his personal history. This body of work makes evident the intimate and complex relationships among African diasporic communities and the fight for self-determination.