Library Street Collective is pleased to present Crosscurrents, a group exhibition opening August 9th, 2025 which brings together new and recent works by El Anatsui, Nick Cave, Myrlande Constant, and José Parlá in a study of how material can carry memory across bodies, borders, and generations. Through painting, sculpture, and assemblage, the exhibition considers how each artist’s work gives form to layered histories, rendering both medium and tactile presence as repositories of cultural inheritance, political struggle, and spiritual belief.
Characterized by densely worked surfaces, José Parlá’s expressive paintings explore the intricate connections and boundaries among Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Miami. They reflect his personal experiences growing up as the son of Cuban immigrants in Puerto Rico and Miami, while delving into the Caribbean’s rich cross-culturalism, and examining the blend of Afro-Latin, Spanish, Middle Eastern, and European influences that define the region’s vibrant identity and its politics. Based in Port-Au-Prince, Myrlande Constant expands upon the vernacular of traditional Vodou flags (known as drapo) into richly embroidered tapestries that serve as civic, spiritual, and historical testaments. Executed in hand-sewn beads and sequins, Constant’s works combine iconography of the lwa (Vodou spirits) with scenes from Haiti’s colonial past and contemporary life. What begins as devotional craft becomes, in Constant’s hands, a vibrant and often politically charged document of resistance, ritual, and community memory rendered in cloth.
Celebrated for his innovative use of repurposed materials, Anatsui transforms everyday objects such as bottle caps and metal fragments into monumental, undulating forms that blur the boundaries between sculpture and tapestry. His work is rooted in African visual traditions yet resonant with global abstraction, reflecting on the legacy of colonialism while drawing connections between consumption, waste and the environment. Cave presents one work from his Graphts series—a mixed media assemblage that incorporates a needlepoint portrait of the artist himself, set against vibrant compositions of floral patterns and colors crafted from vintage serving trays. The piece investigates the ways in which histories are stitched together across generations, continuing Cave’s ongoing exploration of the violence endured by Black bodies and the sustained impact of inherited trauma.
Together, the works in Crosscurrents present a cross-disciplinary dialogue in which material operates not as a neutral substrate but as an active bearer of meaning—echoing post-minimalist and conceptual traditions that center process, repetition, and the trace of the hand. Drawing from distinct diasporic experiences and vernacular forms, the artists mobilize material as both subject and method, aligning with broader genealogies of assemblage, textile, and gestural abstraction that challenge Western hierarchies of medium and authorship. The tactile density of each work—whether through Parlá’s bold canvases, Constant’s liturgical textiles, Anatsui’s monumental reconfigurations of refuse, or Cave’s domestic bricolage—speaks to a shared investment in memory as a lived, embodied phenomenon. In this context, material is neither passive nor purely symbolic; it becomes a generative site of relation, opacity, and resistance, suggesting that the act of making is itself a form of historical inscription.
Crosscurrents is on view from August 9th through October 8th, 2025 at Library Street Collective.
Source: Library Street Collective
