Hedges and Edges: Barbershops, Community Gardens, and the Architectures of Care is a new solo exhibition by Damien Davis that explores the intertwined aesthetics and social histories of Black barbershops and community gardens as spaces of care, maintenance, ritual, and collective gathering. Opening July 19, 2026 at the Southampton African American Museum, the exhibition transforms the museum into an active social environment where sculpture, performance, reflection, and communal exchange converge.
Drawing from the museum’s own history as a former barbershop serving Southampton’s Black community, Davis reactivates the space through a series of large-scale mirrored acrylic works, sculptural interventions, and live barbering activations. Referencing the mirrors commonly found within barbershops, the works fracture and interrupt reflection, positioning identity as something continuously shaped through memory, performance, projection, and social interaction.
The exhibition’s title points toward the shared visual language between grooming and cultivation. The sharp geometry of a hairline mirrors the trimmed edge of a hedge; both become gestures of care, discipline, self-fashioning, and aesthetic control. For Davis, these forms also operate politically, reflecting the ways Black communities have historically built spaces of autonomy, intimacy, and cultural production outside dominant institutional structures.
Throughout the exhibition, Black barbers will periodically cut hair within the gallery, foregrounding everyday acts of touch, conversation, and aesthetic labor as forms of cultural knowledge. These activations position the barbershop not as nostalgic reconstruction, but as an ongoing architecture of social exchange where vulnerability, masculinity, queerness, and care remain in active negotiation.
Extending beyond the gallery itself, a portion of the project’s funding will directly support the establishment of The Hamptons Black Arts Council community garden on the SAAM museum grounds.
The garden functions as both a material investment in local community infrastructure and a conceptual extension of the exhibition’s framework. Just as the barbershop cultivates identity and social connection, the garden cultivates nourishment, stewardship, and collective responsibility.
By bringing together sculpture, social practice, performance, and environmental intervention, Hedges and Edges asks how Black life is sustained through daily acts of tending that are often overlooked or undervalued. The exhibition proposes care not as abstraction, but as a lived practice enacted through bodies, gestures, maintenance, and shared space.
About the Artist
Damien Davis is a Newark-based artist, writer, and educator whose work explores cultural representation, identity, and systems of visibility through sculpture, abstraction, installation, and public art. His work has been exhibited at institutions including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Museum of Arts and Design.
Source: Superposition Gallery
