Gallery at Scribe

Curatorial Statement

Navigating the expectations of being mothers, educators, or givers at a moment when the world felt as though it was collapsing inward, this exhibition brings together three artists who transform personal rupture into sites of healing, resistance, and reclamation. Through bold chromatic intensity, layered symbolism, and deeply embodied mark-making, Jihan Thomas, Efi Green, and Linda Fernandez articulate journeys shaped by care, grief, identity, and self-possession.

Jihan’s multidisciplinary practice constructs a visual vernacular rooted in Black surrealism, abstraction, and the landscape of the Black figure. Her work reflects the complexities of Black womanhood, motherhood, disability, ecology, joy, and pain, often holding these states in delicate tension. Drawing from decades of experience as an arts educator and cultural leader, Jihan’s surfaces pulse with texture, pattern, and symbolism—offering spaces where healing is neither linear nor silent, but communal and deeply felt.

Efi Green’s mixed-media paintings confront the emotional volatility of mental illness, grief, and limerence through neo-expressionist portraiture. Her vivid colors and unsettling imagery operate as emotional ruptures—visual manifestations of inner states that resist containment. Self-taught in the aftermath of her father’s death, Green’s work becomes both tribute and testimony, revealing painting as a necessary act of survival. Her practice underscores the symbiotic relationship between art-making and art education, where vulnerability becomes a conduit for connection and growth.

Linda Fernandez’s work explores identity and home through a diasporic Caribbean lens, merging bright color, pattern, and symbolic design to map personal and collective histories. Drawing inspiration from nature, architecture, and cultural memory, Fernandez reflects on how heritage is carried, reshaped, and reclaimed across borders. Her compositions suggest home not as a fixed place, but as a living, evolving process—one that is shaped by migration, resilience, and cultural continuity.

Together, these artists offer more than reflection; they assert presence. Whether through haunting gazes, expressive gestures, or subtle declarations of selfhood peering back from the canvas, this exhibition reveals healing as an active, creative force. In a time of collapse, these works insist on transformation—on the power of art to hold grief, joy, memory, and becoming all at once.