The receipts of Black love have no public form. A weathered Hallmark card from 1987, anniversary number written in ballpoint. A screenshot of a 2AM apology text with typing bubbles visible. A voicemail saved for six years: "Call me when you get home." These artifacts—the actual documents of care—remain invisible while wedding reels and carceral files dominate cultural narratives of Black intimacy. In 2025, as anti-DEI rollbacks erase institutional memory and Black Studies programs close nationwide, DEVOTION stages what's being systematically dismantled: the mundane labor of devotion as contemporary art. Grounded in Black Feminist Theory and Intersectionality, this exhibition proposes devotion itself as a public technology—receipts, screenshots, counseling worksheets, and apology drafts that build, weather, break, and repair life, transforming ordinary artifacts into both archive and teachable toolkit.
New York City—with its concentrated Black cultural institutions, long history of archival activism, and dense networks of mutual aid—provides crucial context for making private devotion public. The city's legacy of community archives, from the Schomburg Center to grassroots digital memory projects, demonstrates how ordinary documents become collective infrastructure. This exhibition extends that lineage, staging intimate artifacts in a gallery accessible to diverse audiences navigating the complexities of urban intimacy and collective care.
Visitors move through seven conceptual stages mapped across apexart's space: The Ask (first DMs, "circle yes/no/maybe" notes), Becoming (love letters, saved voicemails), Building (vows, mortgage photos, baby announcements), Weathering (counseling worksheets, apology drafts), Breaking (break-up texts, redacted divorce decrees), Still (ordinary Tuesdays, porch audio, hands clasped), and After (eulogies, unheard voice notes, recipes from repasts). Each stage refuses sanitization while maintaining curatorial care and visitor dignity.
Four artists working independently translate devotion's grammar through distinct media. An anthropologist-filmmaker contributes a 12-minute film triptych threading anonymized intake forms and counseling worksheets into a quiet bureaucracy of intimacy—DMV-style counters, waiting rooms, clipboards—making visible the systems that scaffold love. A documentary photographer presents environmental portraits of doorways, kitchen tables, and porches where tenderness happened, translating personal memory into shared cultural witness. A multidisciplinary artist installs layered relief works anchoring Building and Breaking, using textured materials to hold the physical tension between construction and dissolution. A neo-expressionist painter contributes caulk-textured compositions indexing touch and repair through bold tactile surfaces; a community-forward curatorial practice informs the show's participatory ethic.
The installation is lean but resonant: vinyl text on walls, clip-framed artifact facsimiles, two refurbished rotary handsets playing intimate audio with captions, one compact projection. At the exit, visitors encounter a 1980s thermal receipt printer—the kind that printed love notes between pagers in the '90s. Print a gratitude. Print a boundary. Print an apology. Print "I miss you." Pin it to the shared ledger wall. The archive grows throughout the run as 200, 500, 1,000 receipts accumulate, transforming spectators into practitioners of the grammar they just witnessed. Visitors leave with a takeaway card containing simple prompts for asking, building, weathering, repairing—making devotion's grammar portable, teachable, and impossible to ignore. Success is measured in practices carried home, in conversations shifted, in repair attempted.
New York City—with its concentrated Black cultural institutions, long history of archival activism, and dense networks of mutual aid—provides crucial context for making private devotion public. The city's legacy of community archives, from the Schomburg Center to grassroots digital memory projects, demonstrates how ordinary documents become collective infrastructure. This exhibition extends that lineage, staging intimate artifacts in a gallery accessible to diverse audiences navigating the complexities of urban intimacy and collective care.
Visitors move through seven conceptual stages mapped across apexart's space: The Ask (first DMs, "circle yes/no/maybe" notes), Becoming (love letters, saved voicemails), Building (vows, mortgage photos, baby announcements), Weathering (counseling worksheets, apology drafts), Breaking (break-up texts, redacted divorce decrees), Still (ordinary Tuesdays, porch audio, hands clasped), and After (eulogies, unheard voice notes, recipes from repasts). Each stage refuses sanitization while maintaining curatorial care and visitor dignity.
Four artists working independently translate devotion's grammar through distinct media. An anthropologist-filmmaker contributes a 12-minute film triptych threading anonymized intake forms and counseling worksheets into a quiet bureaucracy of intimacy—DMV-style counters, waiting rooms, clipboards—making visible the systems that scaffold love. A documentary photographer presents environmental portraits of doorways, kitchen tables, and porches where tenderness happened, translating personal memory into shared cultural witness. A multidisciplinary artist installs layered relief works anchoring Building and Breaking, using textured materials to hold the physical tension between construction and dissolution. A neo-expressionist painter contributes caulk-textured compositions indexing touch and repair through bold tactile surfaces; a community-forward curatorial practice informs the show's participatory ethic.
The installation is lean but resonant: vinyl text on walls, clip-framed artifact facsimiles, two refurbished rotary handsets playing intimate audio with captions, one compact projection. At the exit, visitors encounter a 1980s thermal receipt printer—the kind that printed love notes between pagers in the '90s. Print a gratitude. Print a boundary. Print an apology. Print "I miss you." Pin it to the shared ledger wall. The archive grows throughout the run as 200, 500, 1,000 receipts accumulate, transforming spectators into practitioners of the grammar they just witnessed. Visitors leave with a takeaway card containing simple prompts for asking, building, weathering, repairing—making devotion's grammar portable, teachable, and impossible to ignore. Success is measured in practices carried home, in conversations shifted, in repair attempted.
Dr. Myeshia C. Babers is a cultural anthropologist, curator, and Archivist for the Association of Black Anthropologists, exploring Black memory-making through community archives, documentary, and curatorial practice.
apexart’s program supporters past and present include the National Endowment for the Arts, Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, the Kettering Family Foundation, the Buhl Foundation, The Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Spencer Brownstone, the Kenneth A. Cowin Foundation, Epstein Teicher Philanthropies, The Greenwich Collection Ltd., William Talbott Hillman Foundation/Affirmation Arts Fund, the Fifth Floor Foundation, The Puffin Foundation, the Trust for Mutual Understanding, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, public funds from Creative Engagement, supported by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Governor and administered by LMCC, funds from NYSCA Electronic Media/Film in Partnership with Wave Farm: Media Arts Assistance Fund, with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, as well as the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.