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Nothing is Fixed
On View: August 9, 2025 – October 13, 2025
Curated by Jeremy Dennis
“Nothing is fixed, forever, and forever, and forever. It is not fixed.”
—James Baldwin, Nothing Personal, 1964
As a contemporary artist and member of the Shinnecock Indian Nation, I’ve come to understand that nothing in this world—our land, our power, our identities, even our grief—is permanent. This exhibition, Nothing is Fixed, takes its title and spirit from James Baldwin’s prophetic 1964 essay. Baldwin wrote in a moment of social upheaval, and here we are again, contending with rupture: political whiplash, cultural erasure, climate crisis, and generational trauma that refuses to settle into history.
But even in this instability, there is power. This exhibition gathers BIPOC artists from across the country who respond to this moment of uncertainty with clarity, vulnerability, and radical imagination. Each artist applies a unique lens to what it means to live and create in a time where no foundation feels steady, and where the shifting ground invites us to act, resist, and rebuild.
The exhibition gathers works that embrace change as both a disruptive force and a generative one. Rather than seeking resolution, the artists featured lean into the ambiguity of transition, offering reflections on what it means to live, heal, and resist within systems that are in flux.
The works on view reflect themes of ancestral memory, bodily autonomy, diasporic identity, ecological entanglement, and the emotional labor of survival. Through ritual, symbolism, and material transformation, the artists confront inherited wounds, question imposed boundaries, and reimagine the stories we tell about ourselves and each other. Many works engage with forgotten or fractured histories, not to repair them to a previous state, but to acknowledge their lasting imprint and to carve out new futures from their remains. The presence of spiritual iconography, folklore, and acts of repair underscores a collective yearning for rootedness and restoration amid continual rupture.
In a space like the Old Stone House—a site imbued with colonial history—”Nothing is Fixed” becomes both a declaration and an invocation. It invites viewers to consider the transitory nature of power, memory, and meaning, and challenges the illusion of permanence. In this way, the exhibition offers not a fixed narrative but a shifting landscape of experiences, where grief, resilience, rage, and hope coexist. Here, impermanence becomes a place to gather, to imagine, and to begin again.
Jeremy Dennis
Lead Artist, Ma’s House & BIPOC Art Studio, Inc.
Guest Curator, Nothing is Fixed at Old Stone House, Brooklyn
Featured artists: Maryam Adib, Patricia Arnedo, Marissa Alise Baez, Debmalya Ray Choudhuri, Dana Lynn Harper, Xin Lian, Rica Maestas, Kelly Nano-Miranda, Marcela Adeze Okeke, Cici Osias, Jacoub Reyes, V Tineo, Carolina Yáñez, & XY Zhou
Marcela Adeze Okeke
Interpretation, 2025
Acrylic, oil, oil pastel, glue, canvas on wooden cabinet panels
38 x 38 inches
$1,200
If I want to live in a world that values collective wellbeing over money and power, then I, too, must focus on what I believe is good, pure, and true in this life. The change we wish to see must begin with us; liberation will come from caring for ourselves and others. I render my family members in positions of repose and connection, surrounded by vibrant colors to emphasize the love, joy, and childlike wonder I value and know is necessary for all of us to hold in our hearts as we build a new world.
Just as the body heals at a pace sometimes indiscernible, change is always in motion. This is why I paint people sleeping; so much healing and repair happens during sleep, even when we’re unaware of it. The same occurs when we treat each other with kindness at the grassroots level. Together, we make waves.
Marcela Adeze Okeke (b. 2000, Chicago, IL) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Chicago whose work explores themes of unity and liberation concerning ancestry, community, and identity. Initially self-taught in acrylic and oil painting, her practice now includes cement sculpture, puppet-making, and mixed media. Okeke is also a community organizer with Red Line Service, advocating for housing justice alongside artists with lived experiences of homelessness. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Museum of the African Diaspora, Chicago Cultural Center, and Nafasi Art Space in Tanzania. She has been featured in New American Paintings and is a former resident at Nafasi Art Space with an upcoming residency at Vashon Artist Residency.
Maryam Adib
Abiding Echoes, 2020
Acrylic, oil, and oil pen on canvas, stretched over a hand-built polygonal frame
24 x 36 inches
$2,350
Abiding Echoes draws from ancestral and psychic memory stored in our DNA, preserving histories erased by colonization and reflecting on the cyclical nature of history and our power to break harmful cycles through healing and nurturing traditions. The painting’s polygonal frame—with its nearly circular but sharp edges—symbolizes the discomfort of repeating histories, while the haunting yet beautiful scene of ancestral figures amidst golden flowers embodies resilience, resistance, and communal joy despite struggle. Connected to the theme “Nothing is Fixed,” the piece emphasizes collective healing by acknowledging that the past remains present, highlighting both trauma and hope as constants in our ongoing journey toward freedom and community care.
Maryam Adib (b. 1995, Oceanside, CA) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Ithaca, NY, whose practice spans oil painting, clothing design, and muralism. Raised in upstate New York, she explores dreams, memory, lineage, and our relationship to the natural world—drawing from Black storytelling traditions and viewing plants as ancestral guides. A SUNY Cortland BFA graduate (2020), her work has been shown at Albany Center Gallery, The National Afro-American Museum, Field Projects, and in solo shows like Dream State and The Body Remembers. She has received honors including the Creatives Rebuild New York grant and fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, Monson Arts, and MASS MoCA, among others.
Carolina Yáñez
Chinga tu MAGA, 2025
Hand-embroidered floss on a found hankie
15 x 15 inches
NFS
Make the Revolution Irresistible, 2025
Hand-embroidered floss on a found hankie
12 x 12.5 inches
$150
THE BIGGEST WEAPON, 2025
Hand-embroidered floss on a found hankie
9 x 10 inches
NFS
My hankies juxtapose women’s craft and softness with harmful rhetoric propagated by the Trump administration. I use the hankies to inspire, call out, or reject current political issues as an activist and artist.
Carolina Yáñez (b. 2001, Austin, Texas) is a Tejana interdisciplinary artist and activist whose work explores the intersections of Tejano culture, politics, history, place, gender-based issues, mental health, and environmentalism through mediums such as photography, video, fiber, ceramics, and print.
Her work has been exhibited at institutions including the Latino Cultural Center, Mexic-Arte Museum, Sawyer Yards, Lawndale Art and Performance Center, Houston Center for Photography, and the Southampton History Museum. Yáñez is a 2025 Arch and Ann Giles Kimbrough Fund recipient and has held residencies with the Mexic-Arte Museum’s Changarrito Residency and JOLT, a Texas-based nonprofit empowering young Latinos. She earned her BFA in Photography and Digital Media from the University of Houston (2023) and her MFA in Art from Southern Methodist University (2025).
Cici Osias
Et on danse, comme des garçons, 2024
Hand appliqué
14 x 13 inches
$850
Core to my work is the evolving nature of materials and the adaptation of Black diaspora textile traditions to tell new stories and foster connection. Using sentimental fabrics from myself and loved ones alongside culturally significant processes and imagery, my practice emphasizes our ties to ancestors and communities, accessing collective memory to envision the future. My fiber art incorporates cotton to honor enslaved ancestors, denim and indigo as tributes to Yoruba and African American craftspeople, and beadwork inspired by Haitian vodou flags and Yoruba sacred beads. Visually, my motifs reference vodou iconography, Kongo spirituality, and Congolese barkcloth paintings from the Mbuti tribe.
Cici Osias (b. Baltimore, MD) is a Brooklyn-based textile artist, photographer, and printmaker whose vibrant work draws from Nigerian, Haitian, African American, and Congolese motifs to explore identity and ancestral connection. Through textiles and printmaking, she honors the storytelling role of cloth in African, Caribbean, and African American cultures, while her analog photography embraces themes of family and kinship with the earth. Her work has recently been featured at the Textile Arts Center and Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn.
Patricia Arnedo
Held in Passing, 2025
UV print on mirror and acrylic
12 x 15 inches
$2,500
This piece lives in the shifting relationship between surface and interior. As the light changes and the body moves, it invites a quiet encounter that slips just out of reach. In dialogue with the exhibition’s theme, the work embraces instability as a space of potential, denoting the distance between truth and perception, and embracing the quiet wisdom that arises when we surrender to flux.
Patricia Arnedo is a Latina artist based in Brooklyn, whose practice focuses on capturing ephemeral emotional states and unnamed feelings that hover between clarity, ambiguity, fear, and intimacy. Through layered imagery and meticulous attention to contour and detail, she creates space for what is often deeply felt but rarely articulated visual form.
Kelly Nano-Miranda
La Fresita, 2024, photograph, 11 x 14 inches, $1,000
Meadow Lane, 2025, photograph, 24 x 20 inches $1,500
Heron, 2024, photograph, 24 x 20 inches, $1,200
Old Burying Ground, The Static Album, 2023, photograph, 36 x 24 inches, $1,200
As a first-generation American born to Peruvian parents, I am drawn to the weight of inheritance and how culture is carried, fractured, and reassembled across generations. Through photography and video, I aim to document the unseen tensions within these spaces I feel a part of: the exhaustion behind service, the anxiousness of sacrifice, and the negotiation of identity in every newly learned “American” behavior. My work relates to the instability of home and evokes the idea that change is forever evolving in the place in which my family chose to settle down. I seek to create an archive that captures this duality, illuminating the emotional cost of building a home in a place that often refuses to claim our existence.
Kelly Nano-Miranda (b. 2001) is a New York City-based photographer whose work explores themes of class, labor, and inherited resilience through intimate visual narratives. Raised in Southampton, Long Island, she was deeply influenced by the sacrifices of her immigrant parents and uses photography to better understand their experience and that of others in similar circumstances. Her images often blend personal and communal stories, capturing both family and strangers with emotional depth. She currently works at Pace Gallery.
Xin Lian
From Skin to Skin, 1, 2025
Iodine on goat parchment
14 x 16 inches
$500
I approach art-making as an act of imprinting—embedding traces of past presences and activities into drawings that capture lingering energies, creating time-lapsed images where past and present merge. Unlike moving images, these still records blend moments inseparably, exploring themes of change, impermanence, healing, and our evolving relationship with trauma, loss, and grief. In my series From Skin to Skin, I attempt to repair skin damaged by trauma, acknowledging the paradox that while skin can never fully return to its unscarred state, its repaired form continues to connect the body to the physical world.
Xin Lian is a Chinese American artist whose work uses imprinting to connect multiple layers of time, embedding traces of past activities and presences within her drawings. Through this dialogue between past and present, she explores themes of trauma, loss, and grief. Holding a BFA from the Fashion Institute of Technology, her work has been exhibited at venues including CICA Museum in Gimpo, Museum of FIT, M. David & Co. Gallery, and Amos Eno Gallery in Brooklyn.
Cici Osias
Erzulie and her offerings, 2025
Machine- and hand-quilted assorted fabrics, thread, polyester batting, cowrie shell necklace, gold necklace, sterling silver horse hair broom.
47 x 36 inches
$5,000
Dana Lynn Harper
Flowers of my mother, 2024
AI-enhanced photograph on tissue paper, batik fabric, chiffon, glass pearls, pistachio shells, gold leaf, gold rope, found brass bowl, dried jasmine, candles, paper clay, plaster, wood, cardboard
24 x 18 x 7 inches
$1,600
This piece features candelabras that serve as relics connecting me to my ancestry and matriarchal line, honoring the lives and struggles of these women through portraiture, symmetry, and religious iconography. Set in the Old Stone House, a Dutch Colonial building, the work highlights generations of Indonesian women who experienced Dutch colonialism until 1962. Displaying these portraits and relics in this reclaimed space symbolizes the progress since their time and asserts ownership over what was once taken. The candelabras hold their memories and emit literal light, acting as a lighthouse guiding me through their history. Though the world has seen both improvement and setbacks, especially in recent times, these works embody the enduring light that has carried us forward and will continue to illuminate our path.
Dana Lynn Harper is a Columbus, Ohio-based sculptor and installation artist whose work explores racial identity, ancestral knowledge, and the natural world through ritualistic, votive-inspired sculptures. A professor at Columbus College of Art & Design, she holds a BFA from The Ohio State University and an MFA from Penn State University, where she was a Bunton Waller Fellow. Her vibrant career includes solo exhibitions across the U.S. and residencies at Sculpture Space, Teton Art Lab, and Vermont Studio Center, among others. Harper has received numerous honors, including the Ohio Arts Council Individual Award of Excellence (2025), NEA-supported scholarship to Women’s Studio Workshop, and grants from ArtPrize, Ringholz Foundation, and The ArtFile. Her public installations have been featured by the Columbus Museum of Art, Otherworld, and Wonderspaces.
Jacoub Reyes
Fragment 2, 2021
Woodblock print on ceramic
6.5 x 5 inches
Fragment 9, 2021
Woodblock print on ceramic
6.5 x 7 inches
Fragment 11, 2021
Woodblock print on ceramic
11 x 6.5 inches
Fragment 7, 2021
Woodblock print on ceramic
8 x 7.5.5 inches
$1,000 each
I explore the constant flux of environment and culture, inspired by James Baldwin’s assertion that nothing remains immutable. Focusing on the Shinnecock Nation’s deep connection to their land amid the climate crisis, I created woodblock prints wheat-pasted onto found ceramics sourced from Shinnecock Bay, symbolizing resilient fragments shaped by nature’s tides. Highlighting the vital role of kelp and the women-led Shinnecock Kelp Farmers’ efforts to restore their waters, my work infuses natural elements with spirit to reflect their ecological and cultural significance. Through this practice, I emphasize that while change is inevitable, it opens pathways for growth, healing, and advocacy. Grounded by the history of the Old Stone House, my art honors resilience, community, and the power we hold to shape a more just and sustainable future.
Jacoub Reyes is a Florida-based artist and public academic whose work draws on his Caribbean and Pakistani heritage to explore themes of colonialism, social response, and ecological systems. Through collaborations with organizations such as The IEA, Ma’s House, Latinx Project, and CENTRO, his artistic research has gained international recognition. Reyes holds a BFA in Drawing and Printmaking from the University of Central Florida and certifications in sustainable materials from Parsons. His interdisciplinary practice has led to global engagements through lectures, workshops, and exhibitions with institutions like Alfred University, UCSF, and the Museum of Latin American Art. He is a recipient of awards and fellowships from the Center for Craft, the South Florida Cultural Consortium, and The Puffin Foundation.
Deb Choudhuri
The Rockaways, 2021
Photograph
16 x 24 inches
$700
Your Gaze, 2021
Photograph
16 x 24 inches
$700
A Factless Autobiography is a deeply personal photo series responding to grief, illness, and identity, inspired by Fernando Pessoa’s work and reflecting the artist’s mourning after losing a lover and battling tuberculosis. Part of a larger trilogy tracing migration from India to the U.S. during a turbulent political era, it follows three protagonists—a trans woman from Côte d’Ivoire, a Black gay man, and the artist—navigating trauma, displacement, and survival amid rising threats to queer and trans lives. Influenced by Octavia Butler’s notion that change is the only lasting truth, the project embraces the urgency of community, solidarity, and world-building in a time marked by political unrest and exclusion. Ultimately, it is an ode to transformation, collective healing, and the creative construction of a more just future.
Debmalya Ray Choudhuri (b. Kolkata) is a non-binary queer artist and self-taught photographer from India, now based in New York. Working across photography, performance, and text, their diaristic practice explores grief, intimacy, and queer identity—particularly following the loss of a partner to suicide. Their work delves into mental health, desire, and love, using encounters with friends and strangers to reflect on queer existence within a post-colonial, capitalist world. Blurring the lines between subject and photographer, Debmalya invites vulnerability and collaboration to challenge ideas of identity, representation, and image-making. Their work has been exhibited internationally, including at Les Rencontres d’Arles and Rotterdam Photo Festival, and published in Granta, British Journal of Photography, and Der Greif, with clients including FT Weekend Magazine.
Marissa Baez
1687, 2025
Cyanotype
19 x 25 inches
NFS
1687 was created in response to artwork from the Palmer Museum for a collaboration I initiated between SOVA BIPOC students and the museum. The artworks I chose to develop are a response to Carrie Mae Weems’s Kitchen Table Series and Solitaire, and Matika Wilbur’s Dr. Mary portraits. While Carrie Mae Weems and Matika Wilbur come from different communities, both works encourage conversation around marginalized experiences, specifically the roles of women. Regardless of the environment, both women in each work show their presence. I chose this artwork to center the focus on Black and Brown women and to highlight resilience in our BIPOC communities: the intimate environments and moments Weems depicts, to Wilbur’s elder embracing open space ahead of her. In the current political landscape, as artists of color it is essential to focus on solidarity. We are stronger as a community, and I view the cyanotype as an act of resistance to show that our histories and our cultures will not be erased.
Marissa Alise Baez (b. 1997, Houston, TX) is a U.S.-based multidisciplinary artist whose work explores memory, ephemerality, identity, and the body. They hold a BFA in Sculpture from Texas Woman’s University (2019) and an MFA from Penn State School of Visual Arts (2021), where they now teach Sculpture, Foundations, and First-Year Seminar. Baez’s practice spans a range of materials and forms, reflecting their ongoing inquiry into personal and collective experience.
Rica Maestas
bad latine (on EarthVision TV), 2025
Performance documentation
23:11 minutes
$1,200
I am drawn to the dual meaning of “Nothing is Fixed:” both the inevitability of change and the unsettling sense that many things remain unresolved. In my hurt and healing series, I explore this ambiguity through loving yet raw works that confront feelings we often avoid, such as confusion, pain, and uncertainty. Rather than offering neat resolutions or hopeful comfort, my art dwells in the uncomfortable, murky space of mid-change, emphasizing the importance of fully inhabiting the present moment as the only way to envision and shape the future.
Rica Maestas is a socially engaged burqueñx artist, author, and cultural worker whose multidisciplinary practice includes visual art, performance, and curation. They hold an MA in public humanities from Brown University and have received numerous grants and residencies, including at the Santa Fe Art Institute and Harwood Art Center. Rica’s notable solo exhibitions include I’m Sorry (I cannot hold you.) (2022) and We Are. Here Together. (2023). Their work and curatorial projects have been featured in publications such as the Providence Journal and Santa Fe New Mexican.
XY Zhou
Elegy for a Trickster, 2025
Cardboard, acrylic, gouache, watercolor, puppets, paper
24 x 36 inches
$350
One of the vignettes in the Chinese epic novel Journey to the West describes the Monkey King, Sun Wukong, and his encounter with death. In response to his soul being collected by the God of Death, he marches into the underworld and strikes out his name, as well as that of his monkey subjects, giving them all immortality. In Elegy for a Trickster, I create paper dolls and puppets and arrange them to reference a Tibetan Buddhist tapestry depicting Yamantaka, Destroyer of Death. Prayer Book uses the Monkey King motif by creating an interactive, sculptural ceramic book with a verse from the Tibetan Book of the Dead inscribed on the inside, to guide the spirit from one reincarnation to the next. The cycle of reincarnation in Buddhist philosophy breaks the framework of death being the final ending. The idea of infinite reincarnation is also the philosophy of endless change, refusing to accept any fixed way of being and receiving all that occurs.
XY Zhou (they/them) is a New York City-based multidisciplinary artist working across writing, painting, ceramics, textiles, and design. A graduate of NYU Gallatin with a focus on “Translations Between Mediums,” XY’s work explores heritage, cultural duality, mythology, and the body. They currently develop art programming for Phoenix House NY|LI and have exhibited at venues such as Pocket Utopia and Gallatin Galleries. Fellowships, including the Newington-Cropsey Foundation, T.S. Eliot Fellowship, and the Asian American Arts Alliance, support their practice. XY is also part of the Active Chapter publishing collective, creating journals and zines that support local artists.
V Tineo
Gardening angel, 2022
Paper clay (stoneware)
40 x 120 inches
NFS
The only constant in life is change, and while we cannot undo what has been broken, we can attempt to repair the fractures left by history and trauma. Though the cracks remain and the full extent of harm may never be fully understood, we strive to make amends through respect and healing. Despite the enduring damage in our world, we must hold onto hope in its capacity for restoration and renewal even amidst violence.
V is an experimental interdisciplinary artist from Brooklyn whose work merges materiality, storytelling, and cultural translation through mediums like clay, papermâché, performance, and sound. Their practice explores migration, identity, and socioeconomic displacement, using contrasting materials to examine transformation and resistance. Holding an MFA from Queens College (2024) and a BA from Hampshire College (2019), V’s work has been shown in galleries and community spaces, including projects in Jingdezhen, China, and New York City. They are also dedicated to education and mentorship, leading art workshops for diverse communities, while their art and teaching bridge cultures and challenge conventional narratives.
This exhibition is made possible, in part, by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
