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The God-given Art of Gloria Garrett

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We Will Not Be Silent: Art Transforming Rape Culture from October 30 to December 15, 2025, at The Stamp Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | Written by Trinitee Tatum

When asked why art, Gloria Garrett responded: “Art has always been there. I believed God gave me art to share and make a difference in the world.” From an early age, Garrett understood the transformative power of art. “Art can be used to unite people,” she continued, “it can inspire them to open their hearts an[d] imagine a world of peace and joy. Art can help you heal from trauma and life challenges. It can soothe your soul.” Known as the “Mother of Makeup Art,” Garrett was a Baltimore-based poet, performer, and storyteller whose practice was rooted in collaboration and care. Working closely with local communities, she harnessed art’s capacity for healing, turning creative labor into a shared spiritual and social practice. Her multimedia work was deeply intertwined with her Christian faith, which served not only as a source of personal refuge but also as a wellspring for collective restoration.

In a 2021 interview with Nicole Caracia of the Chesapeake Arts Center, Garrett recalled a moment of profound loss: “In 2005 my nephew died suddenly. I asked God to bring color back into my life. My mother gave me some makeup, and I figured out how to paint with it.” Out of grief emerged a new visual language. Makeup, the object of both tactile intimacy and confidence, yet frequently discarded, became her medium of renewal. Through teaching others to create, Garrett found that healing was not solitary; it was expansive, moving through herself, her students, and the world they inhabited together. Garrett’s work participates in a lineage of Black women artists for whom visual storytelling both bears witness and liberates. Her practice recalls visual griots such as Clementine Hunter, whose paintings of everyday Southern Black life infused feminism, spirituality, and racialized memory into acts of quiet resistance. Like Hunter, Garrett turns to the body of Christ and the sustaining power of faith as affirmations of collective survival and as sites through which liberation can be imagined and enacted.

Gloria Garrett, Monument Quilt square, 2018, Mixed media on fabric.

The Monument Quilt, organized by FORCE: Upsetting Rape Culture, was a community-based art project that collected 3,000 stories from survivors of sexual violence. These stories were written, painted, and stitched onto red quilt squares and displayed in highly visible public spaces, transforming private grief into collective witness. Garrett’s quilt square, located in the lower left, was created in collaboration with seniors she taught at the Rita Church Community Center at Clifton Park in Baltimore, grounding the work in intergenerational care and shared making. For Garrett, the act of naming these stories unfolds across both personal and communal registers, affirming art-making as a spiritual, relational practice. Her quilt addresses the viewer directly, asserting their worth despite circumstance: “You are loved and beautiful.” In each corner, the words “You,” “Are,” “Not,” and “Alone” accent the large words, invoking a persistent, collective embrace. Though not overtly religious, Garrett’s contribution gestures toward a theology of togetherness, where survival and the possibility of liberation emerge not in isolation, but through the gathered strength of many.

Gloria Garrett, Be Joyful collage, 2018, Collage, makeup, paper, photocopies.

Intimate in scale, Garrett’s Be Joyful Collage, composed of collage, makeup, paper, and photocopies, is saturated with color and texture. Divided into several sections, each space holds a phrase that reads not as demands, but invocations and affirmations. Most of the text stands out against the colorful sensations of the background. These phrases– “God is love,” “believe in miracles,” “count blessings”– function as affirmations: public-facing, faith-rooted declarations that circulate hope through shared language. The work’s tactile, oil-pastel-like surface echoes Garrett’s stated affinity for the French Impressionists, privileging sensation, intimacy, and emotional resonance. At the same time, her use of makeup introduces a subtle gendered register without confining the work to overt femininity. The medium itself becomes a theology of sustainability: materials often discarded are repurposed into vessels of care and beauty. In Be Joyful Collage, faith is not monumental, but tender, held in the palm of a hand.

Gloria Garrett, Page from Advice for life workbook, 2019, Photocopies of drawings, makeup paintings, activities, and poetry.

Garrett’s workbooks recur as insistent symbols of knowledge in motion, signaling her deep investment in younger generations and in the work of intergenerational networks. Hand-drawn and assembled from photocopied drawings, makeup paintings, activities, and poetry, these books invite touch, participation, reflections, and return. One workbook, I Can’t We Can, centers on a large yellow Christian cross on its cover, flaked by the book’s title on either side. The visual tension between these declarations stages a movement away from isolation toward collectivity, from limitation toward shared capacity, implicitly through Christ. Created in collaboration with On Our Own, Inc., a Baltimore-based behavioral health advocacy organization, and People Encouraging People, a nonprofit providing behavioral healthcare and support, the workbook further situates Garrett’s practice at the intersection of art, healing, and social action. Here, faith is not abstract, but a catalyst for alliance and advocacy. The work affirms, again and again, the transformative power of collective care, of a transition from “I” toward “we.”

Maternal advice appears alongside calls for paid parental leave and equal pay, entwining Christian faith with demands for structural care and change. Throughout Garrett’s work runs a resistance to Black nonbeing. “Please let’s remember,” she implores on one page, “when there’s life, there’s hope… there’s hope in these places because there is life, and when there is life, there’s the Lord.” Her words echo James H. Cone’s assertion in A Black Theology of Liberation that “Black theology is a theology of survival,” one that emerges from a community whose existence is continually threatened by erasure. The Black Church’s orientation toward liberation, as Cone reminds us, is modeled on the life and ministry of Jesus and demands a commitment to the well-being of others– both within and beyond the church’s walls. Garrett’s work embodies this ethic. Through intimate materials, collaborative processes, and faith-informed storytelling, she reengages the visual archive of Christianity to imagine new futures for Black communities, and especially for Black women. Her practice reveals how representations of Christian imagery can carry expansive visions of care, survival, and spiritual possibility.

Gloria Garrett’s work is included in We Will Not Be Silent: Art Transforming Rape Culture at The Stamp Gallery of the University of Maryland, College Park, from October 30 to December 15, 2025.

Artist Interviews, Current Exhibition

Why aren’t you here?

This is a long exposure from April 23 to May 12, 2025 at The Stamp Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | Written by Trinitee Tatum

In the quiet between moments, between internal ideas to realized words and actions, Julia Reising listens. Her work— part sculpture, part language, wholly attentive— asks us to consider not just what we see, but what we sense in the periphery, what lingers in the edges of our minds and our environments. Through tile, text, wood, and gesture, she maps the topography of home, the self, memory, and meaning.

As the exhibition title suggests, This is a long exposure– a line taken from Reising’s personal writing– the stillness and contemplation within her work emerge from the act of waiting and watching closely, mirroring the slow revelation of detail in long exposure photography, where what is hidden at first gradually becomes visible. Thus, Reising moves at the speed of the careful capture of light. Her work dwells on the overlooked, the unnoticed. Radiators, wooden banisters, linoleum floors: these architectural fragments, often existing without much fanfare, become in her hands conduits for cultural signifiers and unspoken values. She is interested in how objects and ideas hold us and how we hold onto them; what we inherit not just instinctively, but also spatially. What we pass down through the corners of our homes, the language of domesticity, the invisible codes of belonging and power.

Still from This is a long exposure (2025), Video.

Tiles reappear throughout her work in This is a long exposure like punctuation. Cool, ordered, repeatable. It speaks to both industry and intimacy, of bathrooms and boardrooms, kitchens and clinics. In one piece, a red “linoleum” corner, a meticulous replica of beloved studio flooring now long gone, appears only in photographs and video— its physicality left out of the gallery space entirely. The absence is the point. What is not there feels expansive and loud, an omnipresent force making its presence known. It is, in part, about control. About the visibility of power, and the spaces it occupies silently. Her work is full of such inversions. Stillness brushes up with animation. Emptiness becomes form. Decay is immortal. 

Branch (Green and Blue) (2025), Branch, grout, ceramic tile, wood.

Reising molds and casts not just objects, but echoes, memories. Tree limbs and stumps contend with tiles, drawing precarious lines and alliances between nature and manufacture. The result is often eerie, liminal, familiar, yet unsettled. Memory, too, plays in this register. Not memory as in strictly nostalgia, but as structure. What stirs memory into being? How does context shape what we remember, and what quietly slips away? Reising uproots sentimentality and instead holds space for the complexity of recollection, contemplating the idea of self-affirmation and the existence of multiple truths. Memory here is not a return, but a reframing.

Exhibition View of Linoleum Room Landscape (One and Two) (2025) and Stump (2025).

Collaboration extends this inquiry outward, becoming a way of grappling with the in/visibility of power and control. It’s about the give and take, about depending on someone else to help you affirm what is reality, our perception of reality, our memory of reality. There is a deep humility and vulnerability in this. A willingness to admit that we do not shape the world alone, that our truths are numerous, that meaning is not fixed but fluid. Reising’s work makes room for this. For uncertainty, for multiplicity, for the poetry that happens when form and thought meet halfway.

As an architectural practitioner of feeling, Reising builds with absence as much as substance. Her materials speak, but they also listen. Her objects point to what is evident but not always seen. Her spaces remember. Her words extend. To view her work is to step into a kind of threshold, the in-between of the visible and the vanished. And it is there, in that hushed middle ground, that her art takes shape, not as a statement, but as an offering.

Julia Reising’s work is included in This is a long exposure at The Stamp Gallery of the University of Maryland, College Park, from April 23 to May 12, 2025

For more information on Julia Reising, visit https://www.juliareising.com/.

Current Exhibition

The Aesthetic of Innocence

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Open Ended Narratives: Mixed Media Assemblages on Wood by Schroeder Cherry from February 18 to April 5, 2025 at The Stamp Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | Written by Trinitee Tatum

For a fleeting moment, opening the wooden doors to Schroeder Cherry’s Adam and Eve Enter the Garden (2024) evokes the sensation of stepping into an old church, where, upon looking up, the heavens reveal angels and saints in divine splendor. Cherubs, plump, childlike, and almost always white, fill the walls and domes, shooting arrows, dancing, and playing tiny instruments. They have long symbolized love, purity, and divine favor. Yet, their racial uniformity, often unnoticed, subtly reinforces whiteness as synonymous with innocence– an aesthetic tradition ingrained over millennia.

Adam and Eve Enter the Garden (2024), Mixed media on wood.

At first glance, Adam and Eve Enter the Garden does not overtly replicate this imagery. However, through this work, Cherry establishes a recurring engagement with religious iconography throughout the exhibition. In dialogue with other works, it prompts viewers to interrogate the aesthetics of innocence: who is afforded it, and at whose expense.

Future Voter Series, Cute to Criminal (2023), Mixed media on wood.

Positioned alongside Adam and Eve Enter the Garden, Future Voter Series: Cute to Criminal (2023) more directly confronts the implicit right to cuteness and innocence. Centered around a portrait of a young Black boy, Cherry employs symbols of keys, cards, and a clock to evoke themes of access, play, and time. The boy’s youth, once deemed “cute,” is slipping away as time ticks forward. Here, Cherry forces viewers into a moment of reckoning, compelling them to meet the boy’s gaze and answer his pleading question: At what age do I go from Cute to Criminal?

Angel Sconce #15 for 2 Candles (2025), Mixed media on wood.

Completing this visual and thematic trinity, Angel Sconce #15 for 2 Candles (2025), adjacent to the previous works, confronts the violent erasure of Blackness in both sacred and secular spaces. The figure, though visibly older than the boy in Future Voter Series: Cute to Criminal, remains too young to have died of natural causes. His vibrant royal purple halo and wings contrast sharply with the unspoken tragedy of his loss, prompting viewers to ask who, or what, took his life. Cherry’s sconces, designed to carry light both literally and symbolically, illuminate the systemic omission of Blackness from spaces of sanctity. Often found in family and home altars, these objects serve as sites of remembrance, honoring the departed with photographs, flowers, candles, and offerings. In this context, the sconce functions as both a memorial and a challenge to dominant narratives of purity and innocence.

Church altars, historically adorned with white angelic figures, have not only been places of worship but also instruments of religious and social hierarchy, where whiteness is positioned as pure, and thus superior. The racialized aesthetics of innocence, reinforced through sacred art and colonial missionary work, further entrenched these exclusionary structures. Yet, while churches have historically upheld these ideologies, they have also been sites of resistance. Many churches and religious leaders have actively challenged these racial hierarchies, transforming places of worship into spaces of activism, upliftment, and radical inclusion.

Cherry’s work lays bare these erasures, challenging viewers to reckon with the deeper implications of racialized innocence and exclusion. Through his assemblages, he exposes the historical frameworks that have dictated who is seen, who is protected, and who is rendered invisible. Yet, his work is not just about absence; it is also about reclamation. By inserting Black figures into spaces from which they have long been excluded, Cherry redefines the visual language of sanctity, innocence, and remembrance. His work urges us to question the narratives we inherit and, more importantly, to imagine new ones, ones that acknowledge, honor, and illuminate the lives too often overlooked.

Open Ended Narratives: Mixed Media Assemblages on Wood by Schroeder Cherry is exhibited at The Stamp Gallery of the University of Maryland, College Park, from February 18 to April 5, 2025. 

For more information on Schroeder Cherry, visit https://www.instagram.com/schroeder.cherry/. 

Current Exhibition

Standing and Showering in Sound: What Center and Periphery Mean in Mami Takahashi’s Audio Journal

We Live in the Sky: Home, Displacement, Identity from October 16 to December 7, 2024, at The Stamp Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | Written by Trinitee Tatum

Some cannot see the forest for the trees—drawn too close to the core, captivated by its light and promises, unable to look back. Others, existing farther away, wholly see it but are paralyzed by its force. The dominant Western, Anglo-Saxon American narrative weaves itself so insidiously into the cultural zeitgeist and media that it’s hard to identify and articulate, like a word lingering on the tip of the tongue or a dog chasing its tail. My initial introduction to this piece was an anecdote about feeling invisible and othered when prompted to retell my family’s “immigration” story in the third grade. The words evaded me as I attempted to articulate how exclusionary the assignment felt as I was asked to frame my ancestors’ enslavement in relation to immigration via Ellis Island. How, when it came to immigrating to the United States, Ellis Island was at the center, and everything else existed in the margins. Combating the tides of this pervasive dominant narrative is a daunting task, but artists like Mami Takahashi wield the power of language to center and platform the voices of immigrants. In her work Audio Journal (2024), Takahashi memorializes the unique and individualized experiences of immigration, the sensations of belonging and disbelonging, in a sonic assemblage.

Our struggles as immigrants, though individual and varying, share a winding path of fear. Some similar fears are shared regardless of the story: social fear related to the fragility of status, fear of differences in culture and accents, fear of missing out on “common knowledge,” and fear of a limited support system in the new country.

Mami Takahashi via website.
Mami Takahashi, Audio Journal, 2024.

Best described as a sound collage, Audio Journal is a harmonic layering of audio recordings from the Austin, Texas, immigrant community, a collaborative collection of 1-minute recordings at 11 AM from immigrant communities, and interviews from UMD’s international community. Activated by stepping into a marked circle on the gallery floor, a directional speaker bathes visitors from above in a blend of immigrant stories interwoven with fleeting sounds of daily life. The speaker’s design makes the sound feel as if it emanates from the listener’s own body, creating an intimate, almost internal experience that dissipates upon leaving the listening area, with sound softly spilling from the shower’s edges. Artist Takahashi’s use of a directional speaker here “investigates intimacy, though not necessarily closeness, in public spaces.” The speaker itself embodies a boundary– a threshold– separating the center from the periphery, powerfully demonstrating how voices at the center can overwhelm those on the margins.

Krystof Wodiczko, Monument for the Living, 2020.

Takahashi’s work of using language to hold space for immigrant voices parallels Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczko’s ongoing projects of documenting the lives of immigrants, refugees, and other marginalized communities. Wodiczko’s Monument (2020) is the superimposition of the likenesses and spoken narratives of twelve resettled refugees onto the 1881 monument to Admiral David Glasgow Farragut in Madison Square Park. Reimagining the statue of this Union hero challenges the preconceived notions of which stories are preserved and honored for future generations– and which are left to fade into obscurity.

Audio Journal uses the act of standing to hold space for immigrant voices, urging visitors to make both a literal and metaphorical commitment to honor the narratives, experiences, and challenges of immigrant communities. Standing becomes an intentional, active exertion of the body—a stance that amplifies voices often overshadowed by dominant narratives. It acknowledges the physical and emotional labor involved in sharing and receiving these stories, inviting visitors to stand, listen, and shower in the sound.

Mami Takahashi’s work is included in We Live in the Sky: Home, Displacement, Identity at The Stamp Gallery of the University of Maryland, College Park, from October 16 to December 7, 2024. 

For more information on Mami Takahashi, visit https://mamitakahashi.art/. 

Current Exhibition

Securi ex machina, or Safe from the machine

The Digital Landscape from August 26 to October 5, 2024, at The Stamp Gallery | University of Maryland, College Park | Written by Trinitee Tatum

For an instant, I stood in front of Chris Combs’ Pollination (2023). It simultaneously stole my face and voice, projecting a virtual me before the physical me. The real me. I should have felt violated, exposed, but I stayed. I let Pollination search and seize me. I spoke so it could hear me. I was compelled to let it document me. A moment of pirated digitalization transformed into a prolonged, authorized archival of the self for my own benefit. What led me, and many others, to indulge in and consent to Pollination’s surveillance? Are we hoping to see if technology perceives us the way we see ourselves? Or is it the hope that this piece documents our existence forever, so we may never be forgotten? Perhaps the answer lies somewhere in the unearthing of the algorithmic and systematic indulgence of surveillance for the sake of vanity and ego.

Chris Combs, Pollination, 2023. Aluminum, DIN terminal blocks, wire, screens, computers, 5×4.5×4’. Screenshot via artist’s website.

Pollination is an interactive flower-shaped piece that responds to faces and speech. It uses a camera to recognize faces, transforming them into rotating flower-like shapes, while a microphone listens to speech and displays its transcription on multiple small screens. However, Pollination does not fulfill the desire to be forever etched into the ether as nothing is uploaded from the piece. It uses “whisper.cpp” to transcribe audio entirely within the device and the facial recognition is powered by OpenCV. The closed circuited experience of Pollination means the user’s interaction is disposable, ephemeral. It’s a denial of permanent documentation.

Search results of security camera selfies on Pinterest.

On both systemic and individualistic levels, surveillance is often driven by concerns of fear, vulnerability, and a struggle for control. Surveillance pacifies through the external imposition of order, creating an illusion of security and stability through acts of monitoring, predicting, and understanding. However, this sense of authority is often superficial, and surveillance’s inherently parasitic nature demands data for eternity. Only major organizations have been able to harness the beast by overtly passing the labor of watching on to the users. Big tech companies create opportunities for self-surveillance and external monitoring via social media, but rather than creating a sense of control, this often exacerbates feelings of inadequacy and insecurities. Intentionally or unintentionally, users equate their self-worth to their social media metrics and are driven to curate a perfect public image to feel both internal and external validation. The more susceptible users watch themselves and others via digital networks, the more the images and algorithms reinforce their insecurities, where they compare and conflate themselves with the idealized, curated lives on their feeds. This creates a feedback loop where insecurity fuels surveillance, and surveillance fuels further insecurity.

Screenshot of ChatGPT when prompted to consider its own participation in self surveillance.

Ultimately, (self)-surveillance driven by insecurity is an endless and futile pursuit of reassurance as it only temporarily assuages fears– big, existential fears of the unknown, the fear of losing control, the fear of mortality, the fear of fate. The fear that we are here, and then we are gone. This reassurance, however, is fleeting, a temporary respite. The more one surveils, the more one realizes that complete control or total knowledge is impossible. Look Pollination in the eye, speak to its mic, but seek personal satisfaction beyond the screens. 

Chris Combs’ work is included in The Digital Landscape at The Stamp Gallery of the University of Maryland, College Park, from August 26 to October 5, 2024.