When singer-songwriter (and DJ at Club 1BD) Durand Bernarr dropped his most recent album, BLOOM, in the middle of February, you could tell he had been through something. He strains on the opening track, GENEROUS, I’m looking past the blood on the leaves/ The ones that stain my family tree/ willing to bet my life there’s a new road/ even through all the hurt I’ve seen/ even through all the dirt, I’m clean/ the past it ain’t got a hold on me no more. Both the album and his world tour entitled “You Gon Grow, Too!” (which starts in California at the end of this month) have therapy-assisted growth as a theme. He’s been wearing white, playing in flowers, and talking about boundaries. But in Mwinga Sinjela’s Oh, They Rolling Bones In the The Back we see what I immediately recognized as Dark Durand. 

The painting doesn’t exactly depict Durand or tell any particular story about the musical artist (though Mwinga disclosed he used Bernarr’s features as a reference); it’s more like an interdimensional glimpse into an alternate universe. Suspended reality — on this afro-futuristic, liberated, action-packed plane — is a motif in Sinjela’s solo exhibition Grasslands at ChaShaMa Gallery’s Bryant Park location. 

There are evocative tufts of wheaty branches tucked into wall scones around the gallery, but grasses and plant matter also find their way into a few of the works. In HELLO!, pink-skinned people with kinky textured hair don pine needles around their necks and calves as they lean out of formation on a stacked metal structure that recalls the gigantic bleacher setup Beyonce used for her HBCU Homecoming-themed Coachella set. In other works, pastel-colored grasses wiggle at the bottom of the canvas, thick and floppy like the tendrils of anemones under the sea. The location is neither aquatic nor galactic and neither here nor there. The time is neither past nor present nor future; the figures seem both real and fictional. 

It makes sense, then, that Mwinga counts comics as an influence since many superheroes occupy a world that’s close to ours but inaccessible (no matter how tempted I am to pack up and move to Wakanda!). The subjects are queer and colorful and superhuman. They can fly, they wear space suits, their eyes glow white like pale moons in the desert. In Jungo Gym, a handsome femme with a jarhead cut and spiderleg lashes playfully dangles a child by their pinky toe while other children swing around her sculpted body. 

On the Tuesday afternoon when I popped in, Mwinga was in the gallery painting a new piece to pass the time and still making sense of seeing all of the works in one place. Before getting the call to do a solo show, much of the art on display had been in storage and besides a few pieces that had shown at the Affordable Art Fair in Fall 2024, Grasslands was a map being unfurled for the first time. The distinction of Mwinga’s “favorite” work fluctuates between pieces, but on the day I visited the answer was clear. We stood in front of Ups & Ups (Cold Moon Congregation) peering into a purple forest under a full moon’s light. A bald, brown-skinned femme appears to lean out of the canvas on a striped tree limb, her likeness appears in the background sitting on, hanging from, and standing on branches with a knowing expression and impressive control of a spear-tipped javelin. I asked if it was the same woman on different nights or if she had sisters, and Mwinga talked about how shadows can depict movement in animation. (The answer is really up to you.)

In “Grasslands”, Mwinga has handed over interpretation to the audience, a part of the artistic process that is not without difficulty. Sinjela has painted a world that resembles ours in its Blackness, fashionable details, and turns of phrase, while also presenting a place where we’re freer, more expressive, in deeper relationship with the natural world, and even more powerful. I noticed that when there’s a moon in Sinjela’s artwork, it’s always whole and luminous. Full moons mark culminations (they’re the end of the lunar cycle) and they lend enough light for way-finding on dark nights. What the viewer sees in these moonlit grasses is as much about their roots as it is about how they’ll grow. 

“Grasslands” by Mwinga Sinjela, curated by Sheer, is on view at ChaShaMa Gallery (1155 Avenue of the Americas) from March 15th until the closing reception for the show on April 13th, 2025. Entry to the gallery is free. All works are available for purchase and can be accessed through the catalogue.