The Shed’s 12 artist group show, curated by Dejá Belardo, paves elaborate pathways along the connections of our human experience

 

Watch my TikTok review of this show here. 🖤

 

The call comes the day before the big day. Incoherent sobbing and existential questioning from a friend with the ‘birthday blues’ trying to make sense of how another year has passed while she has nothing to show for it. 

 

I wasn’t aware that the American entity could have a similar crashout. On the eve of the 4th of July — the night before the United States turned 249 — I watched the only country I’ve ever known saw through its own leg just above the knee. A grim and grisly spectacle; they mowed through the delicate skin, the flesh, and the resistance of bone and smiled all the while. 

 

Ten days later, I’m still flabbergasted that I exist in this timeline. I have no idea who to blame: my parents? the American electorate? A tardy hero en route via DeLorean? I’m exploring conjugations of words I didn’t even know had other forms. Expat has become expatriate, as in expatriating as in get me out of here now.

 

I am — we are — tethered. If not geographically, we are tethered to this time and our place in history. These connections, the proud as well as the shameful, are laid beautifully at our feet this summer at The Shed. Open Call: Portals, curated by Dejá Belardo, unifies the work of 12 early-career, boundary-pushing artists in physical space and theme. Belardo writes, “The portals and realms created in the exhibition open passageways between past and present, memory and material, displacement and belonging, representing a constellation of interrelated yet irreducibly distinct identities, each contributing to a dynamic, shared humanity.”

 

 

If I leave this country, I choose displacement and in doing so will likely displace another. But a longer view of history reminds that my forebears were already displaced, and my migration may from a centurion circle. “Residence Time / The Sea Is History” by duo Yelaine Rodriguez and Luis Vasquez La Roche “excavates” the Door of No Return in Ghana, from which scores of West African people embarked on the terrifying and inhumane Middle Passage. By constructing the door as a sculpture, affixed with offerings to Yemayá, we can circle the entryway looking forward and backward through a place and time where our ancestors had only one choice: through. 

 

 

This is not to say that staying in Africa is an all-salve. Chelsea Odufu’s “Gold with a Mind of Its Own” places striking photography of diasporic people draped in gold that glints against the skin. Gold durags, headdresses, brooches, and jewelry evoke a ‘we were kings and queens’ aesthetic alongside an experimental film that traces the precious metal back to its violent and exploitative sourcing in places like Côte d’Ivoire. Taken together the photo and video combo goes from Trinidad James’ “All Gold Everything” to [old] Kanye West’s “Diamonds From Sierra Leone”. When you remember the true cost of your ring or ear stack, or your necklace, it might make you tuck your chain in.

 

 

While you’re tucking, check the tag on your shirt. Bodies are invisible but implied in apparel sculpted from sugar. Like Kara Walker’s sludgy toddlers who spent a whole summer melting at the Domino Sugar Factory alongside a 35-foot sphinx in 2014, Mel Corchado refashions the narrative around the medium and legacy of sugar, colonialism, and labor. Dresses, Chinese slippers, and body chains drip thick, brown molasses onto white pedestals below a glazed machete. Through consumption, we’re all tethered to extracting value. That the name $TICKY $IN$ is a believable title for an Insta-famous bakery, a rapper’s nom de plume, or an underground fashion label (it is the title for Corchado’s work) gives me a tummyache.

 

 

But look at all we’ve made: the homes we’ve built in places we haven’t chosen, or the languages we were forced to learn and then redefined. Jarrett Key, whose work I last saw at their solo show Above and Beyond, is here in Portals with a multimedia installation entitled “Hair Painting No. 40 (in three parts)”. There was one part on view for the opening reception. A wall-sized canvas with rough abstract swirls of black and white hung beside a small video screen of Key’s process. Through the use of elastics and the divine gift of sturdy coils, they pull their hair into a vertical ponytail. The hair is the bristles, their neck is the handle: the body as a paintbrush. The shapes, painted over each other until they lose distinction, are like a Black ABCs. In Bernadette Triplett and June Heinrich’s Black ABCs from 1970s, A is for afro and B is for beautiful. Key’s ABCs are more personal, stirring family stories into cultural research. Key’s A is for amen, B is for baby, and C is for “chirun” (children). In the paintings, Jarrett uses their body as a vessel to encode messages from the past into the present. Key has scheduled live painting sessions on June 28 and July 12 with a recap for August 9. I spoke with the artist at the opening reception and asked if they felt nervous about having viewers present, but Jarrett is looking forward to the energy they’ll share and hold with the audience.   

 

 

All of the artists (and artist teams) in Open Call: Portals — Zain Alam, AYDO, Mel Corchado, Marwa Eltahir, Patricia Encarnación, Laurena Finéus, Lily Honglei, Tyson Houseman, Jarrett Key, Chelsea Odufu, Victor “Marka27” Quiñonez, Yelaine Rodriguez and Luis Vasquez La Roche — seem to be in conversation in the Level 2 Gallery, which is the mark of a well-curated exhibition. In all of the work, Belardo sees a connection to Glissant’s philosophy of mondialité (world mentality) a “vision of global belonging rooted in relation, difference, and poetic entanglement”. This means, for better or for worse, I am here. In this timeline, in this reality. No matter where I go in the world, I will be ‘poetically entangled’ with our shared history. There is no running from the past, but I am/we are not trapped.

 

The portals this collective has opened in Hudson Yards frame a view into what has brought us all here, what we’ve held onto through displacement, what we’ve inherited — struggles, stories, and gifts, and how we might console our nation and our world with hope. If America is crashing out over the gap between her grotesque real life and her liberty-themed vision board, her impending 250th birthday marks a good time to pivot.     

 

blacklove 🖤 and starlight 🌟 

 

Watch my TikTok review of this show here. 🖤

 

Open Call: Portals is a group show featuring 12 artists at the The Shed in Hudson Yards. It is on view from June 27th until August 24th, 2025 with special events throughout the exhibition run. With the exception of one large-scale outdoor installation (which is visible at any time), the artwork is in The Shed’s Level 2 gallery, which is open Tuesday through Thursday from 2pm-7pm, Friday from 2pm-8pm, and Saturday and Sunday from 12pm-8pm. The gallery is not open on Mondays. Admission to all of The Shed’s Open Call events is free.