BmoreArt

Close Enough, featuring works by Aliana Grace Bailey and Brandon Donahue-Shipp, curated by Ines Sanchez de Lozada.

Close Enough explores the intimate power of gesture and memory. With works rooted in care, legacy, and presence, this exhibition holds space for quiet boldness and deep connection. Bailey’s weavings, locs, and collages sit in conversation with Donahue-Shipp’s oil paintings on stretched T-shirts, offering layered reflections on Black life, softness, and everyday beauty.

Together, their works open portals of familiarity and connection. Through bold textures and tender gestures, Close Enough asks us to consider the legacies we carry and the ones we’re building. It is an exhibition that doesn’t ask to be decoded, but to be felt—by those close enough to recognize themselves in the folds.

Close Enough to know something sacred happened here: Threads that stretch from a grandmother’s room to the edge of a child’s fingertips. A closeness not defined by distance, but by daring proximity. A kind of legacy that teaches you how to listen, how to wait, how to remember. Close Enough is about the intimacy of gesture, the quiet boldness of choices made with care. It’s how stories drape themselves on fabric, how color holds grief and celebration at once. How scale wraps around you like arms, while still keeping part of itself untouchable. It’s the moment you recognize yourself in the texture of another’s life.

At its core, this show is shaped by the tender, layered practices of Aliana Grace Bailey and Brandon J. Donahue-Shipp, two artists who work from the inside out, feeling first, forming second, and trusting that what’s honest will resonate. Their practices live in the tension of what they share and what they keep. Between boldness and softness.

Bailey presents a collection of weavings that trace the quiet rhythms of her inner world, hand-dyed locs that hold the love embedded in protective care, and collages that pause on the everyday act of choosing presence and finding joy amid uncertainty. Her materials and compositions are threaded with intimacy: soft, strong, and deeply personal. Rooted in slowness and care, her practice becomes a space for reflection and healing – first for herself, then as an offering to other Black women like her.

Donahue-Shipp transforms everyday objects into layered portraits of care. Using T-shirts as his canvas, he combines oil painting and airbrush acrylic to capture imagery of himself and other Black people in casual encounters and everyday snapshots. His works breathe with vibrancy, yet remain still. They offer meditations on the beauty and significance of the mundane while centering Black people living, unbothered and present, in moments that often go unnoticed.

Together, these artists open portals of familiarity traced in monochromatic depths and vibrant color stories. Through subtle and overt gestures, their art practices carry the legacies they’ve inherited and shape those they will pass on. They create space for tenderness and strength to coexist, offering works that don’t ask to be decoded, but to be felt by those close enough to recognize themselves in the folds.

Brandon J. Donahue-Shipp, Artist Statement

At the foundation of my art practice is 25 years of experience as a custom airbrush artist. T-shirts were my first canvases, surfaces where I conveyed messages of identity, commemoration, and resistance. They became sites where I confronted ideas about personal and cultural identity, as well as themes of exaltation and transformation.

Threads in Peace is a series of oil painting and airbrushed acrylic works on stretched T-shirts that explores how identity, memory, and the present moment can be reimagined through opacity and catachresis. Drawing on Édouard Glissant’s notion of opacity—the right to resist full transparency or comprehension—I create images that dwell in the unresolved. Figures emerge in mundane, everyday moments, yet remain obscured by layers of oil paint, airbrushed acrylic, and collaged polytab fabric. Their partial visibility gestures toward the complexities of selfhood and the impossibility of fully capturing lived experience.

I also turn to catachresis—intentional misuse or dislocation of meaning—as a way to speak through material. Collected and repurposed T-shirts become the ground for these works, hardened into canvas yet still bearing the textures of their past life. This juxtaposition of soft and rigid, personal and collective, reflects a fractured way of moving through memory and history. Through this work, I aim to create a space of resistance against the pressure to be fully understood, against fixed narratives, and in favor of a more layered, imaginative form of truth.

Aliana Grace Bailey, Artist Statement

I am an interdisciplinary fiber artist—taking up space with bold softness. My work embraces artmaking as a form of growth, intimacy, and inner peace. Weaving together vibrant color, narrative, and the creation of healing environments, I explore and manifest awareness of self, Black womanhood, and everything sacred to me.

My work is bold yet quiet, warm yet intimate. It invites the viewer to slow down, to reflect on their own relationships and how they choose to love—both themselves and others. This invitation is initiated by sharing my vulnerability, openness, and self-healing practices. My work is large in scale, emotional, and vibrant in color to encompass the body and provide viewers with comfort while exploring familial connections, memories, and experiences that tug on our hearts.

Fiber entered my practice in 2012 in honor of my grandmother, Ruby. We shared many intimate moments as I helped care for her in her final years. Each day, she admired a print from across the living room at my parent’s house—Faith Ringgold’s Church Picnic Story Quilt (1988). Following my grandmother’s passing, I was called to reconnect to my creative freedom of mixing mediums and my interest in textiles as a child.

My weavings and locs are living works—transforming across spaces and moments. This is most fully realized in Soft Gather, a series of healing installations where Black women and gender-expansive people are invited to rest and build community through color and fiber. I explore love, spirituality, and healing, intentionally nurturing intimacy across people and generations. While intimacy is not something to force, it can be intentionally explored, better understood, practiced, celebrated, and strengthened between individuals, communities, and across ancestral lines. My artwork juxtaposes beauty against traumatic realities—creating spaces where joy and healing coexist. In this tension, my work finds rest.