Shawn Theodore: Pyramid Club Uninterrupted
On Display Offsite at Temple Contemporary through December 19, 2025
Part of PYRAMID CLUB: 1937-2035

UPCOMING EVENT
Dr. William A. Dodd & Dr. Matt Kenyatta in Conversation with artist Shawn Theodore
Thursday, October 9th: 5:30 - 7:30pm
This event at Temple Contemporary is free and open to the public.

LOCATION & HOURS
Temple Contemporary 

Find Temple Contemporary inside the Tyler School of Art and Architecture. The gallery is open to the public from Wednesday-Thursday, noon to 8 p.m. and Friday-Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Temple Contemporary
Tyler School of Art and Architecture
2001 N. 13th St.
Philadelphia, PA 19122

Enter the building's Norris Street entrance between 12th & 13th Streets. 

ABOUT THE COLLECTION

Foundations, Continuums, and the Birth of a Neverending Vibe
—by Shawn Theodore

The artists who passed through the altar of the Pyramid Club did more than leave behind a record of their presence. They set into motion a current of vision that continues to move through us. Their work does not rest willingly in the archive; it holds the charge of its making. Nor does it settle as an artifact; it gathers itself, storm-like, each time we stand before it, speaking as though it were always waiting to be heard at this moment. What we now call Vibe.

The Pyramid Club was a stage, a sanctuary, and a vessel. Within those rooms, images and ideas took form with the force of prophecy. Humbert Howard’s curatorial hand brought them together, and John W. Mosley’s camera caught them in flight, ensuring they would not vanish into silence. The annual exhibitions articulated a living sovereignty, a declaration that Black creativity remains unbound by the whim of any institution. The Pyramid Club is and was an ontological beauty of fugitivity wrestling with the grotesquery of conformity. How we come to grips with this tension marks us as stewards, captains, or willing cargo in the hold.

These works I’ve co-curated with Dr. Matt from Dr. Dodd’s collection and The Blockson Library remain as prescient touchstones of an unshakable law within Blackness: if it is not sacred, why make it? Every brushstroke, every print, every photograph answers that question with its own baptismal resonance. The sacred is not distant. It is the lens through which the work comes into clarity—as beacon, as lighthouse, as North Star. It is the truth that steadies it and the current that carries it forward, unbroken and unfettered, sailing across time into the port of now and, conversely, if.

This gathering is not a reconstruction of what has been lost, for nothing has been lost. It is a recognition of what never ceased. These works refract and bend, shifting with our sight, showing us many angles at once. They prove that history, however bent and broken the branch, cannot contain their reach. The art created to honor the Pyramid Club returns as unbroken Black continuums, as radiant evidence of Blackness itself—an expression of what has always been here and what insists on continuing—a testament and embodiment of Sankofa.

With humility, pride, and reverence, my work stands in conversation with theirs. It does not replace or echo, but extends. It listens to the frequencies they set loose. It builds within the resonance they left behind. It carries their signal into another register of sight, another season of becoming and another reason to be. It comes forward to submit to the Vibe check, asé.

The Pyramid Club carries forward through every artist who enters its field. It breathes through brushstroke and print, through photograph and sculpture, through the gathered voices of collectors like Dr. William Dodd, archivists like Leslie Willis-Lowry, and institutions such as the Blockson Library that keep it alive. It moves across generations and across geographies, unfurling its sails wherever its vision is invoked. It endures because the work was made in reverence. It endures because the artists who carried it knew it to be sacred. It endures because its signal—the Vibe—cannot be erased. The Pyramid Club has always been here. The Pyramid Club is the persistent now. The Pyramid Club is, as it always will be, still arriving.

EXHIBITION IMAGES

Exhibition Documentation by Jason Chen 
Copyright 2025 Paradigm Gallery + Studio