Shawn Theodore at NXTHVN: Glory
March 7 – August 30, 2026

This exhibition is curated by 2025-2026 NXTHVN Curatorial Fellows Tara Fay Coleman and Juanita Sunday.

Featuring artwork by:

Faustin Adeniran, Akea Brionne, Patrick Eugène, Chris Friday, Tyler Mitchell, Woody De Othello, William Rhodes, Bria Sterling-Wilson, Jomo Tariku, Shawn Theodore, and VantaBlack

“What does how we arrange interior space say about how we live? And what does that say about who we are?” asks Elizabeth Alexander in her book, The Black Interior. To enter a Black home is to enter a space where visual language is intentionally constructed, shaped by care and self-definition, allowing complexity and identity to take form outside the demands of public gaze and institutional framing, as noted in bell hooks’ 1995 essay “In Our Glory: Photography and Black Life.”

Rooted in these concepts and expanded through a design experience, Glory honors the aesthetics of everyday survival and the ways working class Black American families have built beauty, community, and meaning inside the walls that held them. Suspended between past and future, Glory transforms the gallery into an imagined Black American home interior, and a living technology of memory. In this space, the home becomes an archive of care and imagination, where images and objects speak in the language of cultural memory.

Using the visual language of the 1970’s, an era that symbolizes cultural pride and transformation, nostalgia is activated as a portal exploring how material culture and spatial design tell a story of the ways Black identity can be created and reflected through one’s environment. Glory brings together artists whose practices engage with memory, materiality, family, and domestic space, working across photography, painting, assemblage, mixed media, textile, and sculpture. Collectively, the exhibition positions the interior space as a realm where the Black subconscious is materialized.

This exhibition is curated by 2025-2026 NXTHVN Curatorial Fellows Tara Fay Coleman and Juanita Sunday.

LOCATION
169 Henry St.
New Haven, CT 06511

HOURS
Wednesday – Sunday: 2PM to 6PM

PRESS
New Haven Independent

Explore the collection here

Photo credit: Chris Gardner Photo, Courtesy of NXTHVN

INTRODUCING SHAWN THEODORE'S SOUTHLINE SERIES
now available in-person at Paradigm Gallery

In tandem with the exhibition at NXTHVN, Shawn Theodore is releasing a collection of 24 new small works that will be for sale in-person only at Paradigm. The Southline series, named after the railroad line that employed his grandfather and his family used to ride, is comprised of film manipulation from emulsions of found and family photos. Theodore is experimenting with a new genre of minimal collage built on a reserved, neutral color scheme. Theodore cultivated the muted, distinct background colors by looking at contemporary interior design favorites for creating calm, restorative living spaces. Theodore's purposeful pairing of older moments with contemporary colors allows him to seamlessly reduce the scene to only the subjects. Theodore states, "Memory is always present. It may shrink or render out the architecture of that moment, but the presence of the people is persistent. It is the essence moment: figure as an inescapable icon that reminds us that every  ‘now’ is inextricably connected.”

Each piece is unique, and all are currently on display at Paradigm Gallery + Studio (12 N 3rd Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106). Come in person to view the series, or contact info@paradigm-gallery for pricing. 

About Shawn Theodore

Shawn Theodore (b. 1970) is an interdisciplinary artist/ Afrotheorist based in Philadelphia whose work merges photography, theory, mythmaking, and creative writing to reimagine Black presence as sovereign, eternal, and uncontainable. Born in Germany and raised between Devon, PA and West Philadelphia, Theodore learned early to navigate contrasts-rural stillness and urban urgency, ancestral memory and contemporary life-that continue to shape his vision. 

Through his original trademarked framework of Afromythology, Theodore expands photography beyond documentation into ritual and cosmology. His practice spans neighborhood portraiture, mythic figuration, and archival reconstitution, transforming the ordinary into archetype and everyday spaces into portals of memory. 

Theodore's work has been acquired by the National Portrait Gallery (his portrait of Amanda Gorman, the inaugural National Youth Poet Laureate), Philadelphia Museum of Art, The African American Museum of Philadelphia, the Library of the Metropolitan Muse um of Art, Library of the Whitney Museum, Library of the Guggenheim Museum, Library of the Getty Institute, Amon Carter Museum of Art, Arcadia University, Texas State University, ArtCenter College of Design, Syracuse University, Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Drexel University, and The Coca Cola Company. His work has also been collected by former First Lady Michelle Obama. 

He has exhibited at Temple Contemporary at Tyler School of Art, Hudson Valley Community College, The University of the Arts, and Notre Dame of Maryland University, and has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Musee Magazine, VIBE Magazine, The New Yorker, and Paper Magazine.  Across images, text, and theory, Theodore creates a body of work that resists erasure and insists on presence, reconceiving Black life as a luminous, sovereign continuum. 

About NXTHVN

NXTHVN is a new national arts model that empowers artists, curators, and the community through education and access to a vibrant ecosystem. Supported by intergenerational mentorship, cross-sector collaboration, and local engagement, NXTHVN accelerates the careers of the next generation and fosters retention of professional art talent while helping catalyze New Haven into a world-class, sustainable arts community.

NXTHVN was founded by Titus Kaphar and Jason Price. Their core aim was two-fold: to build an alternative model of art mentorship and career advising through a specially designed curriculum, and to simultaneously set into motion significant opportunities for emerging local entrepreneurs.
In the spirit of adaptive reuse, NXTHVN is located in two former manufacturing plants in the Dixwell neighborhood of New Haven, Connecticut. The space was designed by TenBerke and opened its Fellowship wing in 2019 to our inaugural cohort of studio and curatorial Fellows. NXTHVN is a registered 501C3 organization.