National Portrait Gallery Acquires Shawn Theodore's Portrait of Amanda Gorman and Announces New Exhibition

Mnêmosynê, Afrolinquistica - a portrait of Poet Laureate Amanda S. Gorman • Archival Pigment Print on Hahnemühle Rag Paper • 2023

Paradigm Gallery + Studio is pleased to announce the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery has acquired Mnêmosynê, Afrolinquistica - a portrait of Poet Laureate Amanda S. Gorman, and will be a part of the permanent collection.  Shawn Theodore's striking portrait of Amanda Gorman will makes its institutional debut in the National Portrait gallery's upcoming presentation, Photographic Memory: Fifty Years of Collecting, curated by Ann Shumard, senior curator of photographs. The work will be on view on the National Portrait Gallery’s second floor ( 8th St NW & G St NW, Washington, DC 20001) from November 14, 2026, to November 7, 2027.  More information here.

The Michener Art Museum Acquires Four Works by Shawn Theodore

"Kingdom" • Archival pigment print on Canson Infinity Platine Fibre Rag 310gsm • 2017

We are honored to publicly share the good news that the James A. Michener Art Museum has acquired four pivotal works by Shawn Theodore through Paradigm Gallery + Studio.  The acquisition  spans from various series created within Theodore's trademarked ‘Afromythology’ praxis.

Kingdom, from The Guardians of Africanus, the Emancipation of Bashi-Bazouk series, challenges that inheritance by emancipating the sitter from the historical and aesthetic conditions imposed upon his image. Theodore’s deliberate hand-painting of the subject’s skin black introduces a further confrontation with the history of racial representation. Where blackface minstrelsy employed blackened skin as an instrument of caricature and racial degradation, Theodore reclaims the material gesture as a means of spiritual elevation. Within Afromythology, the application of black pigment becomes an act of consecration, moving the subject beyond the limitations of human representation into the realm of ancestral spirits and deities. The historical convention is deliberately subjugated through this reversal, its authority to diminish Blackness challenged by an image in which the very condition once made an object of ridicule becomes the foundation of divine presence.

Fanm Jade Ble • Canson Infinity Platine Fibre Rag 310gsm, 2019

Fanm Jade Blue, from Night Stars series, Theodore expands the Afromythological lens through the material and spiritual histories of West African indigo, tracing its cultural inheritance across the Atlantic and into the cosmological imagination of the African diaspora.

Indigo carries a complicated inheritance. Its cultivation and preparation reflect generations of African knowledge, while its transformation into a valuable colonial commodity depended upon the exploitation of enslaved African labor. The extraordinary depth of its color contains a history in which beauty and violence occupy the same material existence. Across the diaspora, indigo becomes a means of contemplating what survives displacement, particularly the cultural knowledge that endured the interruption of ancestral geographies.

Within Night Stars, this inheritance enters a speculative relationship with water and the celestial world. The Atlantic becomes an immense repository of historical memory, its depths holding the consequences of forced passage, while the night sky extends beyond the territorial boundaries through which human lives were claimed and divided.

Off Kilter • Archival pigment print on Canson Infinity Platine Fibre Rag 310gsm • 2016

Off Kilter, from the Church of Broken Pieces series, examines Black identity through its relationship to visual representation, particularly the influence images exert upon collective consciousness and the ways Black people understand themselves within the cultural imagination.

Drawing upon the artistic inheritance of the Harlem Renaissance, Theodore considers how the creative ambitions of the early twentieth century helped establish enduring frameworks for modern Black self-representation. The movement emerged through an extraordinary negotiation between cultural self-determination and the racial conditions governing American society. Its artists developed visual languages capable of expressing possibilities for Black life that dominant representations had long denied.

Off Kilter returns to Aaron Douglas’s visual language to examine this unsettled inheritance. Theodore considers the distance between the Black imagination that produced these images and the expectations subsequently attached to them, exploring how an aesthetic born from cultural liberation can become a framework through which later expressions of Blackness are measured. The work inhabits that tension, where the desire for self-recognition encounters the persistent authority of images inherited from another historical moment.

Africaine no. 2 • Archival pigment print • 2019

Africaine no. 2, from the Future Antebellum series, extends into speculative territory, imagining a near future in which the inherited structures governing Black representation have become increasingly untenable.Photographed entirely at Philadelphia’s historic New Freedom Theatre, the series situates this speculative future within an institution whose own history is inseparable from Black cultural self-determination. Theodore draws upon the theatrical possibilities of the space to place Renaissance aesthetics and Orientalist conventions in conversation with colonial constructions of ornamental Blackness. The resulting compositions expose the persistent influence of Western art history upon the representation of Black subjects, even within imagined futures that have otherwise departed from familiar historical conditions.

Within Future Antebellum, the question of Blackness extends beyond its contemporary representations toward the uncertain conditions of its future visibility. The work examines what remains possible when inherited structures of recognition begin to collapse, and whether Black existence can occupy a future no longer governed by the aesthetic and political authorities that have historically claimed the power to define it.

Shawn Theodore on view at Samuel Bak Museum
University of Nebraska at Omaha

The Salon of Oluchi Oneya and Leenos The Forgiving • Archival Pigment Print on Hahnemühle Rag Paper • 2018

Samuel Bak Museum: The Learning Center presents Past, Present, Futures, an expansive exhibition highlighting Shawn Theodore's developement of Afromythology in his conceptual photography.  Past, Present, Futures will be on display at Samuel Bak Museum through December 20, 2026. More information here. 

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 PARADIGM GALLERY
Paradigm Gallery + Studio® was established in 2010 by co-founders and curators, Jason Chen and Sara McCorriston. The gallery exhibits meaningful, process-intense contemporary artwork by emerging and mid-career artists from around the world, with a focus on Philadelphia. In 2023, Paradigm moved locations and opened its new 5-story, 7,000 sq. ft. home, The Paradigm Arts Building, in Old City, Philadelphia. Open to the public, the building boasts multiple floors of exhibition space, integrated in-house design and printmaking, a dedicated events floor, and art advisory offices. With this, Chen and McCorriston expanded their vision for the greater Philadelphia arts community. The gallery is at the heart of this vision, anchoring Paradigm’s overall mission of increasing access to the commercial art world, supporting artists and advancing their careers, and collaborating with like-minded partners to build a more equitable, sustainable arts economy for all.

For all inquiries and press, please contact info@paradigm-gallery.com.