Domestic Interventions (Part II): The Spirituality of Color

Agnes Martin, Antonia Kuo, Brianne Garcia, Chiffon Thomas, Denzil Hurley, Frank Bowling, Gerard Mossé, Greg Ito, Haejin Park, Jason Fox, Kylie Manning, Naomi Lisiki, Rachel Eulena Williams, Reginald Sylvester II, Sam Gilliam, Shaniqwa Jarvis, Spencer Russell Lewis, Taha Heydari, Theresa Chromati, Torkwase Dyson, Trevor Warren, Wook-Kyung Choi

Gladwell Projects is pleased to present the second installment of its itinerant exhibition series, Domestic Interventions in a landmarked Harlem brownstone. Titled The Spirituality of Color, this group presentation explores the transcendent, political, and emotional resonance of color in both contemporary and historical artistic practices.

Staged across four floors of a brownstone built in 1885, in a neighborhood historically marked by Black religious institutions and spiritual traditions, The Spirituality of Color presents itself as a sensorial and conceptual journey. Featuring a cross-generational roster of artists, the exhibition positions color as a conduit for knowledge, ritual, and healing. It illuminates abstraction as a method of both rupture and repair.

Theresa Chromati’s Fuck—I Fuck Back (Woman Births Woman), 2025, channels the erotic, sacred, and chaotic through an ecstatic palette and rhythmic visual language. The work pulses with refusal and bloom, conjuring color as both emotion and declaration. Chiffon Thomas’s five sculptural works are installed like quiet interruptions, delicately suspended, stitched, and braced throughout the home. His Bible buildings, sewn from the leather covers of deconstructed Bibles and named after public housing communities in Chicago’s South Side, carry the weight of memory and the infrastructure of belief. Within the context of a Harlem brownstone, surrounded by historic churches and community institutions, Thomas’s use of muted tones (burnished browns, ash pinks, soft greys) resonates like ritual. Together, these artists show color not as surface, but as frequency: a force that tends, witnesses, and transforms.

Other highlights include Wook-Kyung Choi’s Untitled, 1974, a tightly composed field of calligraphic energy and emotional turbulence; Trevor Warren’s Lake Tapps, 2025, a meditative excavation of memory through scraped, sedimented paint; and Jason Fox’s Untitled, 2025, an abstracted, psychic response to a tightly cropped detail from his earlier figurative painting Melmoth, 2020. In this new work, Fox disassembles the internal logic of his own image, blurring the line between figuration and fever dream. Brianne Garcia’s overlap (moral support), 2024, introduces a vocabulary of sewn pigment and quilted memory. Along the seams, tree twigs gathered from around Harlem are delicately embedded, bridging gesture, color, and place with quiet intensity. Agnes Martin’s Untitled, 1977, luminous and spare, anchors the exhibition’s tonal range through meditative restraint.

The exhibition is conceived as a multisensory environment. Visitors will be guided not only through visual form but also through scent and sound. Incense, botanical oils, and an ambient soundscape by writer and researcher Lauren Williams —comprised of recordings from throughout Central Harlem— are integrated throughout the space, transforming the home into a site of ritual activation and atmospheric intimacy.

The curatorial structure unfolds across four thematic currents. Root Matter explores color as an embodied frequency tied to ancestral memory, erotic knowledge, and intuitive assertion. Structures of Feeling considers color as emotional infrastructure, holding psychic weight and transitional states. Transmissions and Tethering focuses on material-based rituals — stitching, staining, printing, and touch — that connect abstraction to metaphysical practice. Air and Afterlight reaches toward color’s transcendental capacities, where clarity, stillness, and perceptual deceleration emerge through minimalist poetics and quiet repetition. These themes unfold without rigid boundaries, allowing visitors to experience each space as a layered and open-ended portal.

Part of an ongoing curatorial series developed by Christiana Ine-Kimba Boyle, The Spirituality of Color follows Domestic Interventions: The Metroplex, which debuted in Dallas earlier this year and resulted in the acquisition of Chiffon Thomas’ Sundering, 2024, and Clifford Prince King's silence by the river, 2023, for the permanent collection of the Dallas Museum of Art. Notably, 50% of the Dallas exhibition’s profits were donated to Eighth House Residency, reflecting Gladwell Projects’ commitment to artist-led ecosystems and long-term cultural infrastructure.

“I’m honored to launch Gladwell Projects in my home neighborhood of Harlem with The Spirituality of Color,” said Christiana Boyle, founder of Gladwell Projects. “This exhibition has been in development for four years, and presenting it here, in a community shaped by spiritual and cultural legacy, feels especially resonant. While color and abstraction have long held a central place in the art historical canon, they’ve often been approached through narrow, formalist frameworks, stripped of the emotional, lived, and metaphysical dimensions many artists have long brought to the medium. This show seeks to expand that lineage, offering space for artists across generations to explore color as a carrier of memory, intuition, and transformation.”

“I’m honored to launch Gladwell Projects in my home neighborhood of Harlem with The Spirituality of Color,” said Christiana Boyle, founder of Gladwell Projects. “This exhibition has been in development for four years, and presenting it here, in a community shaped by spiritual and cultural legacy, feels especially resonant. While color and abstraction have long held a central place in the art historical canon, they’ve often been approached through narrow, formalist frameworks, stripped of the emotional, lived, and metaphysical dimensions many artists have long brought to the medium. This show seeks to expand that lineage, offering space for artists across generations to explore color as a carrier of memory, intuition, and transformation.”

This marks the first New York presentation by Gladwell Projects, a new program founded by Boyle with a mission to support artist-led initiatives and foster new modes of exhibition-making. The Spirituality of Color affirms the radical potential of art to transform space, perception, and the viewer’s engagement with the sacred.

Gladwell Projects is an independent program established by Christiana Ine-Kimba Boyle, a gallerist whose professional ethos centers on championing artists whose practices are rooted in authenticity, experimentation, and visionary rigor. Named in memory of her late uncle, a painter lost during the Biafran War, and remembered with enduring reverence and familial love, Gladwell Projects emerges as a living tribute: an intergenerational vessel through which memory, lineage, and creative practice are honored and reimagined.

Operating as a shape-shifting ecosystem that prioritizes dialogue, experimentation, long-term relationships, and moves at the tempo of artistic inquiry, the program is designed to nurture artists across various stages of their careers, particularly those whose work challenges categorization. Gladwell Projects seeks to uplift practices that traverse formal, conceptual, and institutional boundaries through radical storytelling as a reclamation space where culture is made and seen through dynamic curated shows and community-centered programming. It is a space where legacy meets the future: in motion, in dialogue, and always with intention.

With a deep commitment to artists whose work embodies social consciousness, personal narrative, and aesthetic innovation, Gladwell Projects invites audiences to experience art not merely as an object of consumption but as a catalyst for connection, reckoning, and transformation. It is a space where legacy meets the future: in motion, in dialogue, and always with intention.

Christiana Ine-Kimba Boyle is a New York-based art dealer and curator, and the founder of Gladwell Projects, a curatorial program committed to institutionally scaled exhibitions and cross-disciplinary storytelling guided by the principle “Do Nothing Without Intention.” Previously, Boyle served as Senior Director and Global Head of Online at Pace Gallery, where she launched the pioneering digital platform Pace Verso, brought painter Kylie Manning into the program, and worked closely with artists such as Lynda Benglis and Hank Willis Thomas. Her curatorial work consistently champions underrepresented voices and fosters inclusive, engaged collector communities with a vision of transforming the contemporary art landscape through intention and equity.