Archives Yet to Come

February 8 - May 4, 2025

Opening reception: Saturday, February 8, 3-5pm

Curated by Hannah Waiters

curator’s statement

Archives Yet to Come is an exhibition exploring archives born out of artistic strategy and action, investigating preservation's history and creative uses. The exhibition and accompanying programs set forth themes of archival imagination, ways of knowing, and diasporic narratives. Archives Yet to Come features seven artists working across various media and historical contexts through familial and imagined archives. Constructing their own language to rethink archival memory that exists as documents, photographs, and other enduring artifacts whose meanings change over time, these artists pursue collective memory.

For artists like Lynse Cooper, Charles Lee, and Jy Jimmie Flora Gabiola, archival imagination is an artistic strategy demonstrating: care, erasure, displaced memories, marginalized archives, Black American memory, and visual culture. Cooper presents a photo series Myrtle Vista (2021-present), wherein the artist spent time making a family archive from their sold home. In the years after the creation of this place-based series, Cooper described how they sensed that their family home could be read as an "archive," in itself signaling a refusal of Western collection traditions. The artist draws from their family's experiences and archives, complicating our concept of home and portraying homeland as an archive. Lee's archival process involves remixing civic object histories, images, and vernacular. In the commissioned installation, Lee created an altar-like space centering archival reprints of family members, examining Black American endurance, Blackness, ways of knowing, and remembrance through generations. Underscoring the importance of the archival process in art, Gabiola's artwork is filled with collective memory, and it cultivates and amplifies familial immigration stories.

The artworks of Mary Graham and Qadir Parris are grounded in histories of Black American education and ways of knowing; they offer an approach to, historical, imagined, and family narratives. Graham's impulse to wander her imaginary archive memorializes the enduring struggle of Black Americans in the Jim Crow South. Graham draws on the nature of the "brown paper bag tests" used to discriminate through colorism in the twentieth century. The imagined archive, an important factor in this process, speaks to Graham's subjects in her artworks as symbolic representations of erased historical narratives. Parris's commission highlights connections between past and present educational endurance and renders visible traces in his family's legacy with Black Colleges and Universities. Both interspersing remnants linked to Black American education, these artists speak to communal resilience and historic preservation complexities. 

Lindsey Filowitz and Nneka Kai's artwork is situated within expression, performance, and preservation. Working through materials like Black hair, Kai portrays the experience of the Black female body as an archive. Similarly, Filowitz draws on their "tangible archive from their dreams." Travel allows Filowtiz to gather spiritual, embodied, and shared female experiences; these are cornerstones of Filowitz's practice of deeply engaging the archive through transformational narratives. Filowitz's video installation is a "shrine to [the artists'] grandmother, reflecting upon how Latinx American[s] preserve our loved ones after they have gone."

Helmed by curator Hannah Waiters, this exhibition reflects the embodied, collective, and enduring memory of the spirit of histories in the Bay Area, presenting works that address local historical materialism. Born, raised, and trained to write about art in the Bay Area, Waiters works as a Curatorial & Project Assistant with UCR ARTS Museum of Photography. 

Major support for this exhibition is provided by the City of Berkeley, Berkeley Civic Arts Commission, and East Bay Community Foundation’s East Bay Fund for the Arts. Special thank you to Elena Gross for organizational support on this exhibition.

Lynse Cooper

Lynse Cooper’s work is a tribute to memory and loss. Rooted in photography, her practice honors, reveres, and memorializes those closest to her, often inspired by personal experiences of family deaths. Exploring themes of grief, decay, preservation, memory, and isolation, Cooper uses analog, digital, and cameraless techniques to create both literal and abstract images. Her work extends beyond photography, incorporating risograph printing, text, and sculpture to deepen its conceptual impact. These elements culminate in multi-layered installations featuring domestic spaces, bodily representations, and absence. Based in Northern California, Cooper is a second-year Fine Arts graduate student at California College of the Arts.

Mary Graham

Mary Graham’s work explores the concept of “the ancestors” as a spiritual and conceptual lens for understanding history, relationships, and self. Through painting, performance, and installation, she employs figurative styles and meditative compositions to inspire reflection. Rooted in African-American spiritual traditions, her art honors her lineage while addressing themes of generational love, collective origins, and the unknown. Influenced by Philadelphia’s rich artistic institutions and global travels, Graham merges classical and contemporary practices. A California College of Art graduate, her notable works include Kin, Portraits of My Ancestors, and her interactive performance in Letters From Dogpatch at ICA+SF.

Charles Lee

Charles Lee is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and educator based between Cleveland and Oakland. Using photography, archives, assemblage, drawing, video, and installation, the interdisciplinarity of Lee’s work is a metaphor for what Blackness is; a stateless existence that is always in flux and at odds with categorization. It is a search for the sublime moment within the quotidian. The sublimity in the work lies in its impermanence, the labor-intensive making and the work’s personal nature. Lee’s work extrudes that which is universally experienced while simultaneously elucidating experiences that are culturally specific and challenge traditional Western epistemologies. Lee holds an MFA in Fine Arts from California College of the Arts, and a BA in Business with a focus in Marketing from Bowie State University. His work has been exhibited broadly including Berggruen Gallery (SF), the Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis, Casemore Gallery, Marin MoCA, SF Camerawork and 1014 Gallery in London. His work is held in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College and Recology. 

Nneka Kai

Nneka Kai, an Atlanta-based interdisciplinary artist, holds an MFA in Fiber & Material Studies from SAIC and a BFA in Textiles from Georgia State University. Her practice examines what defines a free Black feminine form, using Black hair as material and concept. Through fiber, sculpture, installation, and performance, Kai explores embodiment, self-expression, and reclamation. Her work reimagines connections to ancestry, place, and time, integrating textile sensibilities like structure and tension. By interrogating materiality and spatial arrangement, Kai unveils narratives beyond traditional definitions, offering nuanced perspectives on identity and liberation.

Lindsey Filowitz

Lindsey Filowitz is an Oakland-based image-based media artist specializing in photography, performance, and installation. She earned her BFA in Photography from Bard College in 2011, and her work has been exhibited in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and internationally. Growing up visiting her grandmother in Lima, Perú, Lindsey’s work reflects the intersection of memory, loss, and identity. Her photographic series documenting her grandmother’sfinal years delves into the emotional impact of aging, while her video installation, presented at the Berkeley Art Center, honors her grandmother's legacy through a shrine-like exploration of Catholicism, memory, and family.

Jy Jimmie Flora Gabiola

Jy Jimmie Flora Gabiola is a lens-based poet and artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. His work reclaims personal and collective narratives surrounding immigration, exploring what it means to be American today. Through photo collage, candid portraiture, and visual poetics, he engages with themes of family albums, post-colonialism, ethnic identity, and futurism. Immigrating at a young age, he became a U.S. citizen at 10 and grew up as a military dependent, which influenced his global perspective. His artistic journey began with 35mm disposable cameras and scrapbooking, documenting his frequent relocations and evolving identity.

Qadir Parris

Qadir Parris is a versatile Miami-based creative working in animation, photography, and film. Their brand, "/JAT/co," expresses their ideas through unique pieces like upcycled denim hats, known as JATs. Inspired by experimentation and versatility, Qadir refuses to be limited to one medium, constantly evolving in their work. At the heart of their practice is an exploration of Black identity, shaped by family and ancestral influence. Their 2022 painting and short film honored the figures of Miles Davis, Muhammad Ali, and their grandfather, reflecting on the struggles of the past and the energy passed down, continuing to inform Qadir’s creative journey.

Hannah waiters

Hannah Waiters is an artist, educator and researcher who earned her MFA/MA in Fine Arts and Visual and Critical Studies at CCA. Waiters graduated with a B.S. in Earth Sciences from the University of California Santa Cruz. As a first generation African American, Waiters is fighting the curse of temporality, by showing how objects of a lowly status long to be permanent. Her afrofuturist research and artwork are important in that she is looking to make history. Her work seeks to uncover the life, the history, the power, the grief and joy of fallen objects. Waiters is the Curatorial & Project Assistant with UCR ARTS Museum of Photography.