This Saturday (August 15th, 2026), The Creative & Commercial (an arts newsletter via Substack) is hosting its first event. A gallery tour with Gladwell Projects founder and curator Christiana Ine-Kimba Boyle. We’ll be meeting on the floor of the gallery’s current location in the historic Powerhouse Arts District in Jersey City, and Boyle will take us through six solo exhibitions on six floors. Here’s a sneak peek into each artist’s distinct style:
Chunghee Yun’s The Blue Mirror is a collection of oil paintings that investigate the imbalance within the patriarchal structure of functions between men and women with a hyper- focus on their sexual manifestations.
Chiffon Thomas’ Fugitive Pleasures is comprised of sculpture and installation; the title is taken from the postactivist philosopher Bayo Akomolafe’s musings on fugitivity. Akomolafe describes the fugitive as existing outside systems of recognition; Thomas incorporates agency into this concept, exploring the refusal of conformity rather than just forced displacement. His work touches not only on his history but also on the Black collective’s through religion, displacement, and mutilation, thus creating a dialogue between refusal and rejection.
Purvai Rai’s Cartography of the Grounded Sky is a collection of sculptural, material, and spatial works that reconsiders the natural world as being a place of worship, rather than tied to an institutional practice. Rai considers that ritual is embedded in the passage of time and its natural cycles, rather than in a man-made structure.
Vamba Bility’s Wild Poems – Loops and Interlaces explores material memory, migration, and improvisation through painting, sculpture, textile assemblage, and installation. The artist has a varied cultural background, born in Côte d’Ivoire and raised between West Africa and coastal New England; his work is a visual manifestation of the qualities which allow such a movement to flourish: rupture, improvisation, and reconstruction.
Lisu Vega’s Las raices hablan… El recuerdo susurra reminisces on the artist’s personal history. Through textile-based works, Vega explores memory as a material inheritance. The stitch lines the artist creates in the work resemble the root structure of a mango tree, inspired by the one in her Grandmother’s garden. Through a process of photographic transfer pressed textiles, she enlarges her family album and welcomes viewers to explore her history as a material inheritance.
Trevor Warren’s With Two Eyes contains a collection of oil and acrylic paintings. The title comes from a line in Patricia Lockwood’s An Agate a Day from Four Poems, “the most valuable are the ones/ With two eyes and a crystal mouth.” A line that Warren placed in his studio while creating this body of work. Two Eyes expresses duality and the continual effort to negotiate between the ends of two spectrums, spatial and temporal.
Come by and gain the visual context to these vastly different practices! We hope to greet visitors on Saturday at 12:45 p.m. for a tour from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. Tickets are available through Luma.
Oceana Andries holds a BA in Art History and Fine Arts from Columbia University. Her background spans fine art, art writing, and curatorial work.