FORTHCOMING

Gormley Gallery

Fourier Hall, 2nd Floor

Curated by Jasmine Gabrielle Washington, Rich in What They Can’t Measure examines value beyond systems that rely on visibility, productivity, and quantification. The exhibition brings together artists whose practices center care, labor, intimacy, interiority, and inherited knowledge—forms of wealth that resist easy measurement yet sustain life, culture, and community.

Historically, Black life has been assessed through extractive frameworks that flatten complexity and render care invisible. This exhibition pushes against those logics, asking what becomes possible when worth is understood through presence rather than proof, relationship rather than output, and endurance rather than efficiency.

Across photography, video, installation, and material gesture, the works gathered here attend to the body as archive and infrastructure. They honor acts of holding, carrying, tending, remembering, and refusing—gestures often dismissed as informal or immeasurable, yet foundational to survival and self-determination.

Rich in What They Can’t Measure invites viewers to slow down and reconsider how value is assigned, who is allowed fullness, and what forms of abundance exist beyond institutional recognition. The exhibition asserts that what sustains us most—care, memory, intimacy, and interior life—has never required permission to exist.

The artists featured in Rich in What They Can’t Measure work across painting, photography, sculpture, and mixed media to examine interior life, memory, lineage, and the labor of becoming. Each practice resists easy legibility, attending instead to forms of knowledge that are felt, inherited, embodied, and lived.

Together, these artists attend to the body and assert voice as archive and infrastructure, insisting that what sustains us most cannot be measured, extracted, or reduced.

Jahniah Kum creates paintings rooted in interior mythologies, emotional landscapes, and ancestral resonance. Her work moves between abstraction and figuration, drawing from memory, intuition, and inherited narrative to construct visual worlds that resist singular interpretation. Through layered surfaces and symbolic gestures, Kum treats painting as a site of emotional truth and embodies knowing where history, feeling, and imagination converge.


Lisa Brown works with photography and mixed media to interrogate archives, memory, and Black diasporic history. Her practice reclaims and recontextualizes images, challenging dominant narratives that have historically excluded or misrepresented Black life. By working within and against archival structures, Brown centers photography as a tool for remembrance, refusal, and re-visioning, foregrounding intimacy and care as critical methodologies.

Mathilde Mujanayi’s work explores identity, spiritual memory, and the layered narratives embedded in Black womanhood. Through photography and material experimentation, she engages themes of inheritance, faith, and self-definition. Mujanayi’s practice embraces opacity and multiplicity, allowing personal and collective histories to coexist without resolution or simplification.


Melissa Sutherland Moss works in sculpture and mixed media to examine lineage, belonging, and the materiality of cultural memory. Her practice engages found objects and tactile processes as a means of holding history, treating materials as carriers of lived experience. Moss’s work honors acts of care, repair, and continuity, foregrounding the physical labor of remembering and survival.

View the Exhibition Guide

Rich in What They Can’t Measure is a group exhibition I curated as part of my ongoing research into Black visibility, language, and the politics of perception. It exists in direct response to systems that demand legibility, productivity, and recognition as conditions for value.

I am interested in how worth is shaped—and distorted—by frameworks that privilege what can be measured, optimized, and made legible, while dismissing care, interiority, and relational labor as excess or invisible. These systems do not merely overlook complexity; they actively flatten it. They determine not only what is seen, but what is preserved, rewarded, and allowed to endure.

Featuring work by four recent MICA graduates whose practices resist easy reading, this exhibition centers forms of knowing and wealth that exist beyond metrics, extraction, and institutional validation. Across photography, video, painting, installation, and material gesture, the works gathered here attend to the body and assert voice as archive and infrastructure—holding memory, lineage, and lived knowledge without offering them up for consumption.

This exhibition is the first public program under Use Your Voice (UYV), a philanthropic cultural platform I founded to center humankind across difference, beyond dominant systems of value and measurement. Envisioned as an annual offering, Rich in What They Can’t Measure begins from the lived experiences and perspectives of Black women, while refusing containment within a single narrative or frame.

This exhibition does not ask to be proven. It refuses the demand to translate itself into comfort or clarity. Instead, it asks what becomes possible when we stop measuring ourselves by systems never built to hold us—and begin to recognize value in what has always sustained us.

What is held here—care, memory, intimacy, interior life—has never required permission to exist. This exhibition does not grant it legitimacy. It insists that it has always been legitimate.

– Jasmine Gabrielle Washington, Guest Gallery Curator for the 2025–2026 Academic Year

Featured Artists and Curator

  • Jahniah Kum

    Featured Artist

  • Lisa Brown

    Featured Artist

  • Mathilde Mujanayi

    Featured Artist

  • Melissa Sutherland Moss

    Featured Artist

  • Jasmine Gabrielle Washington

    Curator

Additional Programming

A series of public programs accompanies Rich in What They Can’t Measure, extending the exhibition through conversation, gathering, and care.

The following programs do not require an RSVP:

  • Opening Reception

  • Weekly Community Art Hive with the Art Therapy Department

  • Exhibition Walkthrough

  • Closing Reception and Artist Talk

All other programs are RSVP-only due to limited capacity.

Please click below to view full event details and reserve your spot where required.

Learn More and RSVP

Guest Collaborators for Programming

Together, they contribute to conversations that extend the exhibition beyond the gallery walls—centering reflection, care, and lived experience as essential forms of knowledge. Their presence supports dialogue around ancestry, visibility, value, and interior life, helping create spaces for collective listening, exchange, and community engagement.

  • Aliana Grace Bailey

    Aliana Grace Bailey is an interdisciplinary fiber artist, designer, and care worker, taking up space with bold softness. She was born and raised in Washington, DC, and lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland. She is a passionate advocate for radical self-love, wellness, and healing. Her work embraces artmaking as a vehicle for growth, building intimacy, and creating inner peace through weaving vibrant colors, preserving narratives, and creating environments. Her work is large, emotional, and vibrant, encompassing the body and providing viewers comfort while exploring familial connections, memories, and heart-tugging experiences. Aliana is a proud alumna of NC A&T State University, where she double-majored, earning a Bachelor of Social Work and a Bachelor of Art in Visual Arts Media Design. In 2020, she earned her MFA in Community Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art.

    About Soft Gather™

    Aliana’s fiber-based, communal art practice, Soft Gather™, creates trauma-informed healing installations for Black communities through color and textiles. Founded in 2023, these immersive spaces invite gathering, reflection, rest, and connection through weaving, crochet, rug tufting, sewing, macrame, and upholstery—all informed by the community it’s serving. Each installation lives in community spaces for extended periods—from therapy suites to wellness centers—adapting to evolving needs. The practice extends through Soft Gather™, Quiet Flame, a series of intimate gatherings for the quiet, introverted Black women and gender-expansive individuals seeking to explore their quiet power, connections, and fiber play. This is a space of being together without the pressure to be “on.” Soft Gather™, Quiet Flame honors that our reserved nature isn’t something to overcome—it’s a form of strength, a sustined inner fire that burns with intention.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​


  • Brianne Latrice

    Brianne is a creative director, cultural producer, and the owner of BLK ASS FLEA MKT (BAFM) and The Wombynist. She creates work that feels lived-in, intentional, and rooted in real stories. Collaborating with artists, brands, and spaces, Brianne uses design, storytelling, and experiential programming to push past what’s expected, challenging dominant narratives while building spaces for culture, care, and creative liberation.


  • Diamond Bruns

    Diamond Bruns is an experienced yoga teacher (EYT), meditation guide, and sound healer with a background in psychology and education. Living in Baltimore since 2020, she is now a proud resident near Patterson Park. She began her yoga practice in 2018, in response to a mental health crisis. Yoga became a ferry–offering safe entry to refuge, solace, and healing. Diamond has deepened and expanded her practice off the mat into her everyday "walking life". Having taught over 1,000 hours, Diamond believes that wellness of all forms is a birthright. Yoga and its teachings have become the way Diamond views, understands, and interacts with the world and with life, much like an artist and their craft. 

    Outside of teaching yoga, Diamond enjoys exploring herbalism, traveling abroad, and a good laugh. In her free time she likes to experiment with tea blending, nurture her plants, reset on a trail somewhere, and generally stay open to learning and new experiences. 



    Wealth In Wellness LLC is a Baltimore-based yoga business offering classes, workshops, and private experiences. Rooted in psychology and education, our work emphasizes well-rounded and diverse yoga practices featuring mindfulness, yoga philosophy, and integration of wellness into everyday life. Our vision (G.E.M.) is to: Gather in community, Encourage healthy change, and Move towards feelings of freedom. Guided by the belief that wellness in all forms is a birthright, Wealth In Wellness creates reflective spaces where movement, creativity, and healing intersect. Offerings take place in studios, online, or in community settings while partnering with local organizations to amplify mental wellness. There is wealth in your wellness.

  • Jenné Afiya Matthews

    Jenné Afiya Matthews ) is an infinitely curious culture worker and artist grown and honed in Baltimore, Maryland.

    She descends from a long line of “take-no-stuff kind of folk” from Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, and beyond. She is forever grateful for all of their sacrifices, brilliance, dreams, fortitude, and prayer of which she is a direct result.

    She is a founding member of the Black queer woman and femme-led artist collective BALTIGURLS (2014-2018). In her decade of working in the arts she has supported creative endeavors at organizations such as BCAN, BLACK MATTER, BlackStar Projects, Black Femme Supremacy Film Festival, and Retrospect Studios. Currently, she supports programmatic efforts at The Luminal Theater.


    In 2021 she launched ZUZU HAUS, an audio project dedicated to exploring the unique relationship Black folks have with their home spaces, past and present. Currently she is working on two new projects: a zine entitled NINE HUNDRED & TWENTY FIVE SUNS that explores the practice of “ancestral oracle deck making” as a catalyst for grief processing and reckoning with personal and inherited archives. And a short film Be There in The Morning that chronicles a fated queer romance in the not-so-distant past.