SUNS & SHADOWS
AMADLOZI Gallery. African Heritage Cultural Arts Center
6161 NW 22nd Ave
Miami, FL 33142
MARK DELMONT
REGINALD O’NEAL
LANCE MINTO-STROUSE
MARK FLUERIDOR
T. ELIOTT MANSA
Light and shadow converge at the African Heritage Cultural Arts Center for the opening of Suns & Shadows, a thought-provoking exhibition curated by Roscoè B. Thickè III in the Amadlozi Gallery.
Exploring Miami’s contrasts—its vibrancy and vulnerability, resilience and renewal—the exhibition features works by Mark Delmont, Reginald O’Neal, Lance Minto Strouse, T. Eliott Mansa and Mark Fleuridor. Through sculpture, painting, installation and textile, the artists reflect on legacy, memory and identity, illuminating how history and imagination shape both community and self.
Curator Roscoè B. Thickè III, a celebrated Miami-born artist known for his lens-based and multidisciplinary practice, brings his deep connection to place and storytelling to this compelling presentation.
We were once children in the hush of someone else’s shade
held in the arms of giants whose names were sung,
whose shadows stretched across front porches, oceans, classrooms, barbershops and sanctuaries.
We learned to move beneath them
not in fear, but in reverence.
Because in Blackness, a shadow is not the absence of light.
It is the evidence of presence.
A trace of protection.
A testament that someone stood tall,
and made a way.
SUNS & SHADOWS is a gathering of artists who reckon with that inheritance
who remember the hands that shaped them,
and recognize the moment they began to shape themselves.
This exhibition reveals the ways we have always been both the dream and
the dreamer,
the rooted and the reaching.
They honor the shadow as shelter,
and the sun as a calling.
SUNS & SHADOWS is an exhibition that holds the circular nature of legacy at its center. It begins with an acknowledgement: we are always living in relation to those who came before and those who will come after. To stand in the present is to be both inheritor and torchbearer, both child of someone’s shadow and source of someone else’s light. The works in this exhibition gather around that truth, offering forms that remind us that lineage is not linear. It is a cycle of giving and receiving, of being sheltered and sheltering in return, of being illuminated and illuminating others.
Within the vastness of black knowing, shadow has never meant the absence of light. Instead, it has been presence, evidence that someone stood tall enough to protect, to shield, to make a way. The shadow drapes across skyscrapers built from breath, sanctuaries of praise, classrooms shimmering with becoming, barbershops echoing lineage and a kitchen fragrant with care. It is memory, but it is also living practice. The artists here do not merely look backward in mourning or forward in aspiration; they remind us that to exist in this moment is already to participate in an unbroken circle of care, sacrifice, and creation.
Together, these works create a collective vision that is not confined by chronology. They are about memory and mourning, yes, but also about the ways in which we are always more than recipients of history. We are extensions of it, co-authors of it, living embodiments of its cycles To honor the past is not to leave it behind, but to recognize how it lives on through us. To imagine the future is not to move past the present, but to understand how our actions, gestures, and creations will cast their own shadows forward.
SUNS & SHADOWS therefore asks us to see legacy not as a weight to carry but as a rhythm, a breathing, circular exchange that we inhabit. We are reminded that to be held is also to hold, to be guided is also to guide, to be shaped is also to shape. The rays of the sun move through these works, revealing what persists, while the shadow gathers what light leaves behind. One calls us forward, the other folds us in. Between them lies the comfort of continuity, the knowledge that both brilliance and shelter sustain us.
Suns & Shadows: Opening Reception takes place on Friday, November 14. Admission is free and open to the public.
