(April 29, 2023 - November 26, 2023)

Lavett Ballard, of Southern New Jersey, is an internationally renowned artist whose mediums include collage, painting, sculpture, and installation. Her mixed media collages have been featured twice on the cover of TIME. Victor Williams, International Art Director at TIME, wrote “Ballard’s visual practice involves layering images, mostly of ordinary African Americans, to create visual connections from past to present.”

Ballard has said that her “strong affinity for imagery and history has led me to focus on creating a visual lexicon of African American, female, self-identity.” Her collages typically depict a range of social issues that impact Black women and are often layered atop reclaimed wood fences as they are a “symbolic reference to how fences keep people in and out physically, just as racial and gender identities do so socially.”

Ballard’s installation Say A Little Prayer, is dedicated to music icon Dionne Warwick and their similar memories having grown up in the Black church. Ballard wrote, “I grew up listening to Dionne Warwick’s music in my home. Ms. Warwick’s first artistic experience was singing in the church and my first visual art experience was creating art for the church.” She said that “this information is what helped direct my vision of creating an experience secular to the Black church, with a backdrop of a visual timeline of the African American female experience highlighting Ms. Warwick’s life within.”

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