Our Summer Show, Ancestral Threads, is coming soon!!
Don’t miss your opportunity opening June 19th.
Photo by: Michael McKisson
Ancestral Threads
Arianna Barley, Wabwila Mugala,
Semoria Mosley
Opening
June 19, 2025 - September 21, 2025
The three woman show features the works of recent MFA (Master of Fine Arts) graduates, Arianna Barley from the Arizona State University, Semoria Mosley from the University of Arizona, and Wabwila Mugala, from Arizona State University. The Ancestral Threads Exhibition shows multi-media works informed by African Diaspora culture, identity, mysticism and colonization repercussions.
Arianna Barley’s art is rooted in the material culture and histories of the Black Southern United States.
“I create mixed-media textile works and installations that explore and question ways of knowing. Through my practice, I utilize things passed down as tools for understanding and examining our relationship to ancestral and shared histories.”
Semoria Mosley’s combination of video performance and photography interrogates the relationship between habit and habitat through vehicles of shared memory.
“My curiosity leads me to traditional media techniques and contemporary image-making. Using practice-based research to explore the complexities of culture, identity, and environments within African diaspora communities, I focus on uncovering daily nuance and mysticism of Black Americans in the Deep South.”
Wabwila Mugala is a Zambian born interdisciplinary artist with a focus on print processes grounded in design and textiles. Her practice engages with the call-and-response within the African diaspora through her own visual glossary functioning as pattern, design and language. She has been featured in Southwest Contemporary Magazine: Radical Futures (Volume 10) and AIGA Charlotte.
Blue Lotus Artists Collective Information
Blue Lotus Artists' Collective (BLAC) is a non-profit gallery space dedicated to supporting and uplifting Black Artists. Located on the ground floor of the historic Pioneer Building in downtown Tucson, Arizona, our gallery is a place where the community can come together to celebrate, appreciate and see the art and talent of Black Artists. The gallery was founded in 2022 after several meetings of Tucson artists and arts advocates to ascertain how to promote Black Artists who are often underrepresented in museum and gallery settings. A smaller group, who now comprise the board members of BLAC, determined to address the issue first hand by creating this artists’ collective. Willie Bonner, local artist, chose the Blue Lotus to represent the effort. The Blue Lotus is a water lily native to Africa that grows even in muddy and nutritionally poor conditions that was cultivated by the Ancient Egyptian civilization and had great importance in their religious devotions.
Like the Blue Lotus, Black Artists have arisen from harsh and inhospitable environments to thrive, create and bring beauty and wonder to the world.