Erika Nj Allen: This Is Not a Coup
January – March 2023

This Is Not a Coup transformed the Welcome (M)art space into an immersive black and white photo installation to take the viewer back in time to banana farms. Ceramic bananas adorned pedestals, bowls, and other elements, visualizing all the tools that were used to “civilize” the banana. This immersive ceramic and photo installation introduced the history of the United Fruit Company and how it led to a massive campaign to romanticize the presence of the banana in American homes, while committing crimes against the countries and their people where the exotic fruits came from. 

Erika Nj Allen is a multi-media artist with a BFA in photography from the Art Academy of Cincinnati. and a current MFA candidate at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI. in the ceramics department.

Rebecca Nava Soto: TLACUA PAHTIĀ
April – June 2023

Tlacua. náhuatl / Tla-Cu-A / (v.) to eat, to feed. Pahtiā. náhuatl / Pah-Ti-Ya / (v.) to heal.

The TLACUA PAHTIĀ project was designed to bring the surrounding community together around the healing rituals of food and art based within indigenous Mexican traditions. This project served as a reclamation to what was lost, endangered and appropriated due to the effects of colonialism.  With reciprocity at its core, honoring and offering support to the original holders of this wisdom, this exhibition also invited the viewer to embrace their own healing potential. 

Rebecca Nava Soto is a multidisciplinary Xicanx artist who synthesizes ancient and modern traditions in her art practice employing references that range from mesoamerican writing systems, materials, language and shamanic practices that speak to contemporary issues and the broader Latinx perspective.

Rami George: Spheres of Influence
July – September 2023

Spheres of influence sought to explore the intersections between food and spirituality by way of the artist’s particular family history. Their story is one of immigration, loss, a search for religion, the joining of disparate ideas and cuisines within the context of cults and fringe communities, and what happens to a family along the way. Spheres of Influence was also an intergenerational conversation, bringing together the artist’s work alongside early ceramics from their mother.

Rami George is an interdisciplinary artist currently based on Lenape land in what is now called Philadelphia. They have exhibited and screened broadly and remain motivated by political struggles and fractured narratives.

Maggie Lawson & Lyric Morris-Latchaw: Preservation Reading Room & Kitchen
October – December 2023

A collaboration between Cincinnati-based chef-artist Maggie Lawson and farmer-artist Lyric Morris-Latchaw this project transformed the gallery into a reading room (a space for reflection and conversation) and a kitchen for putting up the abundance of the season.  The artists, who are both new mothers, strove to bring together the tension between preserving traditions and the desire for social change. As well as navigating the widening gap between urban and rural ways of living.  Are homemaking, homesteading, and mothering inherently oppressive tasks, or is there room for liberation within these traditions?

The artists drew upon their networks of farmers and deep thinkers to create a performative and evolving food-based installation of preserved goods using canning, dehydration, fermentation alongside Lyrics’ sumptuous murals and a library of texts.