Lyle Ashton Harris, bell hooks and Marlon Riggs (New York, Early 1990s), 2019. Chromogenic print. From the series Ektachrome Archive. Courtesy the artist, Salon 94, New York, and David Castillo, Miami

Brother to Brother: Marlon Riggs & Essex Hemphill will celebrate the collaborations, communities, and legacies of the late experimental documentary filmmaker Marlon Riggs (b.1957, Fort Worth; d.1994, Oakland) and poet, performance artist, and activist Essex Hemphill (b.1957, Chicago; d.1995, Philadelphia). Through the work of Riggs, Hemphill, and their peers, Evan Garza and Ade Omotosho will explore the period of the AIDS crisis in the United States from the vantage points of Black queer relationality, community-building, and artistic production. 

Highlighting Riggs’s and Hemphill’s involvement in networks of gay Black artists, performers, activists, scholars, and poets, Brother to Brother will focus on the collaborative practices that defined their work and how their artistic legacies inform contemporary queer Black artistic practice. As part of their research, Garza and Omotosho will examine archival holdings, including the Marlon Riggs Papers at Stanford, and the photographic archives of contemporaries like Lyle Ashton Harris. This project offers an in-depth look at an underexamined period of artistic production during the last American culture war and extends the curators’ shared commitment to interdisciplinary Black queer cultural production. Brother to Brother will open at Stanford University's Cantor Arts Center in Spring 2027 and subsequently at MASS MoCA.

Marlon T. Riggs, Tongues Untied, 1989 (still). Black-and-white film, sound. Starring Marlon T. Riggs, Essex Hemphill, and Brian Freeman. Cinematography by Ron Simmons. Courtesy Signifyin’ Works and Frameline Distribution

Lyle Ashton Harris, Once (Now) Again, 2017. Three-channel video, projections, and sound. From the series Ektachrome Archive. Installation view, 2017 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, March 17–June 11, 2017. Courtesy the artist, Salon 94, New York, and David Castillo, Miami

Evan Garza is a scholar of global contemporary art, a queer art historian and Curator at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA). Previously, Garza was a Curatorial Exchange Initiative (CEI) fellow at MASS MoCA, where they curated the critically acclaimed exhibition Steve Locke: the fire next time (2024). Recent honors include a Fulbright Scholarship at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) and a Visiting Research Fellowship at Trinity College Dublin. Garza has held curatorial and institutional leadership roles at MASS MoCA, the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University (Houston), the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (now SMFA at Tufts). Garza was cofounder of Fire Island Artist Residency (FIAR), a New York nonprofit and the first residency program in the world exclusively for LGBTQIA+ artists. They earned their MA from the Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art.

Ade Omotosho is the Nancy and Tim Hanley Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the Dallas Museum of Art. He received his BA in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin, where he wrote a thesis on the photography of Rotimi Fani-Kayode, and his MA from the Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art, where he wrote a monographic essay on Marlon Riggs’s 1989 film Tongues Untied. From 2015–17, he was a Mellon Undergraduate Curatorial Fellow in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and from 2017–19 he served as the Ford Foundation Curatorial Fellow at Pérez Art Museum Miami. He was the Miami Editor-at-Large for Burnaway and is a former National Book Critics Circle Emerging Critics Fellow. He has contributed writing to outlets such as Hyperallergic, Art in America, and the publications for Prospect New Orleans, Made in L.A., and the Venice Biennale.

Faris Saad Al-Shathir, Sydney Fishman, Lucas Ondak, BOFFO