A House Is Not a Home

Long Gallery Harlem is pleased to present A House Is Not a Home, a group exhibition tracing several decades of America’s 250-year history through the lenses of Black woman artists — a nod to the women, mothers, and matriarchs who bolster our homes with the emotional scaffolding that allows for identity creation and exploration.

Situated on Martha’s Vineyard throughout August 2026, A House Is Not a Home draws on the island’s layered history as a Black haven. By curating the works within the context of a home, a more intimate and embodied space than the traditional white cube gallery, the exhibition asserts home as both a site for sharing a collective identity inspired by family, memory, and personal and cultural lineages and for investigation into rituals of belonging and historically unseen labor.

Advanced registration required for weeks 1 of 3 below. Participating artists, exhibition hours, and specific location to be announced in July.

Curator Bios

Jade Elizabeth Flint is a writer, curator, and art historian specializing in archival practice, Black diasporic traditions, and contemporary art. As Assistant Curator at Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art + Thought, she has organized exhibitions, including Helen Cammock: I Will Keep My Soul (2023) at the UNO St. Claude Gallery and Tina Girouard: SIGN-IN (2024) at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. She created The Prepared Table (2022), an initiative welcoming New Orleans-based artists into hands-on archival research with the Amistad Research Center, bridging living artistic practice with one of the country's foremost collections of African American history and culture. Independently, Flint has curated Dean Lucy Diggs Slowe: Her Truth and Service at Howard University (2023), an exhibition highlighting one of the fiercest Black woman educators and civic organizers of the early twentieth century.

Flint is a Louisiana native and a recipient of the HBCU Alliance of Museums and Galleries / Bard Graduate Center Research Fellowship and the Mellon Community Engaged Fellowship at Tulane University. She holds a B.A. in Art History, cum laude, from Howard University—where her undergraduate thesis examined the work of Betye Saar and Renee Stout—and an M.A. in Art History from Tulane University, where her thesis explored the work of artist vanessa german.

Taylor Thomas (b. Chicago, IL 1995) is a Black artist based out of Los Angeles. She graduated Magna cum Laude with Distinction from Amherst College in 2017 where she double majored in Sociology and Film & Media Studies. After receiving her undergraduate degree, Thomas spent 6 years developing feature films at Netflix and The Walt Disney Company. However, witnessing a lack of diversity in the entertainment industry drove Thomas to change careers and create the representation that she craved in the visual arts. She received her MFA in Fine Art with a Certificate in Education from CalArts in 2025.

Artist Statement

“My work investigates the ways in which public and private notions of Blackness and the Black family are formed through embodied experience and attempted reproduction of said experience through Film & Television media. Sourced from my grandmothers’ photo archives and the public archive of industry trade publications, I question the influence of external representational systems on Black interiority. 

The color palette of my paintings is an interpolative nod to the television color bar, a visual calibration tool used to help viewers "see" on their home tv monitors. However, the visual framework of that system was built for white skin and discriminatorily left Black people discolored and further othered on screen. I subvert that representational system by using the vibrant colors that make up the color bar, chrome, and collage to render beauty in moments of Black domesticity.

My sculptures explore the relationship between skin and body and interiority and exteriority. I abstract Black bodies into squared pixels which I then string together with metal chains to create a collage composite. The collages are then draped over corporally inspired ceramic forms that are painted chrome as an interpolative nod to television static. 

While within the context of Film & Television, pixilation and static are associated with a moment of visibility disrupted where the subject is no longer accessible to be more deeply known by the viewer, I create my portraits using these visual tools to frame my work in a state of unknowing as the complete knowing of an other is a fallacy of entertainment media. Instead, I reference the parts that make up the whole, and the spaces between legibility and abstraction that might inspire connection.”

— Taylor Thomas, Curator and Participating Artist

Dates
August 1 – 23, 2026

Location
Martha’s Vineyard
Oak Bluffs, MA

Artist
Participating artists TBA

Curator
Jade Flint and Taylor Thomas