The Art of Sister(hood)

There are certain spaces that ask nothing of you except your presence. Before I saw the artwork, before I lifted my camera, before I read a single word on the gallery wall, I noticed the incense. Then came Erykah Badu. Bag Lady. The song drifted through 33.G so naturally that it didn't feel like music playing in the background — it felt like part of the architecture, as essential to the room as the white walls, the afternoon light, or the flowers resting beneath the words The Art of Sister(hood). Dried already, some of them. Soft yellow, fading green, kept anyway.

“Welcome to the space, family.” Chase McCurdy, the gallery's founding director, greeted me before I had the chance to introduce myself. He was standing near the entry, the way someone stands when they've been waiting on purpose, not by accident. Warm. Direct. The kind of welcome that doesn't make you feel like a guest — the kind that reminds you you've arrived exactly where you're supposed to be.

I remember thinking, I'm here. But my body knew something before my mind could name it: I'm safe. That surprised me — not because I had arrived expecting to feel unsafe, but because safety announced itself before anything else did. My shoulders softened. My breathing slowed. Whatever urgency I'd unknowingly carried in with me quietly left the room. I hadn't realized how much I needed that.

The morning of my visit, just after I booked it, I wrote a question in my notebook: What am I here to notice? At first, I believed I was asking that question about the exhibition. Instead, the exhibition asked it back.

One month earlier, I had spent the afternoon inside Lauren Halsey's Sister Dreamer in Los Angeles. Exactly one month later, I found myself standing inside The Art of Sister(hood) back home in Las Vegas. May 23. June 23. Two exhibitions. Two cities. One conversation. At the time, I didn't yet understand what connected them. Now I think I do.

Both invited me to slow down. Both reminded me that place is never just place. Place carries memory. Place carries lineage. Place carries the people who came before us. Place shapes who we become. As a writer and visual documentarian, I often say that I'm interested in documenting spaces, memory, and the people shaping them. Yesterday, I realized something: sometimes a space documents you back.

Less than five minutes after I arrived, Tameka Henry walked through the gallery doors. The last time I'd seen Chase was during Dinner & a Podcast, hosted by Naoka Foreman, where Tameka was the featured guest. Seeing them again didn't feel accidental. It felt like recognition — not celebrity, not networking. Recognition. The quiet kind. The kind that happens when you're rooted in community long enough for your paths to naturally cross again.

I've spent a lot of this year thinking about alignment. I used to imagine it as something dramatic — a breakthrough, a sign, a perfectly timed opportunity. Lately, it's looked much quieter. An invitation. A familiar face. A conversation continuing months later in a completely different room. Alignment, I've learned, rarely introduces itself. It simply waits for you to notice.

Erykah Badu continued singing overhead. Without warning, I was twenty-three again. New York City. Trying to build a life as an artist. Trying to trust myself. Trying to believe that choosing creativity wasn't irresponsible.

I remembered something my father said to me during that season. He was worried. Protective. Afraid. He told me that if I wasn't careful, I'd become one of those people carrying bags everywhere — that I'd struggle, that I'd end up with nowhere to go. At twenty-three, those words stayed with me. At thirty-five, standing inside ThirtyThree Gallery, they returned. Only this time they sounded different.

Because when Erykah sang — “All you must hold on to is you” — I understood something I hadn't understood before. The bags were never physical. They were fear. Expectation. Other people's ideas about who I should become. Stories I'd inherited but never consciously chosen.

For weeks now, one sentence has quietly become the center of my life.

I belong to myself.

I wrote those words on my calendar the night before visiting the exhibition.

The exhibition describes sister as a sacred bond — a shared lived experience, supporting, knowing, and understanding. It describes (hood) as shared sacred space, community where loyalty is given and received. I stood there reading those words longer than I expected. Not because they were unfamiliar — because they named something I had been feeling all afternoon: the relationship, and the place that makes the relationship possible.

For so much of my life, I've been drawn to spaces. Hotels. Museums. Neighborhoods. Libraries. Coffee shops. Homes. Galleries. Architecture has always fascinated me, but not because of buildings themselves — because of what they allow people to become inside them.

There was a portrait by X.Darvi near that wall — a woman rendered in gold and green and fractured color, her hair a soft cloud around her face, nothing about her hidden or apologized for. I stood with her longer than I meant to.

There was one piece I kept returning to: a work by Christina G Joseph, collaged from images taken from the artist's own mother's obituary. Small fragments arranged close together under glass — pieces of a single life, layered the way grief and memory layer together, never quite in order. A shadow fell across the glass when I photographed it, long and dark, like even the room knew to be careful with it.

The longer I stood before it, the more I thought about my own mother. About my grandmother. About the women whose lives continue through mine. About memory, inheritance, and how photographs refuse to let us disappear.

I realized then that the exhibition wasn't only asking what sisterhood looks like. It was asking what we choose to carry forward. Not fear. Not expectation. Not performance. But memory. Love. Community. The stories that deserve another generation.

Yesterday reminded me that presence comes first — the photograph follows. Sometimes the greatest act of documentation is putting the camera down long enough to fully arrive.

As I prepared to leave, I thought again about the question waiting inside my notebook: What am I here to notice? The answer wasn't a single artwork. It wasn't a conversation. It wasn't even the exhibition itself. I was there to notice what it feels like when a space created with intention returns you to yourself.

The final panel of The Art of Sister(hood) ends with a sentence I carried home with me: “This communion allows for deep connection to self.” I don't think I understood those words until I walked back outside.

I arrived expecting to witness an exhibition about sisterhood. I left understanding that sisterhood is also the spaces women create for one another. The rooms that soften us. The music that welcomes us. The stories that refuse to disappear. The flowers placed carefully beneath a title. The photographs that remind us we have never arrived alone.

I left remembering something I'd quietly been learning all year: I belong to myself.

The Art of Sister(hood) is on view at ThirtyThree Gallery, Las Vegas, NV, June 5–July 31, 2026, by appointment only. Schedule a visit.