As We Move Forward is a curatorial intervention gathering and championing the artistic and social practices of BIPOC women from Augusta Savage’s home state of Florida in her gallery namesake. Savage, renowned sculptor and beloved educator, was a groundbreaking catalyst in the arts whose legacy serves as a reminder of the importance of community, advocacy, and mentorship as foundations for sustaining an equitable and inclusive art world. This show honors her work and influence to construct a space for artists to create, to move, and to become. Throughout the exhibition, artists search out what it means to embody space, place, home, and self as critical expressions of Black Miami feminist geographies. Ultimately, this show continues the memory work led by scholar Donette Francis at the inaugural Still Here symposium at the University of Miami Center for Global Black Studies to further canonize these women artists from Miami and their relationships to the intersectionalities of race, place, labor, and gender in the Arts. 

The Augusta Savage Gallery is located in the New Africa House at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, a site made possible by the collective organizing of students, faculty, staff, and community members. We thank and honor the spirit of this site as kin-occupants also seeking and moving toward radical black futures in Miami, Amherst, and beyond.

CURATORIAL TEAM
Juana Valdes uses printmaking, photography, sculpture, ceramics, and site-specific installations, to explore issues of race, transnationalism, gender, labor, and class. Functioning as an archive, Valdes’s work analyzes and decodes experiences of migration as a person of Afro-Caribbean heritage. Born in Pinar del Rio, Cuba, Valdes came to the United States in 1971. She received her BFA in Sculpture from the Parsons School of Design (1991), her MFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts (1993) and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture (1995). She is currently an Associate Professor in the Art Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Nhadya Lawes is an interdisciplinary scholar and arts professional in pursuit of the practical and the poetic in the cultural sector. A University of Miami graduate with a Bachelor’s in English Literature and minors in Sociology, Art History, and Africana Studies, she was born and raised in South Florida to Jamaican immigrants and is a champion for arts of social practice and placemaking.