A Museum Built Around Living Artists

The Studio Museum’s former home was itself an important piece of Harlem’s cultural architecture. The museum occupied a converted bank building redesigned by the distinguished Black architect J. Max Bond Jr. in the early 1980s. It became a landmark on 125th Street and a gathering place for artists, scholars, residents and visitors from around the world.

The new building brings exhibitions, education, gathering and production together. Its studios are central to the architecture, declaring that art does not arrive at a museum only after it is completed. It is researched there. Questioned there. Scraped away and started again there. That makes Pharr, Quamina and Simmons more than the building’s inaugural residency cohort. They are the first artists to test what this new architecture can make possible.

With A sustained becoming, the work moves from the productive disorder of the studios into the formal space of the galleries. That transition matters. A gallery may suggest resolution, yet their figures remain unsettled, their environments layered and their narratives open to memory and change.

Derriann Pharr Reclaims the Body

Derriann Pharr’s figures do not ask permission to be beautiful. They stretch, fold and reassemble across the surface. A limb becomes an expressive mark; a contour disappears before the body is fully contained. Born in Winfield, Alabama, in 1998 and based in Birmingham, Pharr developed her practice within the social realities of the American South after earning her BFA from the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Her work is concerned with identity, memory, safety and what she describes as the abjection of the human body. Beneath that language is an intimate question: How do you build a loving relationship with a body that the world has taught you to judge? Using drawing, fluid acrylic and mixed media, Pharr examines pressures placed upon marginalized bodies, particularly Black female bodies shaped beneath Southern tradition, religious authority and social scrutiny.

Her figures shapeshift through gestural marks as flesh, color and negative space move into one another. Distortion becomes freedom from rules governing which bodies deserve tenderness. Transformation, in Pharr’s practice, is deeply personal. As she has moved into womanhood, her work has become a place to collapse false beliefs, reconsider her own value and practice self-compassion.

Each figure becomes a mirror through which Pharr examines what she has been told about herself and decides what no longer deserves to remain. Pharr is not painting the body as a finished object. She is painting the difficult process of returning it to oneself.

Simonette Quamina Builds Memory in Layers

Where Pharr’s figures seem to change from within, Simonette Quamina’s work carries the movement of people across places, generations and borders. Born in Ontario in 1982, Quamina spent her childhood moving among Guyana, the Caribbean and New York City. Those shifting geographies ground her interest in how histories are reconstructed. She studied at City College of New York and earned an MFA in printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design.

Quamina is a printmaker, but she pushes against one of printmaking’s traditional promises: the ability to reproduce the same image again and again. She instead constructs singular, monumental works, layering graphite drawings, printed passages and hand-cut paper into surfaces that reveal their own assembly. That process becomes a language for migration. Memories rarely cross borders intact. Places survive in fragments, family histories are revised or partially lost, and identity is reconstructed from what completes the journey.

Quamina’s collaged surfaces embody that process. Her figures inhabit environments marked by wooden louvers, corrugated metal, patterned floors and other architectural details that connect domestic life to the Caribbean and its diaspora. The spaces feel specific, but they are not offered as nostalgic fantasies. Quamina complicates the Caribbean fantasy of permanent sunshine and escape, revealing histories of labor, colonial power and economic migration behind the tourist mythology.

The people in her work are not performing tropical life for an outsider’s pleasure. They appear in moments of labor, reflection and communal quiet. Their surroundings carry beauty, but that beauty has weight. Graphite suggests memory surfacing; cut paper introduces disruption. Every layer reveals that something has been covered, removed or repositioned. Quamina’s images understand that migration is both movement and reconstruction. Her figures are not merely located within a landscape. They are built from the histories of the places they have inhabited, departed and continued to carry.

Taylor Simmons Paints the Right to Rest

The atmosphere changes when we enter the work of Taylor Simmons. His paintings glow. Fluorescent pinks, electric yellows and deep oranges make his canvases glow like nightclub strobes, streetlights and phone screens. Figures emerge through airbrushed haze and dissolve into color. Born in Atlanta in 1990 and now based in New York, Simmons draws upon music, family photographs, viral video and street culture.

He samples images the way a producer samples sound. A gesture, face or interior fragment enters a new arrangement as oil, acrylic, airbrush and wax move between figuration and abstraction. The results are energetic, but the lives depicted within them are not always in motion. Simmons is interested in what happens when Black men are allowed to stop.

Popular culture frequently presents Black masculinity through exertion. On the field, at work or before the camera, the Black male body is expected to perform, hustle and remain on guard. Simmons pushes against those expectations by giving his subjects room to rest. Young men recline, sit with friends, drift into thought or occupy domestic spaces without needing to prove anything. Leisure is not treated as laziness. Stillness does not signal defeat. These private moments become necessary forms of emotional restoration.

That makes the softness in Simmons’s paintings quietly radical. The palette attracts the eye, but the deeper power lies in how little the figures require from the viewer. They live beyond the demand to be constantly useful or on guard. In Simmons’s hands, rest becomes a form of self-possession. The glow surrounding his subjects does not turn them into spectacles. It gives their interior lives room to expand.

Three Ways of Becoming

Pharr, Quamina and Simmons share an investment in the human figure, but they do not treat the body as a stable container. For Pharr, the body carries internal conflict and the possibility of repair. She transforms anatomy to escape the scrutiny that has shaped it. For Quamina, the figure exists within layers of geography, labor and ancestral memory. Identity is assembled from histories that have crossed oceans and survived displacement.

For Simmons, the body moves through the pressures of contemporary Black masculinity and discovers freedom in leisure, companionship and retreat. One body stretches. One remembers. One rests. Those approaches converge in A sustained becoming. Memory looks backward while shaping what can be imagined ahead; dreams reach forward using the material of lives already lived. Organized by Assistant Curator Adria Gunter with support from Studio Museum/MoMA Curatorial Fellow Cam McEwen, the exhibition lets those experiences occupy the same galleries. The result is not a single statement about Black identity. It is an argument against the idea that Black identity could ever be reduced to one.

The Legacy Working Beside Them

The residency’s lineage includes David Hammons, Kerry James Marshall, Wangechi Mutu, Kehinde Wiley, Mickalene Thomas, Titus Kaphar, Simone Leigh, Tschabalala Self and Jordan Casteel. In retrospect, that list can look inevitable. These artists now occupy major museums and shape the contemporary canon. But they did not enter the program as historical conclusions. They entered as working artists.

A residency supports the uncertain period when ideas are forming, techniques are changing and the next body of work may not yet have a name. That early support echoes through Dreams of This Future: The Collection of Peggy Cooper Cafritz. Cafritz collected artists before the market fully recognized them, and her bequest returned hundreds of works to an institution that shared her vision.

There is a meaningful conversation between the two exhibitions. Downstairs, visitors encounter the results of a collector’s willingness to believe in artists early. Elsewhere in the building, Pharr, Quamina and Simmons represent the continuation of that faith. The point is not predicting the next famous name. It is recognizing that meaningful art requires investment before history confirms its value.

Room for What Comes Next

That is the promise of the museum’s new home: its collection preserves what Black artists have contributed, while its studios commit to what does not exist yet. Derriann Pharr, Simonette Quamina and Taylor Simmons now occupy a distinctive place in that story. They are the first cohort to work within studios created expressly for the residency, but they will not be the last.

Other artists will enter those studios. The walls will be repainted, new materials will arrive and different questions will emerge. That makes A sustained becoming larger than one exhibition. It describes the artists, whose work refuses fixed definitions of the body, memory and identity. It describes the residency, which has continually renewed itself through successive generations.

It also describes the Studio Museum, returning to 125th Street in a new form without abandoning its mission. The finished work may eventually hang downstairs. But the future of Black art is still being worked out upstairs.