Selven O'Keef Jarmon: Looking for New Guinea
Right: Sketch for "Queen City" line drawing dress. Queen City housed roughly 900 people in 1940 with its own businesses, churches, and fire station. It was home to about 200-300 households, with roots dating back to 1892.
Selven O’Keef Jarmon’s new body of work in Looking for New Guinea engages histories of erased Black American neighborhoods through sculptural garments and mixed-media objects that function as living monuments to cultural memory.
Originally conceived for presentation at the Museum of African American History, Nantucket, the exhibition was cancelled following federal funding cuts. It now appears at Front Gallery in a newly realized installation.
At its center are Jarmon’s hand-crafted Line Drawing Dresses—intricate, crochet-embellished garments named for historically displaced communities. Functioning as embodied monuments, the dresses translate mapping, memory, and presence into acts of cultural reclamation.
Prominently featured alongside the dresses are mixed-media wall works constructed from stainless steel and cotton thread. Extending Jarmon’s investigation of line into tensioned spatial structures, these works translate drawing into relief—mapping histories through accumulation, restraint, and measured force. Their precise geometries and suspended linear systems evoke architectural frameworks, suggesting both containment and endurance within the shaping of collective memory (see attached).
Together, the garments and thread constructions render displacement visible—giving physical structure to histories too often omitted from the public record.
Reception: Saturday April 25, 6-8 PM
Gallery Hours: Saturdays 2-5 (May 2- June 20) and by appointment.
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