Exhibitions

The North Star | works by Diego Garcia

Curated by Beth Giacummo

January 14-February 28, 2025

Gallery Event

Reception & Gallery Talk Diego Garcia

Thursday, February 6, 4:30 - 6:30 p.m.
JoAnn Mazzella Murphy '98H Arts Center 

The North Star

Br. Kenneth Chapman Gallery presents a solo exhibition entitled The North Star featuring new works by Diego Garcia, curated by Beth Giacummo. 

The North Star features works created over the past four years, during a period the artist describes as a monumental spiritual checkpoint in his life. He felt called to sit with the entirety of his human experience, unlocking new creative ideas and techniques while simultaneously circling back to the purest inspirations that first drew him to art. Through this process, he harvested a series of new paintings, expanding his palette to express himself through familiar styles fused with innovative techniques and ideas. Navigating this checkpoint, he reflects, was ultimately a matter of following his true north.

The artist was raised on the north side of his neighborhood, where his craft was cultivated and supported by his community. The title of this exhibition embodies the mentality he has developed as an artist: the discipline required to carve art from life’s emotions, the athleticism and hustle inherent in painting, and a heartfelt love letter to his people and culture.

About the Artist

Diego Garcia has been a fixture in the Long Island art scene for the past decade. His paintings have been featured and exhibited across the island and throughout the city burrows. Vivid use of color, fragments of lyrics, poems, graffiti and abstract expressionist techniques all have become the artist’s recognizable motif.

Most recently, Diego debuted his 7th solo exhibition (Vol.7) which featured over 20 paintings and a mural installation. This body of work was on display from July to September, 2023. Following the “Vol.7” exhibition, A painting by the artist was selected to feature in the Long Island Museum's exhibition, SOMOS/WE ARE: Latinx Artists of Long Island (September-December, 2023).

Past Exhibitions

The sapeuses are a recent offshoot of the sapeurs, a male sartorial resistance movement that blossomed in Brazzaville, Kinshasa’s neighboring city (now capital of the Republic of Congo) in the 1920s, when the former city was part of the colonial bloc of French Equatorial Africa. The sapeurs – or Société des Ambianceurs et des PersonnesÉlégantes (the Society of Tastemakers and Elegant People) – sought to resist French and Belgian colonial rule by adopting and pastiching the ‘master’s clothes’, with prominent sapeurs also being key players in influential Parisian anti-colonial pressure group L’Amicale.

The sapeur style and gentlemanly code of honor was formalized in the mid-20th century under the leadership of ‘dapper’ Papa Wemba, a rumba artist who was known for his taste in dazzling white suits and monochrome spats. Bemba influenced a later generation of sapeurs who rose to political power through the turbulent years of the Congolese and continental wars and whose subculture has now entered the mainstream (controversial president of the DRC, Joseph Kabila, is a self-confessed sapeur).

The female answer to the sapeurs, les sapeuses, have emerged in the past decade as young female Kinshasans view the inherited traditions of la sape as a method of escape from rigid gendered roles and expectations. For some sapeuses, who traditionally dress in masculine suits and accessories imported via the Congolese diaspora in Belgium and France, la sape is a return to pre-colonial modes of strong African femininity; for others the movement, with its sapeuse solidarity clubs and rich socio-historical heritage, is a means of operating as a queer woman in a nation and era in which homophobia is rife. The Women Dandies, first staged as an academic exhibition at SOAS, The University of London in 2018, but now back with fresh photographs and sapeuse stories as this subculture evolves, will run in the first-floor space at The Heritage Gallery at The Naval College, The University of Greenwich from March.

Sally Howard is the exhibition’s curator and a journalist and author who writes about social affairs and feminism in the global south. She is author of books including the Home Stretch (Why We Need to Come Clean about Who Does the Dishes), Atlantic Books, 2021; The Kama Sutra Diaries, Hachette, 2014; and the upcoming Vagina Inc., which explores the risks and rewards of femtech in global context.

Junior D. Kannah is a Kinshasa-born photographer for news agencies including Associated Press. Kannah’s work documents the lives and culture of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and neighboring Republic of Congo, with his photographs often showcasing the vibrant spirit and resilience of the Congolese people, but also conveying the country’s struggles, with civil war, corrupt governance and hardship.