Opening Reception: What Shall I Do With My Dead?

Join us for the opening reception of What Shall I Do With My Dead?, a six-week exhibition at Blanc Gallery bringing together family photographs, historical documents, and handmade artworks to explore intergenerational memory through a Black feminist storytelling lens. Building from archival research and personal lineage, the exhibition examines the afterlives of the Great Migration and the ways Black families gather, honor, and assess what remains.

For nearly a decade, Raja'Nee and Jalen Hamilton have built a shared practice around gathering, preserving, and transforming family memory. Raja'Nee approaches the archive in the spirit of sankofa, reclaiming the past as a guide for the future, while Jalen translates the archive through printmaking and textiles, working from rediscovered materials as inheritance and evidence. Together, their practices move between preservation and reimagination, treating the family archive as a site of return, possibility, and futurity.

The exhibition features quilts and textile works that physically stitch together photographs, fabric, and archival materials, an embodied practice that transforms fragmented histories into living narratives and centers intimacy, memory, and relational knowledge.

Come celebrate the opening, view the work in person, and meet the artists behind it.