September 13, 2025 — June 14, 2026
Curated by Alexander Jarman, Assistant Curator of Exhibitions and Academic Outreach
Foregrounding Jamea Richmond-Edwards’s interdisciplinary practice, Another World and Yet the Same features a large body of newly created work alongside a selection of mixed-media paintings from the last seven years examining issues of race, class, and identity. Themes close to the artist’s heart—notably her hometown of Detroit and the music associated with it, including jazz, soul, Motown, techno, and hip hop—are a strong undercurrent in her work, which is infused with a rhythm and energy evocative of the music that inspired it.
To dazzling visual effect, Richmond-Edwards outfits the subjects of her portraits, typically herself as well as family and friends, in elaborate, colorful attire, setting them against equally decorative backgrounds. Materials such as marker, construction paper, collage, and soft sculpture are often incorporated into her often monumental paintings, adding dimensionality and a quality of limitlessness to her canvases.
Additionally, the regalia, music, and movement of school marching bands are referenced both overtly and subtly, reflecting Richmond-Edwards’s personal history as a French horn player in ensembles throughout her formative and college years. All these elements culminate in vibrant compositions that convey a sense of the personal style of the people the artist depicts, the communities she has been a part of, and the central role that fashion plays for many Detroiters.
With a new series of works debuting in this exhibition, Richmond-Edwards sets out to explore a world beyond the known universe. The exhibition title Another World and Yet the Same is borrowed from a seventeenth-century dystopian literary work of the same name, Mundus alter et idem (c. 1605). Written by Joseph Hall (1574–1656), the novel is an imaginary account of a voyage to the oceans south of Africa and stood as a satirical indictment of the power structures of England at that time.
Richmond-Edwards has adapted this narrative via a character of her own making, Iceberg, who appeals to family and friends to embark on an oceanic caravan to Antarctica, where they might establish a new, egalitarian society. This fictionalization presents the inherent challenges of creating a utopian state on a rapidly shrinking continent and mirrors the contemporary crises of nations that are under threat from climate change or are experiencing the promises and pitfalls of self-determination and independence. With their grand scale and multilayered meanings, these works take the fantastical, otherworldly elements of Richmond-Edwards’s previous series to new, epic heights.
Jamea Richmond-Edwards (b. 1982, Detroit) earned a BA from Jackson State University (2004) and an MFA from Howard University (2012). Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum; California African American Museum, Los Angeles; Charles Wright Museum, Detroit; Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington; Frist Art Museum, Nashville; Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; and the Columbus Museum of Art at the Pizzuti. She is a 2018 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant. Her work is in the collections of the Rubell Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art, and the US Department of State’s Art in Embassies program.
