Acrylic, Yule marble paste, and Los Angeles palm frond ash paste on linen and canvas with wood.
June 4 – July 24, 2026
Material Witness
Peter Blum Gallery
In Person Viewing:
176 Grand Street
New York, NY 10013
Online Viewing:
https://www.peterblumgallery.com/exhibitions/material-witness/
Peter Blum Gallery is pleased to present Material Witness, a group exhibition of new and recent works by Candida Alvarez, Teresa Baker, Nicholas Galanin, Tomashi Jackson, Kapwani Kiwanga, and Brenda Mallory. The exhibition is on view at 176 Grand Street, New York from June 4 through July 24, 2026.
The exhibition Material Witness brings together artists who treat physical matter as an active archival record. Moving beyond pure abstraction, the works utilize materials to surface specific narratives. By interrogating the associations of their media, the artists transform the gallery into a site of testimony. Here, the “tactile” becomes a form of “telling,” revealing how histories are woven and layered into the very structures of the contemporary world.
In these works, the choice of medium is never neutral; rather, the material carries the weight of its own sociopolitical and environmental lineage. Whether utilizing ceramic tiles, synthetic turf, or acrylic on linen, the artists in this exhibition treat the physical world as a repository of latent memory. The act of making becomes a process of unearthing, where the “witness” is found in the fibers, pigments, and structures that comprise our shared reality.
By re-contextualizing these materials within the gallery, the artists challenge the viewer to look past formal aesthetics and engage with the deeper histories of labor, Land, and identity. Abstraction serves as a gateway to these truths, providing a visual language that can express the complexities of systemic power and cultural resilience. Material Witness ultimately proposes that our built and natural environments are not static backgrounds, but are instead vibrant, testifying witnesses to the fluid processions of history.