“The Only Reason you Want to go to heaven” was a 3-person exhibition at Nina Baldwin gallery.

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.” 

In The Color Purple, Alice Walker conjures Celie, a fictional manifestation of the authors own journey of dissecting Christian dogma and the foothold it’s taken in the lives of marginalized people, violently attempting to sever and replace a more intuitive and expansive spirituality defined by our Earthly world as a purposeful source and connective tissue of all living things. With a title directly referencing an essay by Walker originally shared in the April 1997 installment of On the Issues Magazine, the only reason you want to go to heaven aims to pick up where Celie left off. Taking a multidisciplinary approach, K. Gilbert, Lewis H. Foster and Makeda Jean Lewis present work illustrating both the friction and ingenuity of existing at the fringes, through Southern, Black, queer history and iconography and material experimentation. If conventional religion has been historically wielded to weaponize differences and distances in service to imperial goals, this exhibition explores what it could mean to center spirituality that speaks to an enduring interconnectedness and reverence for divinity in the mundane.

“You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?”