Harmony Holiday‘s (2025 Creative Capital Awardee) Spectacular Brooding investigates the spectacles and secrets of black grief. Considering the tension between private ritual and public display within this tradition, the Los Angeles-based artist’s exhibition considers what she calls the “Black Backstage” as a zone of sacred privacy that makes the spectacularization of performance bearable. In contrast to commercial reproduction of music, dance, and film that distorts black artistry, Harmony positions the home and the studio as intimate spaces of black creative life.

The exhibition divides the gallery into two spaces: the dance studio and the cutting room. In the studio, Holiday will rehearse live and record her preparatory process towards the performance of a solo dance, which marks a return to live dance performance for the first time in decades. Holiday’s choreography will consider iconic expressions of black grieving in choreography by Alvin Ailey, Judith Jamison, Bill T. Jones, Katherine Dunham, and Robert Battle, as well as gestures of black performance and everyday life in digital culture. A mourner’s bench will provide a place of solitude and public memorial, inviting people to listen to oral histories and to engage with Holiday’s own writing. In the cutting room, Holiday will screen an excerpt of a new film that considers these themes through a documentary of a living artist.