BLACK MATTER Closing Celebration

BLACK MATTER Closing Celebration & Social Practice Performance Featuring Master Artist Michael Bernard Stevens Jr.

First Friday, November 7, 2025 | 6:00 – 9:00 pm (performance at 6:30) | Art Gallery

Free and open to the public

If you’ve been inspired by the work you’ve seen in the exhibition, join us in sending it off with some love by meeting the artists at our closing celebration and participating in a unique performance. Master Artist Michael Bernard Stevenson Jr. Stevenson activates the Urban Shaman—an imagined and embodied ancestral self—in direct with capitalism’s totem: the Charging Bull on Wall Street. Through ritualized struggle, Stevenson exposes the friction between creative agency and economic oppression. This performative act of resistance becomes both a reclamation of denied heritage and a challenge to systemic commodification. In this spiritually healing somatically engaged action, Stevenson transforms absence into presence, conjuring a cultural lineage lost to erasure and reimagined through artful defiance.

Learn more about Black Matter.

Photo Credit: Joel Dowling