We are Here

December 6, 2025 - January 31, 2026
Gallery hours: Wednesday - Friday, 1 - 5 pm
Other hours by advance appointment, 520.222.9405

We Are Here gathers works by Elizabeth Burden, Elizabeth Denneau, and Amber Doe that are born from and addressed to this turbulent political moment. In an era of rising authoritarianism, state-sanctioned violence, erasure, and attacks on bodily autonomy, the exhibition insists on Black presence, memory, and futurity. These artworks act as interventions that track how the nation marks and constricts Black life—and how we resist. Refusing disappearance or neutrality, “We Are Here” is both declaration and demand: a reminder that we are watching, remembering, and imagining otherwise—even, and especially, now.

Across the exhibition, several works contend with the false myths on which the nation has been built. They insist that the stories we have inherited about race, gender, and power are neither neutral nor fixed; they can be exposed, revised, and refused. Other works consider who is named and acknowledged as “citizen,” and on whose terms. They refuse the demand to assimilate into a narrow, nationalist vision, and insist on another way of belonging, rooted in struggle, migration, kinship, and memory.

Taken together, the works in “We Are Here” insist that representation alone is not enough. They ask what it means to live, love, and make meaning in a time when our bodies, histories, and imaginations are under attack. They offer no easy answers or singular narratives. Instead, they cultivate a field of refusal and possibility where images are reclaimed, archives are unsettled, and adornment becomes a strategy for survival. In this field, being “here” is not a simple statement of fact; it is an ongoing, collective practice of presence, accountability, and world-building in the face of everything that says we should not exist.