Join Lava Thomas and Sadie Barnette for an exhibition walkthrough during NEXUS: SF/Bay Area Black Art Week, led by Cornelia Stokes, Assistant Curator of the Art of the African Diaspora at SFMOMA and the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD). The walkthrough will bring the artists’ concurrent solo exhibitions at Jessica Silverman into conversation, exploring how each draws upon personal and collective histories to consider memory, family, place, and Black life across generations.

Lava Thomas (b. 1958, Los Angeles, CA) studied at UCLA in the Department of Art, during which time she held a J.P. Getty Marrow Undergraduate Internship. She earned a BFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco, which later awarded her an Honorary Doctorate. Thomas has also received an Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Prize, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, and an Artadia Award. In 2026, Thomas’s work was included in the inaugural presentation of art at the newly opened Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. In 2024, the San Francisco Arts Commission unveiled Thomas’s Portrait of a Phenomenal Woman: A Monument to Honor Dr. Angelou outside the city’s Main Library. She has had solo exhibitions at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art in Atlanta, GA; Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts in Alabama; Berkeley Art Center in California; and Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at ICA San Francisco and many university art museums, such as the Kemper Museum at Washington University; Alain Locke Gallery at Harvard University; Hunter College Art Galleries and Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University. Her work is held in the permanent collections of SFMOMA; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Berkeley Art Museum; Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA; and Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., among others. Thomas serves on the California College of the Arts Presidential Advisory Board and the Board of Headlands Center for the Arts. Her debut solo exhibition with Jessica Silverman will open September 10, 2026. Thomas lives and works in Berkeley, CA.

Sadie Barnette (b. 1984, Oakland, CA) has a BFA from CalArts and an MFA from University of California, San Diego. Barnette has enjoyed solo exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; SFMOMA, CA; San José Museum of Art; The Kitchen, New York; Pomona College, Los Angeles and Pitzer College Art Galleries, Los Angeles; ICA Los Angeles; The Lab, San Francisco; Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco; Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford College, PA; and Manetti Shrem Museum, UC Davis. Barnette is currently the subject of a solo exhibition at the Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Creative Capital Award, United States Artists Fellowship, Paulson Fontaine Press residency, Studio Museum in Harlem residency, Artadia Award, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture residency, and the inaugural Artist Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Black Studies Collaboratory, among others. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; LACMA, CA; de Young, San Francisco, CA; Brooklyn Museum; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Guggenheim Museum, NY; Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Blanton Museum at UT Austin, TX; San José Museum of Art, CA; Oakland Museum of California; Berkeley Art Museum; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, among others. Recent commissions include Bay Area Walls at SFMOMA, a large-scale photomural at California African American Museum on view through October 2027, and a permanent, site-specific installation at the Los Angeles International Airport that is forthcoming in 2027. Barnette’s third solo exhibition with Jessica Silverman will take place in September 2026. Barnette lives and works in Oakland, CA. She is represented by Jessica Silverman.

Cornelia Stokes‘ curatorial practice is based in Pan-African practices and kinship, focusing on building community through the arts and philosophies of the Black diaspora. Looking to complexify the oversimplification of Blackness within mainstream culture, Stokes invests in opportunities to promote and explore the wide varieties of the Black experience. Cornelia Stokes is the inaugural Assistant Curator of the Art of the African Diaspora with The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD).