Art of the African Diaspora Satellite Exhibit
Selected works by Marcia Barrow Taylor, Christopher Adam Williams, and Cynthia Brannvall
February – April 2026
We are honored to be a part of the Richmond Art Center’s 2026 Art of the African Diaspora. The exhibition supports artists of African descent through representation, professional development, and the building of a creative community. Our satellite exhibit features the work of Marcia Barrow Taylor, Christopher Adam Williams, and Cynthia Brannvall, voices of joy in a complicated time.
For each of these artists, joy wells up from purpose and connection. It can arise from summoning the strength of ancestors or communing with the natural world. Joy can be found in a spark of recognition between two people, strangers or kin. It can flow over us when our hands are busy with thoughtful work. Joy is different for each person and endures despite persistent negative forces. Marcia Barrow Taylor, Christopher Adam Williams, and Cynthia Brannvall communicate their versions of joy and endurance by celebrating the deep wellspring of black experience.
Marcia Barrow Taylor uses paint and natural fibers to explore materiality and the historical context of cotton and other aspects of agrarian life. Her world is built within her imagination, populated by a mythology that conveys wisdom and strength. The work of Christopher Adam Williams utilizes bold portraiture and figurative painting to convey complex narratives, including that of race and gender. The joy in his work emerges directly from the historical context of oppression and the struggle to be respected and fully seen. Cynthia Brannvall creates paintings and sculptures out of vintage and antique clothing fragments and textiles, using them as a launching point for complex conversations about race, labor, history, and slavery. Her art exists in a space between craft and fine art, the past and the present, painting and sculpture, landscape and portrait, and abstraction and representation.
Exhibit Gallery
About the Artists
Marcia Barrow Taylor
Marcia Barrow Taylor’s journey from fiber art to drawing and painting is circular and rooted in gesture. Cotton is a poignant conceptual gesture in her work. The history of cotton production is problematic, and the tension between that history and her artistic exploration of material and motif is the nexus of her interdisciplinary practice.
Marcia reimagines history, specifically the history of African Americans, their relationship to cotton, to land and legacy. Through her figurative and abstract work, she questions what would have happened if the post-Civil War period known as Reconstruction had not been interrupted. What if Special Field Order No. 15 (aka Forty Acres and a Mule) had been widely implemented? Scholars have identified the post-Civil Rights period as “Reconstruction 2.0” and our current moment as “Reconstruction 3.0,” which makes her practice timely.
Marcia utilizes drawing, painting, writing, knitting, sculpture, and new media to explore materiality. Her visual and literary language is an imaginary realm, a mythical space where time collapses. A key figure in her work is The Whisperer, who defies time and space and is the protagonist of this mythology. The Whisperer is the agrarian, the all-knowing ancestor who personifies memory, the healer.
For more information, visit mbtfinearts.com
For purchasing, please email [email protected]
Instagram: @projectmbt
Christopher Adam Williams
Christopher Adam Williams is a visual artist whose practice utilizes portraiture and figurative painting to convey complex narratives, including those of race and gender. Born in Oakland, California, Christophers is co-located in San Francisco and Philadelphia.
Christopher received his Bachelor’s in Fine Arts and Master’s in Fine Arts from San Francisco Art Institute, where he was awarded Best in Show, MFA, and a finalist for the Headlands Arts Center Graduate Residency. 2020 Winner of The Black Artists Fund Sower award and 2022 AICAD Fellow. Christopher is an Assistant Professor at Moore College of Art & Design.
His drawings, paintings and films have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, television, museums and galleries, including The L Word Generation Q season 2 & 3, Root Division: Black artist fellow, Tunnels of the Mind (Times Square, NY), Crocker Art Museum (Sacramento, CA), Spark+Echo Arts (New York, NY), My Studio Gallery (Sacramento, CA) and The Golden One Center (Sacramento, CA). His art practice focuses on Black Joy- a spiritual feeling that has uplifted the African Diaspora through countless trials and tribulations in the quest for freedom and equity.
For more information, visit theblackdavinci.com
For purchasing, please email [email protected]
Instagram: @theblackdavinci
Cynthia Brannvall
Cynthia Brannvall is an art historian and an interdisciplinary multi-media artist who works and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She teaches art history through a global lens at Foothill Community College as a full-time tenured faculty member. Cynthia has undergraduate degrees in Art Practice and Art History from UC Berkeley, where she was a Phi Beta Kappa and a Ronald E. McNair scholar and was awarded the Departmental Citation for her research in Art History. She has an MA in Art History from San Francisco State University with an emphasis on Modern and Contemporary art.
An advocate and ally for social justice and equity, Cynthia’s artwork explores identity formation envisioned in an imagined deep time terrain of memory, reclamation, and the geographies of forced and voluntary migrations of body and spirit.
Her artwork has been widely exhibited in juried group exhibitions in the San Francisco Bay Area, San Luis Obispo, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Washington DC. Cynthia was selected for the 2022-2023 Emerging Artists Program at the Museum of African Diaspora in San Francisco, where she had her first solo exhibition, March 29-June 12, 2022. She was awarded a 4-year studio residency at Cubberley Artists Studio Program in Palo Alto and has exhibited in multiple museums—MoAD, San Francisco, New Museum Los Gatos, Triton Museum, Marin Moca Museum of Northern California, Museum of Museum of Art and History, Santa Cruz, and Museum of Contemporary Art, San Luis Obispo. Cynthia has published short essays for exhibition catalogs and has served as a juror for exhibitions and public art commissions.
For more information, visit cynthiabrannvall.com
For purchasing, please email [email protected]
Instagram @cynthiabrannvall
Gallery Visits
1995 El Dorado Avenue, Berkeley, California
We welcome you to view the exhibit from Monday to Friday, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Please call 510.528.5820 to reserve a time to visit.
Questions:
For purchasing and additional information, please email us at [email protected]