For those who come from somewhere and find themselves somewhere else, visibility can be both gift and grief. To be seen may mean welcome, recognition, or dignity; it may also mean surveillance, suspicion, or control. To remain unseen may offer safety and rest, or become erasure and exclusion.
Seen and Unseen gathers artists whose work attends to the visible signs of human migration — documents, rooms, garments, language, food, architecture, faces, and public images — while honoring the invisible realities they carry: longing, fear, faith, family history, grief, resilience, and hope.
The artists begin with material: threads stitched, garments transformed, paper carved and woven, the visible matter of everyday life. These materials carry what often remains beyond view: the childhood room remembered in detail, the word that will not translate, the labor hidden inside an ordinary object, the hope folded into a family story, the private negotiation between who one has been and who one is becoming.
How might we see one another with capacious care when so much remains invisible across difference, without demanding that difference disappear or resolve? Can we come close without consuming, hold complexity without paralysis, and find common ground generous enough to inhabit together?
Seen and Unseen is curated by Sarah Bernhardt and features work by:
This exhibition opens to the public September 8, 2026 and runs through December 11, 2026. We will have a Dovetail event for Seen and Unseen on October 9, 2026, which you can learn more about here.
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