Mirrored Histores & Woven Futues: Damien Davis, Samuel Nnorom & Dana Robinson

KATES-FERRI PROJECTS presents Mirrored Histories and Woven Futures, a trio presentation of artworks from Damien Davis, Samuel Nnorom and Dana Robinson at 1-54NY Contemporary African Art Fair, Booth #7, located at Starrett-Lehigh Building, 600 W. 27th St, Manhattan from May 13 – 17, 2026.

The three artists’ practices revolve around material transformation, cultural memory, and the visual languages of the African and African American diaspora. Though working across different geographies and mediums, each artist activates historical references to assert Black excellence and project it to the future.

New Jersey -based Damien Davis approaches African iconography through precision-cut plexiglass, using laser technology to reinterpret traditional symbols, masks, and motifs. His translucent, layered works play with light, shadow, and reflection, merging ancestral imagery with industrial materials. Davis’s practice bridges past and future, suggesting that cultural inheritance is not static but continually reshaped through innovation. The use of plexiglass – slick, modern, and architectural – positions African visual

language firmly within contemporary and futuristic contexts, challenging assumptions that tradition and technology exist in opposition.

Nigeria - based artist Samuel Nnorom is known for immersive installations constructed from African print textiles. By stitching, bundling, and layering these fabrics into sculptural forms, Nnorom elevates materials often associated with commerce, domesticity, and everyday life into powerful contemporary monuments. His work explores themes of migration, labor, and collective identity, using repetition and accumulation to reflect the density of lived experience. The textiles rich with color, pattern, and cultural symbolism become both surface and structure, evoking the fluid boundaries between body, landscape, and history.

Brooklyn - based Dana Robinson grounds her work in archival research, sourcing vintage Ebony magazine advertisements that celebrated Black excellence, aspiration, and self-determination. Through a meticulous process, Robinson translates these images into linoleum print compositions on panel. By removing the original commercial context and rendering the imagery through printmaking, she invites viewers to reconsider how representation, consumer culture, and visibility have shaped Black identity. Her work honors the legacy of Black media while critically reframing it as fine art, emphasizing resilience, pride, and self-authorship.

Together, Davis, Nnorom, and Robinson reveal a shared commitment to reworking existing visual and material histories. Their practices transform textiles, industrial plastics, and printed ephemera into sites of meaning, reflection, and affirmation. Across installation, sculpture, and print, the artists engage with pattern, repetition, and iconography as tools for storytelling – each mark or cut acting as a gesture of preservation and renewal.

Mirrored Histories and Woven Futures highlights how Black artists across the diaspora continue to mine the past while envisioning new futures. Through material experimentation and archival engagement, the exhibition underscores a collective impulse: to reclaim visual language, honor cultural memory, and assert Black excellence as both historical fact and ongoing practice.

Available Art: Damien Davis

Available Art: Samuel Nnorom

Available Art: Dana Robinson

YouTube video link