Museum Visitor Software, 2025
NAACP Black Love Gala
Curator and Exhibition Designer Diane Akpovwa
Commissioned by the Penn State NAACP Chapter, this exhibition invited viewers to explore Black love beyond romance and into friendship, selfhood, memory, community, and collective care. As the sole curator and designer, I sourced artists from across the Penn State community and developed an exhibition experience that celebrated the richness, complexity, and tenderness of Black life.
This exhibition served as a warm love letter to the Black community in its perfect nuances. Through visual art, poetry, film, and memory-sharing, the exhibition explored love as a brave act and reflected on the vast and evolving relationship between Black people and love.
Snippet from MemoryWorks video
Design Challenge
How might an exhibition create space for audiences to experience Black identity through joy, intimacy, vulnerability, and connection?
The exhibition sought to broaden conversations around Black life by centering love as a cultural, political, and personal force, using multimedia and sensory design choices to create an emotionally charged atmosphere.
Design and Curatorial Framework
The exhibition was themed around the family, the lover, the self, and each other.
It was designed as an intimate journey through different expressions of love. Paintings, poetry, film, and personal memories were intentionally sequenced to create moments of reflection, recognition, and dialogue.
Rather than presenting works as isolated objects, the exhibition encouraged visitors to move through interconnected narratives of affection, vulnerability, and belonging by combining works through scale, sound, and video.
The experience had a partial reading room with a selection of zines on black life and motifs of love, as well as a community log of love letters to lost and current loves.
Wherever visitors went, they found offerings of softness and invitations to indulge fond memories, bearing witness to love as it exists in the lives of those brave enough to capture it.
Complete with a poetry sound installation, I created an altar to house a reading of Lisette Quitté la Plaine, the oldest surviving song text in Haitian Creole, originally written in 1757 by Duvivier de la Mahautière and read by a student performer, Desiree.
I overlaid this audio with sounds of water to pay homage to the larger history of black people and loves lost across the sea.
The altar asks that you sit and hear the waves crash as the performer calls out for their love who has now become out of reach.
MemoryWorks
As part of the exhibition, I also chose to focus on Memory as a tenet of love.
I developed MemoryWorks as a video installation that places memory and youth at an altar that seeks to hold still against the ever-changing hands of time. This film was made with childhood videos of community members and was shown alongside A Conversation to Be Had by Bryce Johnson-Dendy, a work that references Carrie Mae Weems' iconic Kitchen Table Series.
Projected on gathered silk, this video installation interacts with space, light, and time in their ephemera.
The result is a string of memories that seem to hold a mirror between past and present, positioning the audience at the fulcrum of a forgotten innocence.
MemoryWorks original video
(audio: Lisette Quitté la Plaine for installation purposes)
Curatorial Reflection
The core of this exhibition revolved around the questions:
How can we complicate and enrich narratives around contemporary Black Love through visual storytelling, experimental installations, and soft offerings of humanity? How do we strike a balance between universality and specificity for the immaterial love?
Through art, memory, film, and poetry, the project created space for visitors to encounter Black life through tenderness, complexity, and joy.