Spectrum: A Multidisciplinary Gallery & Reading (2025)

Inspired by a collaborative art and poetry piece by Dylan Gilbert and Samantha Jensen, I ideated a multidisciplinary literary and visual art event that later became Spectrum. As event coordinator at Brown Sugar Literary Magazine, I reached out to Dylan about a collaboration and we brought our teams together to bring this event to life. Spectrum featured the work of 19 visual artists and writers, all curated around “Spectrum” theme.

We put out a call for submissions, reviewed them, and paired the visual art pieces with literary pieces that we believed they were in conversation with.

Amber Malone

Amber Malone is a self-taught artist from Jackson, Mississippi, now based in Brooklyn, New York. Before committing to her artistic practice, she worked in human rights advocacy, anti-human trafficking research, and foreign policy research with think tanks and non-profits across France, Italy, and the United States. Her career inspired her to reevaluate her values, aesthetics and creative inspiration.

An Exploration of Women, her most recent collection, reimagines the omnipresent feminine figure—celebrating diverse ways of seeing, thinking, and being. Though each observer encounters the work through a unique lens, the series underscores a universal thread: self-discovery anchored in archetypal forms and hues. Amber’s work highlights how shape and color transcend language, culture, and circumstance to forge a visceral language of expression.

j. eunsun is an educator, poet, and artist. she integrates mediums of text, paper, and moving image. her work listens towards memory keeping and familial histories.

j. eunsun

Lauren (she/her) is a brooklyn based creator of all kinds of stuff. inspired by transformations, textures, and her muse: fig.

Lauren Yeoman

Maleyah “Lee” Peterson

Maleyah ‘Lee’ Peterson is a writer, radical Black Feminist scholar, political educator, dancer, and multimedia visual artist whose work lives at the nexus of Caribbean diasporic identity, anti-colonial imagination, community care, and freedom dreams. She grew up in Canarsie, Brooklyn, deeply connected to her Trinidadian heritage by way of family, storytelling, living, music, and mas. On any day, you can find Lee curating as the Co-Founder of (W)Ratchet Studies, a Queer Black Feminist Community Education Project, or clinging to the ancestral power of the Afro-Caribbean imagination, doing everything she imagines.

Created in a fluid movement collaboration with Makayla Monét Peterson, "Notes on Color Study #1: Makayla in Red and Yellow (and eventually Blue)>" is a visual exploration of Blackness, color, movement, and rhythm. Poetic language queers the body and creates space to explore blackness and color beyond still images and literal presentation. Body, color, nature, and movement all become one. What do you see at once?

Khaila Batts

Khaila Batts is a multidisciplinary artist based in New York whose practice spans oil painting, digital collage, and installation. Her work centers Black identity, memory, and mediated perception, often layering archival imagery with abstraction to create speculative visual narratives. She holds an MFA in Studio Arts and a BA in Interdisciplinary Arts from The City College of New York. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at Westbeth Gallery, Amos Eno, as well as in Stepmom Magazine. Batts’s practice often integrates technology and family history to challenge traditional visual hierarchies.

Father of Two portrays a Black father in an intimate, nurturing light, challenging narrow understandings of masculinity and expanding notions of gender expression and identity. The inversion techniques applied to the figures, especially the eyes, distort perception and render the image in spectral tones, reinforcing a visual spectrum that mirrors the emotional and societal complexity of Black fatherhood. The piece ultimately exists across multiple binaries: gender, race, and perception, making it inherently intersectional.

Mansi Dahal

Mansi Dahal is a writer from Biratnagar, Nepal, and a graduate of Columbia University’s MFA program, where she was honored with the Waletzky Fellowship award from the School of the Arts for her distinguished work in the writing program.Her writing has been featured in POETRY, New England Review, Southeast Review, Copper Nickel, Colorado Review, Tupelo Press, Palette Poetry, and elsewhere. Her poem “what the eye chooses to see” was nominated by Copper Nickel for inclusion in the Best New Poets anthology, while her poem “Doll-house” was recognized as a finalist for Palette Poetry’s 2022 Sappho Prize.

Abieyuwa Eigbobo

Abieyuwa is a Nigerian-American digital artist, whose work explores Black womanhood through technology. Specializing in 3D modeling, digital video, and more, she examines themes of memory, nostalgia, and identity in contemporary society.

Her featured piece incorporates a wide spectrum of color and was created during a difficult time in her life. For her, it symbolizes a spectrum of feelings and the highs and lows of life.

Brianna Caraballo

Brianna Caraballo (she/her) is a New York City–based conceptual artist and art educator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art. Working in ink and watercolor, she explores memory, healing, and ancestral narratives through fluid forms and color theory. As an art teacher, she guides K–12 students in studio art practices and cultural methods of making across non-profit organizations and public schools. Her practice and
pedagogy reflect her beliefs in art as a space for connection, transformation, and reflection.

As Above, So Within mirrors the cosmos and the inner self, where mother and daughter meet in a point of connection. Bathed in deep, spiritual purple, it radiates intuition and
transformation. It’s looping form, like a prayer bead, becomes a cocoon of devotion and infinity, tracing a spectrum of rebirth and eternal return.

Cecilia Judge was born and raised in New York. Ceci earned a Bachelor's in Fine Arts from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University with a creative focus on Book-Making, Printmaking, and Digital Art. They graduated from Queens College with a Master of Fine Arts, focusing on sculpture related to the sci-fi story by Philip K. Dick, “Fair Game”. They continue to create pieces that build an extra-dimensional and mystical world through digital pieces they call artifacts.

Gilded Compass is a part of a series of pieces she considers artifacts from other dimensions or consciousnesses. This piece represents an imagined tool for reading the coordinates of an individual or soul, thus representing the spectrum that the individual can embody.

Cecilia Judge

Anushka Divecha

Anushka Divecha is a Textile Designer based in Brooklyn, NY and a graduate of the MFA Textiles program from The Rhode Island School of Design.

Born in Bangalore, India, she was greatly inspired by the textiles and patterns around her- From intricately woven Kanjeevaram saris to bold, graphic block prints. She has immense admiration for traditional techniques and the artist's hand and is interested in how to utilise those techniques in more contemporary ways.

Her work, rooted in themes of loneliness and culinary nostalgia, gains poignant relevance amidst the backdrop of the pandemic. Coconut Trees is a love-letter to her home in India and the grove of coconut trees outside her kitchen window – bringing back memories of family and home cooking when she was isolated halfway around the world. Her work engages with “Spectrum” through the emotional, sensory, and cultural continuums that shape identity and memory. Weaving coconut-like fibers, she bridges the distance between my childhood home in India and my life abroad, blending textures and images from different times and places. These interlaced strands evoke the full range of solitude and connection, past and present, revealing how personal and cultural landscapes merge beyond binaries.

Stevia Roxanne

Stevia Roxanne (preferred pronoun is Stevia) is a Bassa and Bamileke interdisciplinary artist and visual storyteller from Chicago, IL. Roxanne’s work explores the intersection of gender, culture, migration, identity, memory, and the body to imagine celebratory spaces for Black femmes and Black queer people. Through photography, film, and archival images, Roxanne engages with Black histories to envision alternative worlds where Black people rest, collaborate, and exist unperturbed.

"My artistic practice explores the spectrums of the Black experience, focusing specifically on queer, non-men folk. The work being exhibited explores the complexities of the hair salon, extrapolated to exist as a utopia. Inspired by my mother's immigration journey and the stories of Yoruban deities, I honor the intimacy, play, and creativity that exists in Black womanhood.”

Sherese Francis (she/they) describes themselves as an AlkyMist of the I-Magination, finding expression through poetry, interdisciplinary arts (collage, book and paper arts, sound and performance art, text art), workshop facilitation, editing, and literary curation. Her(e) work takes inspiration from her(e) Afro-Caribbean heritage (Barbados and Dominica), and studies in Afrofuturism and Black Speculative Arts, mythology and etymology. Some of their work has been published in Women’s Studies Quarterly, Furious Flower, Obsidian, Rootwork Journal, The Caribbean Writer, The Operating System, Cosmonauts Avenue, No Dear, Apex Magazine, Bone Bouquet, African Voices, Newtown Literary, and Free Verse. Additionally, Sherese has published four chapbooks, Lucy’s Bone Scrolls (Three Legged Elephant, 2017), Variations on Sett/ling Seed/ling (Harlequin Creature, 2018), Recycling a Why That Rules Over My Sacred Sight (DoubleCross Press, 2021) and Lady Liberty Smashing Stones (THRASH Press, 2022), and edited a poetry anthology/guided journal, Baby Suggs and a Purple Butterfly (Get Fresh Books, 2024). Sherese won Inverted Syntax’s 2024 Aggrey Book Prize for Poetry for PollyNation: A Seminary of Self, which will be published in 2027.

Sherese Francis

Siddhi Verma is a mixed media artist from Dehradun, India, currently living and practicing in New York City. She completed her Associate's degree in Fine Arts from Pratt Institute in 2025 and is currently completing her Bachelor’s in Visual Arts at Columbia University. Drawing from her cross-cultural life between India and the United States, Verma constructs dreamlike compositions where imagined architecture holds personal and cultural histories. As an emerging artist, Siddhi Verma continues to develop a multidisciplinary practice rooted in immediacy, introspection, and layered narrative.

Across several cultures, balconies have historically been seen as spaces where women are simultaneously visible yet confined, seen yet not heard, present yet excluded. The women represented in “Balconies” have been intentionally placed in architectural contexts that they do not “belong” in, as an invitation to question how we frame gendered identity within place, history, and tradition. It is an exploration of how gendered experience moves across boundaries and is an expression of our shared identity as women.

Siddhi Verma

Sulan Zhang (b. 2006) is a painter working primarily with oils, seeking to capture personal stories through her intricate, photorealistic paintings. She recently moved to Providence, RI, to pursue a concentration in Visual Arts (and maybe something else!) at Brown. Her pieces have been described as "dreamscape-like and fantastical" as she loves incorporating vibrant color alongside sweeping landscapes. The paintings themselves are often confessional and vulnerable, as Sulan seeks to capture the attachments and fractures in human relationships, inspired by the psychological history of her own upbringing. Most notably, her work has garnered attention on social media, where she’s cultivated an audience of thousands.

On the connection to Spectrum: "Rarely uttered from either of our lips, “love” was never a vocally addressed topic. But wearing a look of annoyance, she shuttles me home from school each day, saving me from a cold bus ride. Furrowed brows brimming with concern decorate her face as she reprimands my becoming sick, but as my fever heightens, she brings a bowl of warm soup to spoon-feed. While my mother may not say “I love you,” she shows boundless love, and it is this spectrum of her love that has molded me into the person I am."

Sulan Zhang

Trinh Lê

Trinh Lê is a Bay Area dyke of Vietnamese origin self-publishing under the name B!NGO Press. You can find them communing with their foremothers at the Bay Area Lesbian Archives.

(Artist not pictured, but Trinh’s visual art is featured in the image.)

Xuecong Wang (b. 2002) is a multi-media artist based in New York City, NY. Originally from a small town in China, her work is inspired by the vibrant tension between Chinese and American cultures, the transition from a life deeply rooted in nature to the dynamism of urban existence, and the evolution from a family-oriented background to individual independence. Through her art, Xuecong investigates the subjective reality constructed by memory, perception, and imagination.

Her featured paintings (no. 9 and 10) investigate what lies on the spectrum from internal, private bodily experience to potentially observable external manifestation. No. 9 depicts an acne on the scalp in a surreal, landscape-like scenario, demonstrating the undeniable, concrete existence of the pain. Meanwhile, No. 10 shows the swollen rugae on the roof of the mouth at an unconventional angle. This peculiar framing underscores the hidden nature of both the physical manifestation and the underlying mental anxiety that precipitates it.

Xuecong Wang

Amanda Rosas is a mother, educator and Pushcart Prize Nominated poet. She draws spirit, beauty, strength and creativity from the Latina women in her family and from her husband and three young daughters. Originally from San Antonio, TX, Amanda writes to preserve the memories and stories of her Mexican American ancestors. Her poems have been published by the Latino Book Review, CALYX, among others, and her personal narratives as an educator can be read online at Edsurge.

"Revival" seeks to eliminate binary thinking, sort of like Langston Hughes poem, "Tired," where he splits the world in two. I think what lies within/in between the arbitrary binary is the actual spectrum and multitude of who we are as humanity, and where self-love and belonging and true authenticity thrivingly exist.

(Artist is not pictured, but Amanda’s poem Revival was paired and displayed with Stevia Roxanne’s photographs.)

Amanda Rosas

Kiana Livingston is a poetess, playwright, screenwriter, actress, and activist based in Washington, DC. After graduating from Purchase College at SUNY with her B.A.'s in Creative Writing and Playwriting & Screenwriting, she works incessantly to develop her surrealist narrative voice. After founding the art collective USAF (Us As Fuck), she focused her work towards fighting social justice issues faced by people of color through fantasy. A true child at heart, it is through strange and imaginative worlds that she is able to understand and dissect the world around her. If you’ve got any plays or fantasy suggestions of any medium, send it her way. You also can’t go wrong with a good murder or white collar crime podcast.

(Writer is not depicted, but Kiana’s poem was displayed alongside Abieyuwa’s visual art piece.)