October 10, 2022 (Palo Alto, CA) - Qualia Contemporary Art is pleased to announce Fifth Ward/Delray, an exhibition curated by Alexander Nemerov. Featuring the art of Black painter Gregory Edwards and Black photographer Jen Everett, the show explores the persistence of our earliest memories – of the places where we grew up – in all that we subsequently do and think. Accompanied by a printed curatorial essay, the exhibition is a heartfelt exploration of the mysteries of memory – of how, in never forgetting, a person makes the world anew. Fifth Ward/Delraywill be open from October 19 to December 9, 2022, with an opening celebration hosted on October 23rd from 3:30–5:30 PM PDT with the curator and both artists.

In his recent abstract paintings and in his Afrocentric rendition of The Last Supper (from 1970), Edwards draws upon his deep connections to Houston’s Fifth Ward, where he grew up, and on the Fifth Ward’s relation – in a pure stream – to Africa. Edwards’ paintings wield the freeing and expansive language of abstraction to express a full and infinite range of human experience. Unencumbered by his own earthly identity, Edwards’ seemingly random articulation of marks imbues his urgency and passion, born of a lifetime of making, upon the limitless surface of the canvas. The Fifth Ward is inextricable from the artist’s history and self-formation, and so too, it assumes a vital role within each of his works. 

With pictures sourced from family archives and flea market photographs, Everett evokes her upbringing in Detroit and her intense connections to the neighborhood of Delray in that city. Everett’s collection and arrangement of vernacular photography and personal ephemera transcend the familiar archetypes of family portraiture to reveal the elusive qualities of home and family, and the collective mythology beneath each individual’s story of origin. While Edwards and Everett come from different generations and were raised in different cities, their work addresses the universality of home through the texture of their specific lived experiences and their distinctly personal interpretations of memory, place, ancestry, and belonging. 

Fifth Ward/Delray presents the work of two critical Black artists, Edwards and Everett, as an intervention in Palo Alto. Nemerov’s curation underscores the artists’ capacity to activate within each of us our shared humanity, by making space and portraying that for which we do not have a name. Visitors to the gallery are encouraged to engage in the dialogue between the works selected by Nemerov, the accompanying curatorial text, and their own relationships with the notion of home.

About Gregory Edwards

Gregory Edwards was born in 1948 in Dayton, Ohio. He attended the California Institute of the Arts from 1971 to 1973 and later studied at the Art Institute of San Francisco from 1973 to 1974. Greg's abstract paintings include imagery based on African symbols. He creates his own body of symbolism; colors and lines represent the spirit of his loved ones and the stories of people who surround the artist's life. Edwards correlates the sense of depth his paintings have with the depth of a human being, their emotion and life.

Edwards has held solo and group exhibitions at the Museum of African American Art, Los Angeles, CA; Bakersfield Museum of Art, Bakersfield, CA; Pomona College, Claremont, CA; Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, TX; Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, Norman, OK; Shippensburg University, Shippensburg, PA; Steirischer Herbst, Weiz, Austria; Hotel La Fenice et Des Artistes, Venice, Italy; and more.

Edwards’s works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; De Saisset Museum, Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, CA; Chase Manhattan Bank, NY; and numerous private collections including the estate of Miles Davis, Ann Hatch, Jack and Joan Quinn, and Elyse and Stanley Grinstein, among many others. Edwards currently lives and works in Oakland, California.

About Jen Everett

Jen Everett was born in 1981 in Detroit, Michigan. She received her Bachelor of Architecture from Tuskegee University in 2004 and her Master of Fine Arts in Visual Art from Washington University in Saint Louis in 2019. Everett is interested in the myriad of ways Black people continue to produce and transmit knowledge in excess of formal structures. Her practice moves between lens and time-based media, installation, and writing.

Everett has exhibited nationally and internationally at the Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis, St. Louis, MO; SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA; Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, IL; ACRE Projects, Chicago, IL; University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN; Hampshire College, Amherst, MA;  Seattle University, Seattle, WA; Flux Factory, Queens, NY; SPRING/BREAK Art Show, New York, NY; Kunsthall Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway; and more. Her work is in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago, Chicago, IL.

Everett has presented her work at lectures and workshops at Stanford University, Stanford, CA; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL; Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO; St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; and Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. She has been an artist in residence at Fire Island Artist Residency, ACRE, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Vermont Studio Center and was a 2021-22 Duke University DocX Archive Lab Fellow. Everett currently lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri.

About Alexander Nemerov

Alexander Nemerov is an author, scholar, and curator who teaches at Stanford University, where he is the Carl and Marilynn ThomaProvostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities. He is the author of many books and essays on American art and culture, most recently Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York. His new book, The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s, will appear in spring 2023, and is based on the Andrew W. Mellon Lectures he gave at the National Gallery in 2017. Other publications include Icons of Grief: Val Lewton’s Home Front Pictures (2005), Acting in the Night: Macbeth and the Places of the Civil War (2010), Wartime Kiss: Visions of the Moment in the 1940s (2012), Soulmaker: The Times of Lewis Hine (2016), and Summoning Pearl Harbor (2017). Nemerov curated the traveling exhibition “To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s America” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, accompanied by an exhibition catalogue with Yale University Press (2011).