Louise Mandumbwa: A world in the creases of my palms

From the inception of life, our hands have served as a guiding force. Touch is the very first sense a baby develops in the womb, yet we often overlook how vital our hands are to nearly everything we do. Through the tactile, Louise Mandumbwa brings a bit of her familial garden and archive to Long Gallery Harlem with A world in the creases of my palms. In this show Mandumbwa places the hands back at the forefront of the conversation, highlighting them as an essential tool for environmental interaction, communal bonding, preservation, and future building.

As a daughter and granddaughter of intra-continental immigrants from Zambia, Angola, and the Congo, in addition to her experience as an immigrant herself in the U.S., Mandumbwa has always been interested in epistemologies that are often part of a diasporic experience. A world in the creases of my palms weaves texts, figures, and urban recollections that have defined Mandumbwa’s practice across the cities she’s called home. Anchored by her signature botanical paintings and featuring poems written by the artist herself, this presentation is symbolically unified by portraits and imagery of hands belonging to Mandumbwa and her loved ones. Two new multi-canvas paintings, A Sweet Thing/A Grafted Thing, 2026 and A Marvel, 2026 are on view in the storefront and serve as the entry point to the rest of the show. Unlike many of Mandumbwa’s other works, rendered in greyscale, these two emerge in captivating shades of yellow and green. These colors reflect not only the vegetation but also other natural elements Mandumbwa has encountered during the course of her life.

Beyond her literal portrayals of botanicals throughout this show, Mandumbwa uses the garden as a subtle metaphor for community and resilience. A world in the creases of my palms reminds us of what bell hooks wrote about in her essay “homeplace”: a site of resistance; a safe place created through care, nurture, and hard work; a place where we can affirm and, in turn, heal one another. Given the richness of New York, and considering Harlem’s deep roots, A world in the creases of my palms is a reminder that despite the current state of the world, there is still gardening and harvesting to be done.

Artist Bio

Louise Mandumbwa (born 1996, Francistown, Botswana) is an artist working in painting, printmaking and drawing to explore ideations of home, figurative and botanical works. Her practice is a counter mapping endeavor examining the ranging registers of memory through material exploration, the illegible image and failed translation. Her works revisits sites of both familial and diasporic history and appends them with affect and the anecdotal.

Louise holds an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University as well as a BFA in Painting from the University of Central Arkansas. Her work has been included in recent group exhibitions at Sakhile&Me (Frankfurt, DE, 2025), Chili Art Projects (London, UK 2024), Spurs Gallery (Beijing, CN), David Castillo (Miami, FL), The Wright Museum (Metroit, MI) and Yossi Milo (New York, NY). She was a 2024 recipient of a grant from the Elizabeth Greenshield foundation and the Elizabeth Canfield Hicks award from Yale University. She has completed residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2024), The Sam and Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts (New Berlin, NY 2022) and Visual Arts at Chautauqua Institution (Chautauqua, NY 2019) and Louise lives and works in New Haven, CT.

Curator Bio

Photo Credit: Brandon Hicks

Sundia Nwadiozor is a curator and arts professional working between New Jersey and New York. Her practice engages themes, ideologies, and methodologies within contemporary art and art history with a focus on frameworks that unify communities globally, particularly across the diaspora. She currently works in Sales and Curatorial at White Cube as an Artist Coordinator and also assists the Managing Director, U.S., with artist research, and strategic expansion. Previously, she worked at Lehmann Maupin, contributing to placements in major public and private collections, and held roles at Art Bridges Foundation in Bentonville, Arkansas, as well as the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University. She has also completed fellowships at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York.