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. With A world in the creases of my palms, Louise 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. In that same vein, through the tactile, Mandumbwa brings a bit of her familial garden and archive to the Long Gallery Harlem’s storefront.
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. Composed of multiple canvases, 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 poetry written by the artist herself, this presentation is symbolically unified by an intimate depiction of interconnected hands belonging to her younger cousins, Luwi and Lulu. Unlike many of Mandumbwa’s other works, usually rendered in greyscale, new colors, such as yellow and green, emerge within this presentation, reflecting not only the vegetation but also other natural elements encountered throughout the course of her life.
Beyond the literal portrayals evident within this presentation, 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. Within the richness of New York, and considering Harlem’s deep roots, A world in the creases of my palms serves as a reminder to our community 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
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.
Dates
May 17 through July 19, 2026
Reception: May 17, 2 – 5 PM
Location
Long Gallery Harlem
2073 Adam Clayton Powell, Jr Blvd.
New York, NY 10027
Artist
Louise Mandumbwa
Curator
Sundia Nwadiozor
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