August 30 – October 11, 2025

Opening Reception
Saturday, August 30 | 6:00 – 8:00 PM

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Galerie Myrtis is pleased to present The Brave: Affirming Power, Presence & Possibility, a powerful group exhibition curated by Myrtis Bedolla. On view from August 30 through October 11, 2025, the exhibition features contemporary artists whose work explores the emotional, historical, and imaginative landscapes of the African diaspora.

Inspired by the anthemic lyrics of Danielle Ponder’s Some of Us Are Brave, the exhibition centers artists who examine the complexities of Black freedom, the weight of injustice, and the radical potential of self-definition. Through painting, sculpture, photography, mixed media, and installation, The Brave calls forth a collective testimony that honors ancestral strength, celebrates embodied truth, and demands space for joy, grief, intimacy, and transformation.

Featured artists: Devin Allen, Lavett Ballard, Wesley Clark, Jerrell Gibbs, Fabiola Jean-Louis, Felandus Thames, Megan Lewis, Delita Martin, Ronald Jackson, M. Scott Johnson, Ya La’Ford, James Seward, and Bria Wilson-Sterling.

May 8th – 11th
28 Liberty Street, New York
NY 10005
Ticket Information

Galerie Myrtis – Booth 04
Featured Artist:
Lavett Ballard
Tawny Chatmon
Monica Ikegwu

view artwork | 1-54 artist’s catalog

The 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair will feature a curated selection of galleries presenting contemporary works by both emerging and established artists from Africa and its diaspora. As always, 1-54 will collaborate with leading institutions to offer tailored programming.

VIP Preview Day
Thursday, May 8, 2025
11 am – 7 pm

Public Hours
Friday May 9th, 11 am – 7 pm
Saturday May 10th, 11 am – 7 pm
Sunday May 11th, 11 am – 6 pm

March 27th – 30th
Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Avenue, New York, NY
Ticket Information

Galerie Myrtis at Booth C19
Featured Artist:
Lavett Ballard
Tawny Chatmon
Susan Goldman
Delita Martin

view artwork | IFPDA Artist’s Catalog

Established in 1987, the International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA) is the preeminent international membership organization for galleries, dealers, and publishers specializing in prints and editions. Join us at the Park Avenue Armory, March 27th through the 30th, for the IFPDA Print Fair, a celebration of 550+ years of prints and printmaking.

VIP Preview Day
Thursday, March 27, 2025
Invitation and VIP Pass Only
5 – 9 PM

Public Hours
Friday, March 28, 2025, 11 AM – 7 PM
Saturday, March 29, 2025, 11 AM – 7 PM
Sunday, March 30, 2025, 11 AM – 5 PM

Solo Exhibition – Lavett Ballard
March 30 – May 4, 2024

Opening Reception
March 30th, 4:00 – 6:00 pm.

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Programming
April 20th, 4:00 – 6:00 pm.
Join us for an enlightening conversation with featured artist Lavett Ballard, moderated by exhibition curator and founding director of Galerie Myrtis, Dr. Myrtis Bedolla.

Galerie Myrtis proudly presents Good Fences: Neighboring Narratives of the Soul, a solo exhibition featuring renowned collage artist Lavett Ballard. The exhibit offers a survey of Ballard’s career long practice of embellishing reclaimed wood fences with images taken from historical archives, along with paints, woodburning, and precious metals. These mixed media collages re-contextualize the historical socio-cultural challenges experienced by people of color.

Ballard has had the esteemed honor of being commissioned by Time Magazine to create a portrait of civil rights activist Rosa Parks for the “100 Women of the Year” edition. The artwork, titled “The Bus Riders,” was published on March 16, 2020. In 2023, Time Magazine approached Ballard again to create a visual narrative for an editorial written by Isabel Wilkerson. The mixed media collages, titled “Caste and Chaos,” were chosen to appear in the February 3, 2023, “Division and Destiny” issue. The same issue also featured a cover story on Ballard’s artistic process, written by Victor Williams.

Good Fences: Neighboring Narratives of the Soul sheds light on the role of fences in my artistic practice, particularly in addressing social and cultural challenges faced by people of color. I use wooden fences as powerful symbols representing both division and protection. They embody the passage of time through the grains of the wood, while also signifying the potential for renewal and transformation. Through my artwork, I aim to visually articulate and celebrate the shared experiences of the African diaspora, highlighting how our collective stories connect us to our ancestors and the broader global community.” – Lavett Ballard

Programing
Artist Talk featuring Lavett Ballard
April 20th, 2:00 – 4:00 pm.

Join us for an enlightening conversation with featured artist Lavett Ballard, moderated by exhibition curator and founding director of Galerie Myrtis, Dr. Myrtis Bedolla. The discussion will delve into Ballard’s ongoing use of reclaimed wood, the historical underpinnings of collage, and the importance of uplifting the stories of underrepresented people in her work. Additionally, guests will have the opportunity to present their thought-provoking questions to the artist.

October 27th – 30th
Javits Center, New York, NY
Booth #215

VIP Preview Day
Thursday, October 27th 12 pm – 8 pm

Public Hours
Friday, October 28th 11 am – 7 pm
Saturday, October 29th 11 am – 7 pm
Sunday, October 30th 11 am – 5 pm
Ticket information

Featured are prints by artists

Daily Art Magazine, December, 2020
Lavett Ballard’s African American and Female Narratives byMaia Heguiaphal

Lavett Ballard‘s work is currently on show in two exhibitions, When She Roars is on at the Long-Sharp Gallery and Women Heal through Rite and Ritual is on at the Galerie Myrtis. When entering the show, you will discover works of art that question identity and self-identity using painted collages on wood fences. Lavett Ballard chose this medium to create a lexicon of images of African American and female identity.full article

Whitewall, October, 2020
Myrtis Bedolla is Deploying Art to Address Political and Social Issues by Katy Donoghue

Galerie Myrtis presents “Women Heal through Rite and Ritual” through the end of the year. The show’s focus was conceived prior to this year’s health crisis, and yet its timing could not be more fitting. Work by artists Lavett Ballard, Tawny Chatmon, Oletha DeVane, Shanequa Gay, Delita Martin, Elsa Muñoz, and Renée Stout look to non-Western traditions of the women’s role as nurturer, both physically and spiritually. full article

about the exhibition | view artwork

Lavett Ballard is a mixed media artist who describes her work as a re-imagined visual narrative of African descent people. Ballard’s use of imagery reflects social issues affecting primarily Black women.

Wesley Clark is a conceptual artist whose work challenges and draws parallels between historical and contemporary cultural issues. Clark’s primary focus surrounds blacks in America and the African Diaspora. He examines the young black male psyche and the feeling of being a target.

Alfred Conteh is a painter who presents visual explorations of how people from the African Diaspora societies living in the South are fighting social, economic, educational, and psychological wars from within and without to survive.

Susan Goldman is a printmaker whose “Squaring the Flower” series explores geometry and decorative form. Love of pattern and underlying passion for color and beauty informs playful layering and improvisation. The flower gets stripped away, covered up, and over-printed, yet it always finds a way back in, like a melodious refrain or a cherry blossom in springtime.

Michael Gross is a painter and printmaker whose intensely colorful works are frenetic studies of light and movement. For Gross, every piece attempts to capture a moment of equilibrium, a kind of elegant balance in time and space, and record it permanently.

Michael Gross
The Measure of a Man, 2018
Oil and acrylic on canvas, 72 x 48″


M. Scott Johnson is a photographer and sculptor. As a photographer, Johnson navigates and interprets light, space, and soul in his Landscape Astrophotography series, which represents a yearly pilgrimage to the dark sky of New York’s Adirondack Park, where he captures the rising of the planet Venus in the Northern Hemisphere. As a sculptor, Johnson’s aesthetic and philosophical explorations are shaped by the landscape of his atavistic memories.

Megan Lewis is a painter whose work is a visual series built on her curiosities, experiences, memories, and thought processes. Gathering what she has known to be true becomes the foundation and framework of her artistry. Lewis creates work to express and share her joys.

Delita Martin is a printmaker who portrays Black women as magical beings that possess the power to transcend their black skin and exist in a spiritual form. Through the weaving of history and storytelling, Martin’s work offers narratives on the power of women whose stories are not only layered in textures and techniques but also symbolism.

Arvie Smith is a painter who works transforms the history of oppressed and stereotyped segments of the American experience into lyrical two-dimensional masterworks. Smith’s work is commonly of psychological images revealing deep sympathy for the dispossessed and marginalized members of society in an unrelenting search for beauty, meaning, and equality.

Nelson Stevens is a painter and member of AfriCOBRA (African Commune for Bad Relevant Artists) whose aesthetic is rooted in activism and a commitment to create imagery that rails against racism through positive, powerful, and uplifting imagery.

Felandus Thames is a conceptual artist whose work transcends didacticisms that are typically associated with anachronistic understandings of representation and instead aligns itself with ideas around the taxonomy of human difference. Thames is also interested in the interplay between the personal narrative and the imagined, uses humor to allow the viewer to ease into disconcerting motifs.

February 19th – April 30, 2022

FEATURED ARTISTS
Lavett Ballard | Wesley Clark | Alfred Conteh
Susan Goldman | Michael Gross | M. Scott Johnson
Megan Lewis | Delita Martin | Arvie Smith
Nelson Stevens | Felandus Thames

about the artist | view artwork

This group exhibition explores concepts of existence and being, drawing inspiration from the metaphysical theory of ontology, the study of the nature of things, and their reality, identity, and relatedness.

In this exhibit, visual narratives conceived in conceptual work, paintings, prints, photography, and sculpture draw parallels between shared occurrences and belief systems derived from the artists’ personal experiences and convictions. Here the theory of ontology will be tested and either accepted or rejected as truth, as we question, do our human experiences inextricably link us? Discourse on the notion of communal expressions will challenge relatedness. And social constructionism leads the debate on what defines being, reality, and identity.


Megan Lewis
Calm, 2021
Oil and acrylic on canvas
60 x 36 ″