Sovern LA’s concrete exterior—washed in bright shades of pink and etched with elaborate designs—sets the tone for Into the Pluriverse, a group exhibition running June 25 through October 8, 2026. Inspired by the Zapatista term “pluriverse,” commonly understood as the multitude of realities present in a single moment, the show brings together Nia Lee, April Bey, and Jessica Taylor Bellamy to consider how Afro-indigenous histories and cultures shape, create, and challenge truth and perception. Curated by Nordia Simmonds, each artwork functions as a distinct threshold into layered worlds.
Salt, memory, and embodied ritual
The exhibition opens with five works by Nia Lee under the title Saltbone, a suite that contends with the historical intensive labor performed by enslaved Africans in salt mines. A textile piece sewn from recovered salt bags—sourced from locations where enslaved Africans performed forced labor—bears embroidered messages that Lee spiritually channeled. One reads: “SALT BE MAGNET LOOKING FOR ITSELF IN THE SWEAT ON MY BROW MY PITS MY GROIN MY BACK.” Nearby, the sculpture Salt Spirit draws on Orisha Olokun, known within the Black diaspora for connections to the deepest ocean. Designed to be worn during tasting performances, it gathers fabric, salt, cowrie shells, brass bells, and mirrors into a wearable object for engaging ancestral stories, traditions, and rituals.
Completing this constellation are three plaster busts set on cinder blocks, each crowned with hand-woven baskets where crisp white salt grows from wire cages. Together, these works situate salt as preservative, conductor, and passage—materializing grief, lineage, and the potential worlds held within moments.
Tapestry, timeline, and ecological witness
To the right, educator and artist April Bey presents three towering woven tapestries. When My Flow is Phuckin Ridiculous, standing at over six feet tall, is embellished with hand-sewn sherpa and glitter, shaping the image of a vibrant young woman. Its sister work, When Some of the Most Beautiful Thangs Come Out My Mouth, is stretched across a mahogany fur wall. A final tapestry completes the trio. Each is trimmed with hundreds of brown and golden beads and custom golden hoop earrings, as Bey reimagines the vivid multitude of experience drawn from life as a Black American Bahamian queer person and self-identified blerd.
In the final showroom, native Angeleno Jessica Taylor Bellamy explores the overlap of utopia and dystopia. Pyrocumulus Daisy Portal configures an LA County landscape within an iron gate found in Miami’s Morningside district, opening a portal across geographies and their shared ecological devastation. Uncommon Blue composes a butterfly from fragmented newspaper clippings on environmental disasters, the figure hovering with a construction ball in a dreamy skyscape. Horizontal Thrust 1 (Blue Graffiti Highway) blurs freeway, fence, palm trees, and a silver road; its wall label invites viewers to read it as a timeline that grows hazier up close. Across from it, Ecology IV: Horizon of Manic Striving and Photogenic Decline—made with paint, canvas, image transfer, dried wildflowers grown in Whittier, video projection, sound, and a salvaged BMW e30 bumper—shifts witnessship to an aged automobile part, reflecting footage of a neighborhood poppy field’s destruction.
Into the Pluriverse is a collaboration between artists Nia Lee, April Bey, and Jessica Taylor Bellamy with curator Nordia Simmonds. Programming includes Nia Lee’s Mending the Salt Bone: A Black Food Futurism Participatory Performance and Tasting, with details and closing ceremony information available on Sovern LA’s website.
Vía artandcakela.com
