Beyond Boundaries Closing Celebration

About Beyond Boundaries Closing Celebration

Come explore our galleries and experience an insightful panel discussion featuring artists from the Elliot & Kimberly Perry collection.

Join us to celebrate the closing weekend of Beyond Boundaries: Black Abstraction in the Elliot and Kimberly Perry Art Collection with a panel discussion featuring artists from the exhibition. Learn more about the work of leading contemporary artists, engage with the collectors, and experience the art before the exhibition closes on August 30th. Guests can pre-purchase a copy of the Beyond Boundaries exhibition catalog as a visual archive of the show along with their RSVP. Catalogs will be available to purchase at the event as well.

Panelists include:

Gozié Ojini
Kiah Celeste
Desmond Lewis


About the Panelists & Moderator

Gozié Ojini (born 1995 in Los Angeles) lives and works in New Haven, CT. He holds an MFA from Yale University’s Sculpture Program (2025), a BA from the School of Art and Architecture at UCLA (2019) and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Madison, ME (2022). He was recently included in Alice Coltrane: Monument Eternal at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2025). He has had solo exhibitions at Silke Lindner, New York, NY (2024) and In Lieu, Los Angeles, CA (2023). He has been included in various group exhibitions, among them Stitious at Michael Benevento, Los Angeles, CA (2025), After Hours at the Kiang Malingue, New York, NY (2025), and Polyphonic Views at Funkhaus, in Berlin, Germany (2025) among others.



Kiah Celeste (B.1994, Brooklyn, NY) is a multi-dimensional artist whose work transcends fitting into one category or medium. After completing a BFA in Photography in 2016, Kiah moved into three dimensional production. In the last decade, she has completed artist residencies and exhibitions within the US and internationally including Paris, Lisbon, Barcelona, Italy, Mexico, New York, Miami and Chicago. In 2021, Celeste received the inaugural 21C Artadia Award in Louisville, KY and in 2025 the inaugural Suzanne Fitzallen Jackson Foundation Residency, accompanied by an unrestricted $25,000 stipend. Her work has been acquired by institutions such as the Speed Art Museum, KMAC Museum and University of Kentucky Art Museum. She has been featured in The New York Times, Hyperallergic, The Wall Street Journal, Burnaway, and ArtForum. Celeste is currently included in ‘Fade’, The Studio Museum In Harlem’s sixth iteration of their groundbreaking “F” show, and Harvey B. Gantt Center in ‘Beyond Boundaries: Black Abstraction in the Elliot and Kimberly Perry Art Collection’, a group exhibition at Galerie Claire Gastaud in Paris, and prepares for a solo booth exhibition at the Armory Show in NYC.

Constantly searching and gleaning objects from her urban and industrial environment, Kiah Celeste forages for materials that speak to her. Her freestanding works typically consist of a few components, to which she often incorporates a motif to establish a visual cadence of repetition, balance, motion and variation. Using almost exclusively discarded or secondhand items and minimal hardware, she creates something new and fortuitous from decay. By asserting the cruciality of sustainability in the world, Kiah’s work negates the gratuitous nature of buying new, synthetic materials only to enter into inevitable disorder over time. Although these works are made with primarily synthetic, industrial and household materials, the forms they take on allude to the organic, the surreal and non-function. By adhering to rigorous principles of sustainability and low intervention, she often challenges physics, with compositions which carefully balance through tension, weight, flexibility and gravity. Recent stretched spandex framed works explore the meeting of sculpture and two-dimensionality while retaining foundations in found materiality, tension and physics. These texturally rich compositions highlight the inherent beauty of the objects, while retiring their original practical functions.

With a multifarious identity as a Black and Jewish woman, both feminine and androgynous, and introverted and social, among other seemingly contrasting combinations and in-betweens, the sense of her un-belonging finds respite in the embrace of seemingly disparate materials to create a cohesive whole, finding freedom in self, the world, and creative practice.

Kiah Celeste is jointly represented by DOCUMENT in Chicago and Lisbon and Marc Straus in New York City.



Desmond Lewis is a maker that deeply cares about how material exists within the world. He was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee and currently resides in Memphis, Tennessee. He earned his BS from Tennessee State University, an MFA in Sculpture from the University of Memphis, and an MBA from the University of Tennessee at Martin. Desmond has completed residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Vermont Carving and Sculpture Center, and Pittsburgh Glass Center. His work can be found in several public and private collections including: Birmingham Museum of Art, Penland School of Crafts, Carolina Bronze Sculpture Park, City of Hickory, NC, Vermont Carving and Sculpture Center, The University of Memphis, NexAir LLC, Soulsville USA, and Orange Mound Neighborhood and Veterans Association. Desmond is on the Board of Directors of the Metal Museum and the Governance Committee for the Society of Inclusive Blacksmiths. He is faculty at Fisk University. His studio practice is based in Memphis, Tennessee and Bassett, Arkansas.



Dr. de’Angelo Dia is a theopoet and mystic whose work explores culture and moral imagination through poetry, performance and sound art. Rooted in the aesthetics of Black liberation theology and Southern Gothic literature, his creative practice engages with themes of contemplative spirituality, embodied poetics, and Gullah mythology.

He has received fellowships and awards from Cave Canem, The Watering Hole, the Hurston/Wright Foundation, the McColl Center for Art + Innovation, and the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture. Dia currently serves as the Director of Education & Community Engagement at the Independent Picture House and is a member of DOOMSDAY.704.