The Brooklyn Rail

 Perhaps it was taken from a family photograph, the large graphite drawing of two women standing side by side in a garden with shoulders touching and hands folded at their waists as they wait for the opening of an aperture, the quick snap of a picture intended to save their likeness. In Our Closest Relatives: Leonisia Calderon and Cecilia Calderon (Mama Shoon and Tanti Cecilia) (2025), artist Oasa DuVerney carefully transposes onto her paper the drape of their floral-print skirts and the quiet smiles that ripple their faces, safeguarding the women’s memory and calling them back into being.

Into the Shining Dark at Welancora Gallery brings together nine of DuVerney’s new and recent works on paper which together present her attentiveness to Black womanhood, lineage, community, and survival. Through a series of impeccably rendered portraits and works of cut paper, she builds a constellation of separate women’s stories into a framework of ongoing solidarity that invites viewers to recalibrate narratives of collective history. I first came to know DuVerney through her work with fellow artist Mildred Beltré; the duo co-founded the public art project Brooklyn Hi-Art! Machine, through which they document their Crown Heights community while inviting neighbors to join in their artmaking process. Seeing her solo work for the first time, I recognize the same respectful acknowledgement of the significance of individual lives in work that pushes against marginalization and forgetting.

Olive Morris (2025) shows the Jamaican-born British activist amidst a crowd of people, her gaze meeting the viewer’s. DuVerney crops away most of the faces surrounding her, with Morris’s torso and head becoming a pillar that rises in the center of her composition. Morris was seventeen when she was arrested by London police in an event involving a Nigerian Diplomat outside of a Brixton record shop; she later reported that while in custody, the officers forced her to strip in front of them to prove she was a woman before brutally beating her. Following the incident, she joined the British Black Panthers and campaigned to fight police harassment in local communities before helping to establish the Brixton Black Women’s Group and the Organization for Women of African and Asian Descent. Morris died at twenty-seven from cancer, but is remembered for an extraordinary legacy of local activism. DuVerney’s duotone rendering is breathtaking in its powerful depiction of resilience, but I am equally moved by its tender fidelity to detail as I consider the hours and hours of studio time given to its creation.

For Portrait of an Unknown Black Girl as the Sniping Negress Carrie Minor Johnson (2025), a work of graphite and sparkle ground on paper, Duverney superimposes her subject, a Black girl wearing a Sunday-best dress with a large ruffled collar, over a newspaper page. A headline above her reads “‘Sniping Negress’ Held for Slaying,” referencing folk heroine Carrie Minor Johnson, a seventeen-year-old woman who hid under her bed during the Washington, DC race riots of 1919. When a police detective entered Johnson’s home in search of a rumored sniper, breaking down her bedroom door as he rushed at her, she shot and killed him. Johnson was charged with manslaughter and imprisoned, but a second judge later overturned the verdict, accepting that she acted in self-defense. On a visit to the gallery, DuVerney explained to me that during the pandemic, the photograph of the girl in the ruffled dress began popping up on the internet, tying her to Johnson’s story. In her research, she discovered that the picture had been taken decades prior and was, most likely, of someone who had happily posed for a formal portrait. In her drawing, DuVerney gives the girl precedence over the newspaper, placing her in front of it and rendering the text in soft focus in the background, restoring the personhood of a lost and misremembered young woman while acknowledging the newly-forged connection between the photograph and Johnson’s ordeal.

Included in the exhibition are three of Duverney’s ongoing “BLACK POWER WAVE” series, arrangements of wavy hand-cut paper glistening with dense applications of black graphite pencil. BLACK POWER WAVE as Governor Picton and the Torture of Louisa Calderon (2025) depicts the 1801 torture of a formerly enslaved thirteen-year-old girl with whom DuVerney recently discovered she shares an ancestral link.

Calderon was illegally tied and hung from a scaffolding by her wrist at the orders of the Governor of Trinidad in an attempt to procure a confession for a crime she did not commit. The governor was eventually prosecuted as word of Calderon’s torture galvanized the abolitionist movement in the British West Indies. In DuVerney’s image, a group of men gather below the girl, including Sudhana, a pilgrim seeking knowledge from the bodhisattvas, who turns his face away from the sight. A tiger and a panther circle protectively around Calderon, unflinching witnesses to her horror and its countless echoes through history, symbols of unity and power.