Robin Jayne Henderson is a mixed-media artist with an archival impulse. It is important to note that this impulse is not about scientific sorting and classifying, but about the childhood habit of keeping treasures in a shoebox under the bed. It is about finding wonder in the everyday detritus of life. She is a collector of castoffs: objects, images, and indexical marks left behind in the world.

When I lived in New York, I made paintings that took the form of shaped sculptural paintings and paper constructions and had to do with geometry, flatness, and dimensionality. When I accepted an R1 Research University position at the University of South Florida in 2015, I unexpectedly began working with clay. My new work is a direct extension of the previous paintings and paper constructions, and embodies my journey from New York to Florida and to Turkey, where my husband is from. I think of these ceramic works as shaped paintings.

Round wooden forms and a wonky sense of humor distinguish Kyle Falzone’s work as playful and inviting, while their seamless construction tells also of his intentional precision in craftsmanship. Crisply painted starbursts and radiating lines pair with organic dark woods in cryptic abstraction with a unique sense of character.

I chose migrancy because it privileges movement and process, in both space and time, over stability and fixity.

Shapeshifters: bold, brave, and fearless beings able to change their physical form at will. Nonfictional and mythical figures who assume different forms, often, but not always, as acts of survival. Synonyms: Spirit, Love, La Mujer Salvaje, Black folk, Blackness, Womanness—particularly Black Womanness.

I often hear from observers of my work that they resemble “weavings” or “tapestries,” and, in fact, the many lines do act like “threads” that have intertwined themselves on the paper just as the threads of cloth do in a textile product.

Central to this body of work is the use of cosmology—both metaphorically and literally—to describe the Black experience. Various references are derived from art history, pop culture, and the Black radical tradition to create a sardonic melding. The aesthetic is allusive in nature and is not defined by a single style or visual characteristic. Instead, the work seeks to only be defined by its fugitive character.

You don’t know how far a box of Crayola and brown paper bags from the A&P grocery store can take you . . . (Thanks, Mom.)

My creative and scholarly research has evolved out of an ongoing interest in effort, achievement, and the ethics of irresolvability. Working across disciplines, I focus on the ways in which material and procedural conditions define form and content. Specific gestures have a certain kind of power, and within my work there is a casual and undemanding level of agency, suggestive of an inherent struggle against the pressures of success and a knowing resignation that comes with always falling short.

My recent work is a meditation on the Black male experience. I challenge stereotypes of Black masculinity by presenting allegorical narratives in the aesthetic of the hairstyle-guide posters commonly found in Black barbershops. The individuals depicted in these posters tend to be anonymous, identified only by number. By borrowing these images, I hope to inspire young Black men to break with harmful conventions of representation and see themselves in their own individuality—as more than a number.