Mariane Ibrahim is pleased to present I Dream I Cross the River in One Stride, a group exhibition bringing together the work of Clémence Gbonon (b. 1994), Brittney Leeanne Williams (b. 1990), and Autumn Wallace (b. 1996). 

The exhibition is inspired by ideas explored in Lorraine O’Grady’s seminal essay Olympia’s Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity. If, as O’Grady argues, the Black female body has long functioned as the unseen reverse side of Western femininity—present as stereotype, absent as subject—these artists reclaim the right to produce images that are self-authored, multiple, and unafraid of excess. Across painting and sculpture, Gbonon, Williams, and Wallace refuse inherited dichotomies and instead inhabit what O’Grady calls a “both/and” space: sensuous and thoughtful, wild and monumental, intimate and vulnerable, queer and undefined.

Presented together, these artists do more than correct an art-historical omission; they propose a contemporary grammar for seeing and feeling lived experience. In dialogue with O’Grady’s text, the exhibition suggests that reclaiming female subjectivity today means moving beyond rescue from the male gaze toward a more radical act: freeing these figures from the historic script altogether. Here, the artworks become sites of self-knowledge, contradiction, pleasure—spaces where the right to complexity is not negotiated but asserted.

Image: Brittney Leeanne Williams, Interruption 7, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Alexander Berggruen, NY.