I dream I cross the river in one stride
13 Feb — 28 Mar 2026 at the Mariane Ibrahim Gallery in Chicago, United States
13 March 2026
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.
Clémence Gbonon’s work lends the exhibition its title, which is drawn from a line in Frantz Fanon’s The wretched of the Earth. The phrase situates both the exhibition and Gbonon’s
practice within a horizon of urgency, movement, and psychic crossing. Trained in international law and political science before her artistic studies, Gbonon approaches painting as a site where the body, politics, and abstraction remain inseparable, echoing, in a different register, O’Grady’s conceptual insistence on embodiment. In her canvases, the figure slips through our fingers: it escapes clear outline, resists capture. Yet however abstracted, the energy remains recognizably human. In works like A chair down from heaven (2025) her colors, often complementary contrasts, are fierce and unexpected, carrying an affective charge that oscillates between vulnerability and defiance.
Brittney Leeanne Williams works through a reduced palette of red, black, and white, anchored by an obsessive, almost devotional relationship to red. Williams builds her figures by redacting bodies from European classical paintings, particularly Annunciation scenes illustrating moments of divine dialogue or angelic intervention. ( … )