La Mama Galleria, The Bellwether, and Codify Art are pleased to present Hair Paintings and Other Stories, Jarrett Key’s first solo exhibition in NYC. Key grew up in rural Alabama to the sound of their grandmother singing, “your hair is your strength.”

Hair Paintings… reimagines the collective bodily memories and rituals of the Black community by engaging its narratives of strength, courage, and resilience in an examination of past, present, and future. Investigating the four pillars of their identity — Family, Blackness, Southerness, and Queerness — through the repetition of embodied gestures, exclamation marks and language, Key’s oil paintings and hair paintings manifest the imagined individual. Each mark on the canvas is a signature of Key’s identity, an artifact of a performance that mines the possibilities in trusting one’s own queer, black body to celebrate and examine the legacy of its ancestors.