Opening: Winter Exhibitions

Join us for the opening of our winter exhibitions, including Pamela Sneed and Carlos Martiel: Sacred and Profane, Hortensia Mi Kafchin: Through Different Eyes, and Soft Spaces: Sinan Tuncay and Sarp Kerem Yavuz.

Sacred and Profane brings together the powerful practices of Pamela Sneed and Carlos Martiel to explore Black presence, erasure, memory, and endurance on Fire Island. During her 2022 BOFFO Residency on Fire Island, Sneed investigated the little-known history of slave pens on the island, creating large-scale watercolors and collages using natural materials like shells, sand, seaweed, and cowrie to imagine the presence and erasure of Black bodies, honoring those who may have been held there. Visitors contributed offerings to the work, including Martiel, who became one of those reimagined bodies, in the form of a photograph.

In 2024, Martiel completed his own BOFFO Residency which culminated in Jungle, a durational performance in which his exposed body, surrounded by tropical fruits from Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America, was gradually revealed as attendees consumed the fruit—an indictment of the colonialist and cannibalistic treatment of Black bodies, historically and within contemporary LGBTQ spaces.

The exhibition features new artworks by Sneed, including works on paper, poetic interventions on historical records, and mixed-media collages, all extracting from or gesturing toward Fire Island’s hidden Black history. Her works appear alongside Martiel’s Cuerpo (2022), Custody (2025), Gran Poder (2023), and a new performance, No Resurrection, created with his mother to confront the feelings of grief and powerlessness among African American mothers who have lost children to police violence. Together, Sneed and Martiel’s work transforms Fire Island and Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art into dual sites of Black queer haunting and resistance, embodying what scholar Christina Sharpe calls “residence time”—the enduring afterlife of slavery in salt, water, and memory. Sacred and Profane asserts that to uncover what has been buried is to recover the body as a witness to what was taken and what still remains.

Hortensia Mi Kafchin activates LLMA's Window Gallery with a new installation, Through Different Eyes (2026). As an established painter, Kafchin is known for her eclectic and imaginative dreamscapes, confronting the futuristic, the anatomical, and the technological. Through Different Eyes expands on these ideas with bizarre and transfixing digital renderings and videos. A trio of eyes examines and disorients its viewer, mimicking the experience of being actively surveilled, and Kafchin’s experience of being observed and investigated as a trans woman and Romanian immigrant. The eyes in Through Different Eyes undergo a transformative evolution—from ocular visuals of blood cells to code, cyborgs, and planets—critiquing the harmful reality of technology used against her communities, while also pursuing a queer and trans techno utopia.

Soft Spaces: Sinan Tuncay and Sarp Karem Yavuz is part of a series of installations featuring works by alumni of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art Fellowship, on view in our intimate Living Room Gallery, just right of the the Museum’s entrance when you arrive.

In Sinan Tuncay’s photo collage series Public Intimacy, the artist draws from the tradition of Ottoman miniature paintings, queering the image of a customary Turkish wedding ceremony by inserting portraits he’s taken himself. Sarp Karem Yavuz’s photograph series Polaroids from the Ottoman Empire plays with flaws in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to reimagine a joyous, homoerotic Ottoman Empire—in stark contrast to his experience of the Turkish government’s conservative, neo-Ottoman fantasy.

More than half of Yavuz’s works in the exhibition represent the LLMA’s first acquisition of AI-generated art.

Accessibility
Located at 26 Wooster Street, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art strives to provide a welcoming environment to all visitors. Five external steps lead to our entrance doors: a wheelchair lift is available. All galleries are wheelchair-accessible, and a single-occupancy accessible restroom is located behind the visitor services desk. All restrooms are gender-neutral. Large print didactics are available. Chairs with backs are available. For questions or access requests, please email info@leslielohman.org at least one week in advance of your visit.