For one final night, Young Hot Ebony moves beyond the walls through artist conversation, spoken word, music, and movement.
Free · RSVP required · Address provided to confirmed guests
RSVP for the closing →The closing of Young Hot Ebony shifts the exhibition from looking to responding. Join us for an evening of conversation, spoken word, music, and movement as the ideas inside the show move beyond the walls.
7:00–10:00 PM · The Little House Gallery
Free with RSVP. The gallery address is shared with confirmed guests.
Young Hot Ebony examines the historical and cultural construction of Black sexuality and the ways these narratives continue to shape how Black bodies are seen, desired, feared, controlled, represented, and understood.
Rooted in curatorial activism, the exhibition considers how stereotypes surrounding Black sexuality have been created, circulated, and internalized over generations. Hypersexualization and fetishization exist alongside policing, commodification, erasure, self definition, vulnerability, agency, and desire.
Rather than presenting one definitive history, the exhibition brings existing works by multiple artists into conversation. Painting, photography, installation, and mixed media are recontextualized to create a layered narrative, one that asks viewers to sit with contradictions rather than resolve them.
Presented within a house gallery, the exhibition intentionally moves away from the distance often associated with traditional gallery spaces. The domestic setting creates an intimate encounter between art, lived experience, memory, and the everyday environments where cultural narratives take root.
At its core, Young Hot Ebony asks us to examine the stories imposed upon Black bodies and what becomes possible when those stories are challenged.
Artist information below is populated from submitted exhibition forms. Final artwork images and any remaining artist information can be added as they arrive.
Memphis · Visual Artist
ArtBae Ke · @artbaeke · @artbaestudios
Based in Memphis, Tennessee, Keeosha Armstrong is a visual artist whose practice explores storytelling, the Black interior, representation, and the effects of stereotype and capitalism. Working across painting and installation, Armstrong draws from Afrofuturism, funk, science fiction, Memphis, Egypt, and the African diaspora to imagine spaces of beauty, joy, memory, and possibility.
View artist and works →
Memphis · Installation
She/her · @LoveJkiera
Pryor works with recycled materials and papier mâché to construct spaces and homes that explore intimacy, Black embodiment, desire, and the ways private worlds can become sites of expression.
View artist and work →
Memphis · Fiber / Mixed Media
Felicia Wheeler · She/Her · @felicia_rachelle
A Memphis native and visual artist, Felicia Rachelle works through beadwork, crochet, abstraction, and material practice to explore African American and Indigenous matriarchal heritage, memory, resilience, and the ways tradition carries stories across generations.
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Visual Artist
@bratyspice
BratySpice explores femininity, sexuality, strength, beauty, and feminine rage through acrylic painting.
View artist and works →
Memphis · Mixed Media / Photography
@Cheetoryan · cheetoryan.com
Cheeto Ryan is a Memphis mixed media collage artist whose practice combines photography, collage, documentation, and social activism to examine neighborhood life, poverty, blight, geography, and the layered realities of communities.
View artist and work →
Artist
Kendal Alicia is a Memphis-based multidisciplinary artist and designer working across fine art, graphic design and creative expression. She brings a graphic, image-driven sensibility to everything she makes — whether she’s building brand systems or creating fine art centered on the representation and existence of Black women. Her painting practice moves between bold, saturated realism and graphic design and collage, using the body and pulled imagery to interrogate how Black women have been seen, defined, and consumed — and to reclaim space for how they might be seen instead.
View artist and work →
Memphis · Digital Photography
J. Louis Tucker
J. Louis Tucker, better known as “Ziggy,” uses digital photography to observe and document moments in time as they relate to American culture and its subcultures. On a deeper level, the artist explores rhythm and movement as they relate to people.
View artist profile →
Memphis · Photography / Conceptual Art
He/Him · @whoskaiross
Kai Ross is a Memphis-based photographer and conceptual artist whose practice explores how memory, intimacy, and lived experience shape the way we perceive the world around us.
View artist and works →A spatial guide to Young Hot Ebony at The Little House Gallery. The map identifies exhibition rooms and areas where no art is on view.
Also known as: ArtBae Ke
Practice: Painting, installation, mixed media
Based in Memphis, TN where her family has lived for several generations, Armstrong rethinks pathways for art, dynamic engagement, and portrayals of the Black interior. Her practice explores storytelling while critiquing disenfranchisement, misconception, negative stereotypes, and capitalism. Vibrant color embodies the frequency and joys of Black community alongside histories of injustice. Her work draws heavily from Afrofuturism, funk music, science fiction, Memphis, Egypt, Black political issues, and the African diaspora.
Curatorial context: Armstrong's submitted works speak directly to questions of Black beauty, media representation, intimacy, objectification, and agency.
Work 01
2023 · Acrylic on canvas · 30" × 40" × .75" · $800
About the work: Embrasser, a French word meaning “kiss,” reflects a moment of closure between a Black couple, their final moment of intimacy, their last goodbye. The work offers a positive representation of Black love while highlighting gentleness and vulnerability toward the Black woman and questioning sexual imagery circulated through Black media.
Relationship to the exhibition: The painting questions hypersexualized representations of Black intimacy by centering tenderness, vulnerability, and emotional agency rather than objectification.
Pronouns: She/her
Practice: Recycled materials, papier-mâché, installation
Jkiera Pryor uses recycled materials and papier-mâché to create spaces and homes intended to simulate intimate environments. Her submitted work constructs a galaxy-themed loft with a 1970s-inspired yet contemporary sensibility, functioning as an adult recreation space containing erotic imagery, miniature Black bodies, miniature objects, and three distinct intimate levels.
Relationship to the exhibition: The work creates a space that invites Black bodies to enjoy Black bodies without shame or judgment while interrogating the ideas of privacy and observation.
Installation
2026 · Recycled materials / papier mâché · 11.5" × 20" × 9.5"
About the work: A model of a galaxy themed loft with a 1970s style and modern take. The adult recreation space contains erotic images, miniature Black bodies, miniature adult objects, and three levels of intimate space.
Installation note: Sculptural installation. Confirm final footprint and any display requirements before installation.
Artist: Felicia Wheeler
Pronouns: She/Her
Felicia Wheeler is a Memphis native and visual artist with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Arts with an emphasis in Ceramics from the University of Memphis. Her practice has grown to explore traditional Indigenous and African beadwork practices alongside crocheted handiwork as an homage to her matriarchal upbringing.
Her work celebrates African American and Indigenous matriarchal heritage through peyote stitch, lace crochet, and abstraction. These methods become vessels for preserving memory across generations, with each bead, loop, and gesture serving as a conversation with the past.
Work 01
2026 · Latex paint, adhesive, cording, foil · 24" × 20" × 1.5" · $500
About the work: Gold Bond navigates the duality of existence between burnout, oversexualization, and the challenges one may face when subjected to such conditions.
Relationship to the exhibition: The work challenges and asks the artist to examine norms she subscribes to within herself, creating an opening for viewers to consider how those norms are learned and reproduced.
Artist bio and final profile information will be added from submitted materials.
2026 · Acrylic on canvas · 16" × 20" · $275
About the work: “Sex Appeal” plays on the idea that society becomes conditioned to oversexualize curves and shapes associated with the female anatomy.
Work 08
2025 · Acrylic on canvas · 11" × 14" · $450
About the work: “Maintain” represents balancing grace and strength while remaining sharp and beautiful amidst chaos.
Selected work2024 · Acrylic on canvas · 16" × 20" · $400
About the work: “BRATzilla” captures the surreal essence of feminine rage within the Black woman, presenting femininity and passion as forces that can appear grand and even catastrophic to the public.
Cheeto Ryan is a mixed media collage artist in Memphis, Tennessee. His practice grew from an awareness of poverty and the treatment of his community, leading him to use the camera as a way of documenting and engaging with the places around him.
A graduate of Memphis College of Art with a Bachelor of Fine Art, Ryan has worked with community organizations and schools in Memphis and Arkansas, teaching classes, creating murals, and using creative practice as a form of community engagement. His work moves between collage and photography to alter perceptions of topography and blight while revealing the layers and complexities of neighborhood life.
Work 01
2026 · Photography and Digital Collage · 40" × 22"
About the work: Baartman Study focuses on the hypersexualization and fetishization of Sarah Baartman’s body and the intimate connection between Black sexuality, exploitation, voyeurism, and representation. The work uses sexual accessories, archival imagery, and maps of South Africa to create tension between desire, recognition, exploitation, and self determination.
Relationship to the exhibition: The work engages the historical significance of Sarah Baartman and the ways Black sexuality, stereotypes, exploitation, fetishization, and sexual empowerment continue to shape representation.
Pronouns: He/Him
Location: Memphis, Tennessee
Kai Ross is a Memphis-based photographer and conceptual artist whose practice explores how memory, intimacy, and lived experience shape the way we perceive the world around us. Working across photography and multidisciplinary storytelling, Kai creates emotionally charged narratives that blur the boundaries between personal experience and collective memory.
Drawing from the language of cinema, music, personal archives, and lived experiences, Kai approaches photography as a form of narrative construction using familiar cultural language to disrupt, complicate, and reclaim dominant ideas surrounding Blackness, desire, love, loss, and identity. His work considers the body not as an object of representation, but as a site of agency, memory, contradiction, self determination.
Work 01
2026 · Photography · 24" × 36" · $350
About the work: Invoice No. 267 reframes the historical commodification of Black bodies through the visual language of commercial transaction. Drawing from historical documentation that reduced enslaved Black people to property and monetary value, the piece transforms the invoice into a contemporary instrument of agency.
At its center is the image of a Black woman whose body is presented not as property to be bought, but as something she possesses the authority to define, negotiate, and sell on her own terms. The fabricated invoice assigns monetary value to services that remain partially undisclosed, creating tension between the language of commerce and the history embedded within it.
Curatorial prompt: What changes when the body that was once sold becomes the body with the power to set the price?
Work 02
2024 · Photography · 24" × 36" · $350
About the work: Desperate Housewives explores the freedom of Black women to exist beyond the limitations of a single prescribed identity. Set within the intimate language of domesticity, the image places a woman in a space associated with caregiving and nourishment while presenting her body through a sensual gaze.
The work draws on the cultural archetype of the “desperate housewife,” a woman expected to embody domesticity, femininity, and desire, while reconsidering what those roles mean when inhabited by a Black woman. She can be a caregiver, but still be sexual. She can nurture others while still desiring herself. She can embrace domesticity without surrendering her autonomy.
Curatorial prompt: Why are Black women so often expected to perform labor and care while their sensuality and softness are treated as something to be controlled?
Kendal Alicia is a Memphis-based multidisciplinary artist and designer working across fine art, graphic design and creative expression. She brings a graphic, image-driven sensibility to everything she makes — whether she’s building brand systems or creating fine art centered on the representation and existence of Black women. Her painting practice moves between bold, saturated realism and graphic design and collage, using the body and pulled imagery to interrogate how Black women have been seen, defined, and consumed — and to reclaim space for how they might be seen instead.
About the work: This work is a study of the Black woman's body — unnamed and unapologetic. Painted in acrylic with a graphic realism that’s punchy and saturated, these anonymous anatomy studies isolate breasts, abdomens, thighs, and curves across the spectrum of shades of Black skin.
These forms have long been sites of desire, judgment, and control — hypersexualized, policed, consumed. I want Black bodies to be able to exist simply: neither spectacle nor symbol, just present.
This work extends a practice I’ve long been committed to — advocating for Black bodily freedom. To me it's not about bodies in general — it's about us, and what it means to simply exist, admired, on our own terms.
About the work: I created a large lenticular piece made up of collaged graphics focused on Black women’s presentations in media and in creative spaces, juxtaposed with a quote from Audre Lorde about how letting others define her would eat her alive. The contrast in the graphics and the quote is supposed to be viewed from separate angles by the viewer.
The imagery used is sourced from advertisements, books, products and packages. I also pulled from modern sources such as stills from social media personalities and movie stars. I used vector girls to represent the Black girls of past and present/future, looking up to and out at these representations and at the Audre Lorde quote about allowing others to define us.
This piece is rooted in a history — the ways Black women’s bodies have been claimed, scrutinized, and defined by others across American history. The piece also serves to call attention to some harmful representations of Black women that young girls will still see and have impressed upon them before they have the language to question them.
By holding these images up rather than looking away from them, I want to shift the conversation from what’s wrong with the image to who gets to make it. Lorde’s words don’t sit beside the collage as commentary; they sit in tension with it, asking the viewer to reckon with both at once, from wherever they happen to be standing.
The piece argues, quietly, for the same thing: that the people being represented should be the ones deciding how.
J. Louis Tucker, better known as “Ziggy,” at initial glance uses digital photography to observe and document moments in time as they relate to American culture and its subcultures. On a deeper level, the artist explores the concepts of rhythm and movement as they relate to people.
Selected work
Digital photography
Selected work · 1 of 2
Digital photography
Selected work · 2 of 2
Digital photography
Selected work
Digital photography
The works overlap. A piece may speak to the gaze while also confronting commodity, stereotype, self definition, or agency. These are not categories so much as points of entry.
The domestic setting is not merely a container for the work. Movement through the house becomes part of the encounter, creating an intimate relationship between the art, the architecture, and the viewer.
As you move through the exhibition, notice how scale, proximity, privacy, familiarity, and visibility change the way each work is experienced. The house offers a different kind of looking, one that places contemporary art inside a space that already carries the language of intimacy and everyday life.
Young Hot Ebony is not interested in giving the viewer a comfortable answer to the question of what Black sexuality is. It is interested in examining who has historically been allowed to define it.
The phrase “Sex Sells” enters the exhibition as both slogan and evidence. It points toward the marketplace, but also toward the larger systems through which Black bodies have been turned into spectacle, fantasy, labor, image, symbol, and commodity.
These works do not all say the same thing. They should not. Their differences are part of the exhibition’s argument. Meaning emerges through proximity, tension, contradiction, recognition, and refusal.
Young Hot Ebony is not meant to be experienced in a particular order. The works are intentionally unnumbered, allowing visitors to move through the house freely and form their own connections between artists, ideas, and images.
Follow your curiosity.
The invitation is simple: look longer. Question what you think you already know. Notice when your own gaze becomes part of the story.
Interested in an artwork, commissioning an artist, or learning more about someone featured in the exhibition? Contact the curator for artwork availability and purchase inquiries.
Artwork inquiries: DameMufasa@gmail.com
Exhibition updates: @the_little_house_gallery
The Body Talks Back brings the exhibition together one final time through conversation, poetry, music, and movement.
Free · RSVP required · Address provided to confirmed guests
RSVP for The Body Talks Back →