NXT HVN Puts Down Roots”

Kaitlyn Higgins

The Art of Breathing.

It’s a series of faces moving through an intense range of emotions. Maybe it’s the same person over a period of time. Maybe it’s multiple people in the same moment. Maybe the difference isn’t all that important. Kaitlyn Higgins’s The Art of Breathing is both a study in how to render emotions in paint and an expression of all those moments at once. It’s part of a series of paintings by Higgins that explore parallel senses of outward claustrophobia and inner turmoil. There are no easy answers, but in the accurate rendering of the situation, there’s communication and compassion.

Higgins’s pieces are part of Roots to Benevolence,” now running at NXT HVN in Dixwell until Aug. 22.

The show is the inaugural exhibition from the artists in the NXTHVN apprentice program — area high-school students who applied to the program to further their development in the arts before the pandemic started and ended up making art during a most tumultuous year. As NXT HVN’s accompanying note states, The projects reflect the development of their voice, vision and purpose while participating in the Apprenticeship Program, and creatively navigating the unique circumstances of a global pandemic” — and the social upheaval that accompanied it.

Next to Higgins’s paintings is a multimedia production by Mekhi Banks; the images on display, as it turns out, double as the covers for songs Banks produced during his apprenticeship — Fleet,” Back on Track,” and Are You Down?” — that show him as a savvy arranger and nimble MC. Banks, like Higgins, expresses the complex emotions of the depths of the pandemic, but also has his eyes fixed on a more hopeful time coming, a time that he fills with his dreams and ambitions. Have you ever seen a comeback like this?” he raps.

Ashlynn Topper

Grief Through Adolescence.

Ashlynn Topper, meanwhile, uses the graphic style and iconography of the covers to video games to address the United States’s ongoing racial reckoning. The effect is chilling, as it brings up thorny questions about the role technology has played — from cell phone videos and body cams to social media. How does the technology bring us closer together, and closer to a real reckoning, and how does it drive us apart? How does it bring home the reality of the situation, and how does it distort it? A similar piece, in which the Black Lives Matter movement cover is made to look like its own video game, brings up similarly unsettling questions. The subject matter is, of course, deadly serious. But how has the movement perhaps been commodified (starting with all those t‑shirts)? And at the same time, Topper shows that part of the connection to the movement involves a connection to friends, family, and community, aspects of our lives that bring us joy. In the terms of video games, as Topper points out, the Black Lives Matter movement is rated for everyone.

Aime Mulungula

The Benevolent, Self-Portrait.

Aime Mulungula uses pens and paint to create portraits of resilience, strength, and refinement. He focuses on historical figures, such as Mansa Musa, the ruler of the Mali Empire at the height of its power and wealth in the 13th century, and Haile Selassie, the king of Ethiopia who was potent enough as a symbol of African leadership to become the central figure of a new religion. He portrays more modern African figures in the full range of experience, from urban sophisticates in Congo to regal Masai in Kenya. The drawings are a sign of Mulungula’s keen engagement with a broad and deep cultural heritage that spans a continent, and a continental consciousness that has informed Black artists and political leaders throughout American history. But it comes into focus most clearly in Mulungula’s self-portrait, as a artist in the youngest generation of artists and leaders already taking the reins and moving society forward.

The final piece in the exhibit is a collection of spoken-word pieces, here displayed in written form, by Donte Warren, with illustrations by Higgins. Warren’s pieces begin with a meditation on the pride of being Black, but turn quickly to the oppression and danger he faces. They shoot and kill the darkest of men / Maybe we’ll never see a black man in the white house again / And they don’t believe the same, so you’ve run out of friends / I’m through with peace because they’ll never know when to say when,” he writes. Another piece — echoing Topper’s art — deals with the distorting, addictive effects of online culture, while another details he and his brother’s direct experience of racism. It’s all balanced in a piece in the middle of the collection called Pressure”: Eight letters of shame and acting strange,” Warren writes. I’m putting my foot down because it’s time to make a change.”

Roots to Benevolence” runs at NXT HVN, 169 Henry St., through Aug. 22. Visit NXT HVN’s website for gallery hours and more information.

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