No Room For Self Pity, No Room For Fear Closing Reception

MiSA is excited to announce: No Place For Self Pity No Room For Fear by Ahmari Benton! This show is open to the public and FREE of charge.

Ahmari Benton is an interdisciplinary artist whose work spans wet and dry media, collage, and textile art. Her work centers on interrogating boundaries, self-identity, and social identity within the realms of gender and race politics. “As a multidisciplinary visual artist, I am deeply interested in the intersections of identity, place, and material storytelling. My creative practice draws from painting and fashion design to explore how visual narratives can affirm personal and collective histories—particularly within Black and urban communities. I am intellectually driven by questions of visibility, adornment, and how traditional and contemporary craft practices can be used to challenge dominant cultural narratives.”

Borrowing its title from Toni Morrison’s essay “No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear”, this exhibition embraces her insistence that artists must work, especially in moments of uncertainty. The works gathered here are anchored in the alchemy of endurance and the practice of ancestral forward motion. Across layers of surface and symbol, the work inhabits the threshold “where the flesh ends and the spirit begins.” It moves through polarities—fear and surrender, rupture and renewal, grief and propulsion. Endurance is not rendered as silent suffering; it is an active transformation. Wounds are transmuted into material. Strife becomes texture. Patience burns slow and steady, a disciplined flame that fuels forward motion. Echoing the emotional reckoning found in “Can’t Keep Running Away” by Hip Hop group The Pharcyde, the exhibition calls the self back from distraction and into accountability. To surrender to fear is not to succumb, but to face it long enough for it to become instruction. Guided by the principles of Sankofa (go back and get it) and Kujichagulia (self determination), this work retrieves from the past in order to move deliberately into the future. Legacy is understood as a charge: a responsibility to continue, to grow, to define oneself beyond inherited constraints. Like jazz and soul, the compositions are layered and improvisational—honoring lineage while insisting on expansion. No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear positions Black autonomy as an alchemical force. Closing a chapter becomes an act of agency. New growth emerges not in spite of difficulty, but through it. In this space, resilience is rhythmic, spiritual, and self-defined—an embodied declaration to deliberately stride, one forward step at a time.