Name: Opening Reception - Into the Plurivese
Start: 2026-06-25T19:00:00-07:00
End: 2026-06-25T21:00:00-07:00
Location: Sovern

Opening Reception - Into the Plurivese

Sovern LA is an intersectional community center and gallery, located in LA’s West Adams district, focused on supporting Black and Indigenous women and gender expansive people of color. Fueled by a passion for justice, equality, and creative expression, Sovern is driven by the collective determination to center healing justice, challenge systemic barriers, empower artists of color, and amplify their impact for collective wellbeing. By building a community that uplifts and celebrates diverse voices, we aim to reshape the art world in Los Angeles and beyond, creating a more inclusive and equitable space where artists and communities can thrive together.

Sovern LA

A group show featuring the work of Jessica Taylor Bellamy, April Bey, and Nia Lee, curated by Nordia Simmonds.

Sovern

Into the Pluriverse is an interdisciplinary, group exhibition that incites the co-conspiracy of many ways of being human. The term pluriverse is a Zapatistan term that illustrates a commitment to and the concept of a world in which many worlds fit (Malandonado-Villalpando, 2022). Through the particularity of Afro-Caribbean diasporic worldmaking practices, the exhibition seeks to trouble ways of being that think of nature as necessarily perfect and untouchable, to highlight queer/multispecies kinship, Black arboricultural practices, and ancestor veneration as vital to temporal (re)negotiation. It proposes the artworks of Jessica Taylor Bellamy, April Bey, and Nia Lee as tools of interrupting systems of oppression and erasure. This program is presented through the generous support of Accelerate Resilience Los Angeles (ARLA). ABOUT THE ARTISTS<a href="https://www.jbellzamy.com/" title="https://www.jbellzamy.com/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Jessica Taylor Bellamy</a> (she/her) is an artist of juxtapositions: image and text, abstraction and figuration, handmade and mass produced, reality and fantasy, sunshine and noir. A native Angeleno, born and raised in Whittier to an Ashkenazi Jewish mother and an Afro-Cuban father, Bellamy’s practice considers this particular familial history to address notions of home, homeland, and landscape. The artist’s work is rooted in her observations living at the edge of a precarious paradise of shifting ecological tensions.<a href="https://www.aprilbey.com/" title="https://www.aprilbey.com/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">April Bey</a> (they/she) grew up in the Bahamas and now resides and works in Los Angeles as a visual artist and art educator. She is currently a tenured professor at Glendale College. Bey’s interdisciplinary artwork is an introspective and social critique of American and Bahamian culture, feminism, generational theory, social media, post-colonialism Speculative futurism/surrealism and Blerd culture. Bey’s two-dimensional mixed media works and installations are from her ongoing Atlantica series. Bey incorporates fur, glitter, vinyl and woven textiles--materials rich in queerness--to craft icons around the images of real-life figures from her community.<a href="https://www.nialee.me/" title="https://www.nialee.me/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">Nia Lee</a> (they/she) is a Los Angeles-based artist and writer whose practice materializes Black Food Futurism through sculpture, installation, ritual, and communal performance. Their work explores Black memory, domestic labor, taste, and spirit as portals for ancestral connection and speculative possibility. Nia’s work moves fluidly between material experimentation and multisensory worldbuilding and creates artworks and experiences that merge archival histories with embodied, future-facing imagination. Nia’s work attends to care, liberation, and the architectures that shape Black life. They collaborate with cultural institutions, organizers, scholars, and communities to create installations, performances, and shared rituals that serve as sites of reprieve, memory, imagination, and collective dreaming. THE CURATOR Nordia Simmonds (they/she) is a queer Afro-Caribbean diasporic philosopher and activist by way of Jamaica, Bronx, New York, and Central Florida. Nordia holds a Masters of Arts in Depth Psychology with a specialization in Community, Liberation, Indigenous, and Eco-Psychologies (CLIE) from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Her curatorial approach is both a care practice and pedagogical tool that expresses consideration for all persons and art pieces involved in any given project whilst acting as an interlocutor to relay messages between the audience and the artwork. They enlist decolonial feminist frameworks in their work to support non-hierarchical and non-binary thinking. For her, this project is at once an offering, meditation, and practice of a worldbuilding without borders.

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Opening Reception - Into the Plurivese

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Opening Reception - Into the Plurivese

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