Beyond Boundaries Closing Program

Join us to celebrate the closing weekend of Beyond Boundaries: Black Abstraction in the Elliot and Kimberly Perry Art Collection with a panel discussion featuring artists from the exhibition. Learn more about the work of leading contemporary artists, engage with the collectors, and experience the art before the exhibition closes on August 30th. Guests can pre-purchase a copy of the Beyond Boundaries exhibition catalog as a visual archive of the show along with their RSVP. Catalogs will be available to purchase at the event as well.

Panelists include:

• Gozié Ojini
• Kiah Celeste
• Desmond Lewis

About the Panelists

Gozié Ojini (b. 1995, Los Angeles, CA) is a sculptor and installation artist based in New Haven, CT. His practice interrogates the emotional and cultural weight embedded in everyday objects—particularly musical instruments and domestic furnishings—through acts of deconstruction, reconstruction, and reinterpretation. Influenced by the language of sampling in hip-hop and the symbolic afterlife of functional objects, Ojini’s work explores themes of memory, obsolescence, and the labor of care.

Working with salvaged materials such as discarded pianos, Ojini transforms instruments of performance into silent, bodily sculptures—muted vessels that speak to inheritance, silence, and the invisible weight of value systems. His gesture-based process resists conventional hierarchies of craft, embracing imperfection and embodied intuition. Drawing on personal memory and cultural history, his objects evoke a poetics of absence and endurance.

Ojini holds a BA from the University of California, Los Angeles (2019) and an MFA from the Yale University School of Art (2025)

Kiah Celeste (B.1994, Brooklyn, NY) is a multi-dimensional artist whose work transcends fitting into one category or medium. After completing a BFA in Photography in 2016, Kiah moved into three dimensional production. In the last decade, she has completed artist residencies and exhibitions within the US and internationally including Paris, Lisbon, Barcelona, Italy, Mexico, New York, Miami and Chicago. In 2021, Celeste received the inaugural 21C Artadia Award in Louisville, KY and in 2025 the inaugural Suzanne Fitzallen Jackson Foundation Residency, accompanied by an unrestricted $25,000 stipend. Her work has been acquired by institutions such as the Speed Art Museum, KMAC Museum and University of Kentucky Art Museum. She has been featured in The New York Times, Hyperallergic, The Wall Street Journal, Burnaway, and ArtForum. Celeste is currently included in ‘Fade’, The Studio Museum In Harlem’s sixth iteration of their groundbreaking “F” show, and Harvey B. Gantt Center in ‘Beyond Boundaries: Black Abstraction in the Elliot and Kimberly Perry Art Collection’, a group exhibition at Galerie Claire Gastaud in Paris, and prepares for a solo booth exhibition at the Armory Show in NYC.

Constantly searching and gleaning objects from her urban and industrial environment, Kiah Celeste forages for materials that speak to her. Her freestanding works typically consist of a few components, to which she often incorporates a motif to establish a visual cadence of repetition, balance, motion and variation. Using almost exclusively discarded or secondhand items and minimal hardware, she creates something new and fortuitous from decay. By asserting the cruciality of sustainability in the world, Kiah’s work negates the gratuitous nature of buying new, synthetic materials only to enter into inevitable disorder over time. Although these works are made with primarily synthetic, industrial and household materials, the forms they take on allude to the organic, the surreal and non-function. By adhering to rigorous principles of sustainability and low intervention, she often challenges physics, with compositions which carefully balance through tension, weight, flexibility and gravity. Recent stretched spandex framed works explore the meeting of sculpture and two-dimensionality while retaining foundations in found materiality, tension and physics. These texturally rich compositions highlight the inherent beauty of the objects, while retiring their original practical functions.

With a multifarious identity as a Black and Jewish woman, both feminine and androgynous, and introverted and social, among other seemingly contrasting combinations and in-betweens, the sense of her un-belonging finds respite in the embrace of seemingly disparate materials to create a cohesive whole, finding freedom in self, the world, and creative practice.

Kiah Celeste is jointly represented by DOCUMENT in Chicago and Lisbon and Marc Straus in New York City.

Desmond Lewis was born and raised in Nashville, TN and currently resides in New Haven, CT and Memphis, TN. He earned his BS from Tennessee State University, an MFA in Sculpture from the University of Memphis and an MBA from The University of Tennessee at Martin. Desmond has completed residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Vermont Carving and Sculpture Center, and Pittsburgh Glass Center. Desmond's work can be found in several public and private collections around the US including: Penland School of Crafts, Carolina Bronze Sculpture Park, City of Hickory, NC, Vermont Carving and Sculpture Center, The University of Memphis, Soulsville USA, NexAir LLC, Skowhegan Parks and Recreation, Orange Mound Neighborhood and Veterans Association, and the Stax Museum of American Soul Music. Desmond is currently on the Board of Directors at the Metal Museum. He is also currently a Lecturer in Sculpture and the Fabrication Shops Coordinator in the School of Art at Yale University.