21c Durham is unveiling two new exhibitions with Labor & Materials and The Intuitionist. The exhibitions, which remain on view through May 2026 throughout the 21c Durham gallery spaces, feature a thematic group exhibition of 67 multi-media artworks by 40 artists from across the globe exploring the evolution of industry and labor in the 21st century and a two-person exhibition of paintings by Atlanta-based artist Xavier Daniels and Toronto-based artist Natia Lemay.
Both exhibitions will open to the public with a reception on Thursday, June 12, 2025 from 6pm to 8pm. An introduction to Labor & Materials by 21c Chief Curator Alice Gray Stites will be followed by a presentation about The Intuitionist with guest curator Charles Moore, PhD at 6:30 pm.
This event is free and open to the public. Cash bar and light bites will be provided by Counting House.
ABOUT LABOR & MATERIALS
Exploring the evolution of industry in the 21st century, Labor & Materials presents a precarious balance between promise and peril. Economists describe the explosion of radically new platforms and products emerging in the digital age as an inflection point: a time in human history when how we live and work is utterly transformed. What does an inflection point look like? How will the transformation of commerce and consumption affect access to goods and jobs, to information and infrastructure? Given the widespread changes generated by the COVID-19 pandemic, how work is now experienced, defined, and valued has become increasingly complex and contradictory.
From photographs of today’s living and working conditions by Katrin Korfmann, Alejandro Cartagena, and Pieter Hugo; to portraits of those laboring in 21st-century fields, homes, factories, and mines by Lina Puerta, Narsiso Martinez, Pierre Gonnord, Serge Alain Nitegeka, and Jay Lynn Gomez; to fantastical visions of a world defined by data and digitization by, Karine Giboulo, Chen Jiagang, and Gonzalo Lebrija, the imagery on view is both nostalgic and futuristic.
“As today’s primary means of production, the computer, becomes better, faster, stronger every day, more material and digital goods are made, shipped, transmitted, used, reused, and discarded, evoking concerns about environmental degradation and socio-economic inequities,” says 21c Chief Curator Alice Gray Stites. Labor & Materials features works by Kara Walker, Vik Muniz, Lina Puerta, Pieter Hugo, Catherine Yass, Narsiso Martinez, Esmaa Mohamoud, Marina Zurkow, and many more.
ABOUT THE INTUITIONIST
New York-based independent curator Charles Moore brings a new two-person exhibition to 21c Durham inspired by The Intuitionist, the acclaimed novel by Pulitzer Prize winning author Colson Whitehead, a fascinating, mysterious, and metaphorical story told through the eyes of an elevator inspector.
“In pairing the work of Xavier Daniels and Natia Lemay, each conjures charged, interior worlds where visibility and ascent are not merely physical acts but psychological imperatives,” says guest curator Moore. “Daniels renders Black masculinity with monumental tenderness, layering color and form to press into the threshold where vulnerability meets myth. His figures emerge and recede, suspended between assertion and disappearance, their emotional topographies haunted by systems that ask them to be strong and silent. In contrast and complement, Lemay builds spaces of mourning and reconstitution, where darkness becomes a site of becoming. Her use of black, pigment, presence, and philosophy refuses to resolve, instead asking us to dwell in ambiguity, to feel our way through histories that have been erased or distorted.
Together, drawing on the underpinnings of The Intuitionist, their works trace the architecture of identity as something climbed, navigated, and endured. Each canvas and sculptural gesture empowers personhood, where memory and language break down at the edges of what can be expressed. Daniels and Lemay engage parallel strategies of disruption and reassembly, rendering Blackness not as a static image but as a living, evolving interiority. In doing so, they remind us that perception is never neutral. It is shaped by who is looking, by what remains hidden, and by how we are trained to see. These are not simply portraits or objects. They are evidence. Of feeling. Of refusal. Of intuition as a radical form of knowing.”
