the street is our gallery

April 12, 2025 to May 24, 2025

Richard Beavers Gallery is pleased to present THE WEIGHT OF JOY a solo exhibition by artist Desmond Beach this will be the artist first showing with the gallery.

We survived to tell the tale. That is the testament echoing within the work of Desmond Beach. Intuitively braiding together textiles and ancestral remembrance, he creates spaces for joy, healing, and reclamation of the Black experience. His work emerges from a space both intimate and monumental, where threads, drawings, and archival imagery become vessels of memory and resilience. These tapestries, simultaneously tender, immense, and evocative, invite us to consider the radical act of remembering as a form of resistance, where recalling collective traumas becomes not an opening of a wound, but an offering of restoration. Within these works, softness and strength coexist, drawing upon the legacy of Black textile traditions to shelter and honor the stories embedded in each stitch of our own histories.

Beach’s practice is rooted in the deep currents of history and community, originating from his own experiences growing up on the West Side of Baltimore and maturing as an artist amid the challenges and revelations of adulthood. His works resonate with the persistent themes of Black identity and the navigation of systemic violence, but they have evolved from expressions of anger and protest to manifestations of solace and solidarity.