Art, Earth, and Soul at the YMI: What Belonging Looks Like When No One Is in Charge
- Mar 10
- 5 min read
by AG Staff
In Asheville, conversations about race, belonging, and place rarely stay abstract for long. They show up in church basements, family cemeteries, and in the quiet geometry of neighborhoods where new houses seem to turn their backs on the communities that were already there.
The exhibition Art Earth and Soul Kollective, now on view at the YMI Cultural Center, begins from that lived reality. On paper, it is a multidisciplinary exhibition bringing together artists, performers, theologians, and scholars. In practice, it is the public-facing chapter of a decade-long collaboration among pastors and academics who have been asking a deceptively simple question about race and religion.
“How do well-intentioned practices of the church reinscribe racial regimes rather than disrupting them, and what can we do about that?”
That question guided a group of collaborators, including Kameron Carter (UC Irvine), Donyelle McCray (Yale Divinity School), Mark Ramsey (Executive Director of The Ministry Collaborative), Jemonde Taylor (Rector at St. Ambrose Episcopal Church in Raleigh), and Denise Thorpe (Presbyterian pastor and independent scholar).
Artists were not part of the project when it began.
Over time, the group realized that race was not simply an idea to be studied but something lived through the body and the built environment. As they describe it, “race is far more than an idea—it is a way of being that is patterned and imprinted sensorially: through space, materiality, and our senses.”
If you want to understand race, you have to pay attention to the way space feels.
Artists, they concluded, were the people best equipped to help explore that.
The collaboration slowly grew outward from theological conversation into a broader cultural project. Over nearly a decade the group met, talked, and traveled. Asheville became one of the places that shaped their thinking most deeply.
One of those places was Calvary Presbyterian Church in the East End, where the group spent time observing how the neighborhood was changing. What they noticed there felt like a quiet metaphor for a larger story.
“When we first encountered Calvary, East End was at the beginning of a process of land being purchased, homes torn down, and new, large homes being built,” the curators explain. “Something that really struck us is that the new houses were positioned to point away from the East End community.”
Other locations became part of the conversation too. The cemetery at St. John ‘A’ Baptist Church, where unmarked graves remain. Neighborhoods across Black Asheville whose histories are slowly being eroded or repackaged as cultural backdrop.
The project eventually received major support from the Henry Luce Foundation, which funds initiatives that deepen public understanding and support cultural dialogue. The curators say the project would not exist without that support and the flexibility that came with it.
“This simply would not have happened without Luce’s support,” they say.
Originally the group planned to produce a documentary film about what they had experienced together in Asheville. The working title was In the Basement, inspired by the basement of Calvary Presbyterian Church. The space has served as a tuberculosis sanitarium for Black patients, a school for neighborhood children, and a shelter for unhoused people.
But after COVID the idea of a film began to feel too tidy.
A film would tell the story. It would shape the narrative. The group began to suspect the real work was not storytelling but gathering.
Instead they invited artists into the conversation.
The result was a gathering of artists in Asheville in 2024 that the curators describe less like a symposium and more like an improvisational ensemble. Kameron “Jay” Carter describes the collaboration as “the ensemble,” like a jazz ensemble where different voices step forward at different moments to riff on the conversation.
The exhibition that emerged from that process reflects that improvisational spirit. Visitors encounter paintings, film, dance, sound, photography, textile work, and installation pieces layered throughout the YMI.
Among the works included are a play by Amina McIntyre centered on several Asheville sites that shaped the project, a dance by choreographer LaShaun Dodds performed by young dancers from Atlanta, and paintings by artists including Jasmine Green and Derrick Beasley.
Green’s painting celebrates a moment of Black joy that unfolded late one night at a Waffle House when artists from the project gathered together during the Asheville convening. Beasley’s work depicts a figure emerging from earth and water that is both inviting and confrontational.
The exhibition is intentionally immersive.
“The exhibit is immersive in that it draws on many of the senses,” the curators explain, citing spatial design, sound, film, photography, fabric work, and movement.
The setting matters too.
The show is installed inside the YMI Cultural Center, one of the oldest Black cultural institutions in the country and the historic anchor of Asheville’s once thriving Black business district along Eagle Street.
“The space of YMI itself is probably the biggest force in shaping this exhibit,” the curators say.
The project changed course again after Hurricane Helene devastated Western North Carolina. Rather than simply bringing in outside artists, the collaborators expanded the exhibition to include more Asheville artists and conversations with local creatives. Funding originally intended for a digital platform was redirected to support those commissions and convenings.
The result is a project that feels less like a finished exhibition and more like an ongoing experiment in community.
For the curators, the word belonging is not a tidy institutional value statement. It is something messier and slower, built through trust and vulnerability.
“For our grant group, belonging has meant being knitted together in trust and love and challenge,” they say.
One artist who attended the project’s Asheville gathering described it as the safest space she had ever experienced as an artist. That response still surprises the curators, who say people often comment on the joy and laughter that emerges when the group gathers.
The work is not naïve about the moment we are living in.
The curators describe the present as defined by tensions between fear and hope. Communities they have been learning from feel increasingly under threat.
“Many of the communities from which we have been seeking to learn are under threat right now,” they say. “Is being open and welcoming wise for those communities? Or is it wiser for them to hunker down and protect the treasures they are stewarding?”
The exhibition does not offer answers.
Instead the group describes their work as an “art of convening.” They create spaces where people can explore new ways of being together without trying to control the outcome.
Faith becomes less about doctrine and more about imagination.
“We are trying to practice faith as an invitation to join a party that is shaping all of us,” they say.
The exhibition remains on view at the YMI Cultural Center through March 20, with a closing reception and live performance scheduled for Saturday, March 14 from 5 to 9 p.m. The evening will bring together artists, collaborators, and community members for a gathering that extends the spirit of the project.
When the exhibition closes, the curators do not hope visitors walk away with a single message.
They hope something quieter remains.
“What we hope lingers is a hunger for new ways of being together and trust and courage to take risks and explore that.”
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