New Forms: that which constitutes (critical) matter foregrounds the relationship between material, making, representation, interpretation, radical aesthetic, regeneration, and intellectual imaginings. The exhibition centers alternative forms of art-making and conceptual practices that subvert perception, revealing the undercurrents of historical discourse, as it endeavors to transform or modify materials from artists’ environment to concepts and substances that ground them. By creating outside the limitations of representational “accuracy,” these cross-disciplinary practices turn to the potentiality of abstract or conceptual approaches in materializing Black life, building something that intentionally occupies space, and positions the act of worldmaking futures within the artists’ hands. Grounded by Samara Apanke and Huey Copeland’s articulation of the “mattering of blackness itself” as a means of employing opacity, fluidity, and historicization through conceptual and material choices, Rebecca Bair, Shaurie Bidot, eva birhanu, Charles Campbell, Kim Dacres, Chantal Gibson, Chiedza Pasipandoya, and Jan Wade work across sculpture, textile, painting, mixed media, and found object, emerging a collective yet distinct reading of aesthetic autonomy and Black inhabitation. The exhibit examines form as a paradigm through which epistemologies are unraveled, renegotiated and rearticulated. How might practices that reach beyond the constraints of figurative, socio-political and cultural recognition express new meanings and new inquiries into the conditions that inform Black experiences? What constitutes the matter of Black life?