Portals of Remembrance

The Art Academy of Cincinnati (AAC) invites the public to experience Portals of Remembrance, a mixed media exhibition by Cincinnati-based artist Trudy Gaba, on view August 28 through September 20, 2026, in AAC’s Pearlman and McClure Galleries. An opening reception will be held during Final Friday on August 28 from 5:00–8:00 p.m.

In Portals of Remembrance, Gaba draws from Black ancestral archives scattered across countries, continents, and generations. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century photographs, census records, newspaper articles, mug shots, letters, and images from the artist’s own family archives—spanning Monrovia, Liberia, to Birmingham, Alabama—are layered and reassembled into works in which time, history, place, and people exist simultaneously.

The creation of the work also draws upon Cincinnati’s community resources. Gaba utilized the Makerspace at the Cincinnati & Hamilton County Public Library as part of her creative process, transforming archival source material through contemporary tools and methods to build the layered works presented in the exhibition.

Gaba describes the exhibition as a body of work “incubated in a Black hole deep within the cosmos,” a space where infinite possibilities coexist and timelines become threads woven together like a quilt. Inspired in part by Nikki Giovanni’s comparison of the Middle Passage to a journey to Mars, Gaba considers how Black people carried across unfamiliar and hostile landscapes transformed those spaces, creating life, culture, community, and possibility.

Rather than approaching the archive through absence, Portals of Remembrance emerges from abundance. Gaba queers the archive, allowing histories to remain unfixed and fluid while bringing personal, familial, and collective memory into conversation. Through collage, disparate images collide and converge, creating portals between past, present, and imagined futures.

Trudy Gaba (b. 1988, Atlanta, GA) is a Black American artist currently living and working in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her practice explores power, identity, colonialism, and futurism, with a particular fascination with historic and contemporary photography of Black subjects. Her work brings into sharp focus people and communities positioned on the margins of society while weaving together her work as an artist, historian, and curator.

Collage serves as a central vehicle for Gaba’s world-building. Through the layering and manipulation of disparate images, she creates new narratives and new worlds—a continuity through collision.

Portals of Remembrance is free and open to the public.

For more information visit www.artacademy.edu/events

ABOUT THE ART ACADEMY OF CINCINNATI

Art Academy of Cincinnati, established in 1869, is an independent college of art and design. Degrees granted are the Associate of Science in Graphic Design; the Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, Design, Illustration, Painting and Drawing, Photography, Print Media, Digital Arts Animation and Sculpture; and the Master of Arts in Art Education. Accredited by the National Association of Schools of Art and Design (NASAD), the Art Academy is a charter member of both NASAD and the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design. The AAC is also accredited by the Higher Learning Commission and is a member of the Strategic Ohio Council for Higher Education. The AAC’s mission is to create and sustain radical, forward thinking, contemporary visual artists and designers whose creative contributions make a substantial difference in all the lives they touch.

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