Ann Street Gallery's Curated Reading List

In partnership with Safe Harbors' Ann Street Gallery, Golden Hour Books is pleased to offer titles from the Gallery's Curated Reading Lists to accompany each exhibition--books chosen by featured artists and cultural workers to inform and lend context to their work and the Gallery's exhibitions. Read more about their current exhibition:

The Destiny

...is to take root among the stars

March 15 - May 10, 2025
Free & Open to the public
Saturdays & Sundays 1:00 - 5:00 pm
& by appointment

Opening Reception
Saturday March 15, 6:00 - 8:00 pm

The exhibition is curated by guest curator Jaime Ransome and includes works by:

Destiny Arianna
Vernon Byron
Cy Hinojosa
Lala Montoya
Alisa Sikelianos-Carter
Tony Washington

Inspired by the prescient works of African American, feminist author, Octavia Butler, The Destiny is an exhibition of six BIPOC artists working in upstate New York. The exhibition examines concepts prevalent in Butler’s Parable of the Sower, which depicts imagined futures and recalls distant pasts through magical realism in a post-apocalyptic landscape. The novel reflects our fears about climate change, canonizes our futures as intelligent beings on a dying planet, and unearths the “essential human resources” that will be necessary for humans to inhabit - not colonize - a new world in space or on an unrecognizable Earth.

Artists Lala Montoya and Destiny Arianna illuminate stories of our Indigenous histories, imploring the audience to remember the parables of their families, for they have encrypted the codex for humanity’s success in their stories, rituals, and heirlooms. The works from artists Tony Washington and Vernon Byron resonate the tone of our present, warning about the correlation between rapid technological expansion and systematized dismantling of cultural collaboration. Alisa Sikelianos-Carter and Cy Hinojosa depict our paths to the future - our devolution if we seek no other home and our cosmic legacy if we return to the stars. 

Contributing to an evolving vision of Afro-Futurism, these works of painting, ceramics, video, mixed media, and installation exercise Butler’s theory that small groups of similarly motivated people can create great change. The Destiny acts as a blueprint for how to build something new and sustainable, especially during eras of devastation, hopelessness and fire. Butler finds hope in the idea that Earth is just a womb - just the beginning - and that only by radically reinventing our relationship to it by venturing outside it can our species truly be born, grow, and change. 

“All that you touch you Change. All that you Change Changes You. The only lasting truth is Change. God is Change.”
-Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower