APRIL 17 - MAY 24, 2025

Evening & Conversation with the Artist
Thursday, May 1st, 5 - 7 PM

SOCO Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Soil and Stars, a solo exhibition of new sculptures, masks, photographs, a large painting, and film by artist Allison Janae Hamilton. The gallery will host a public artist talk on Thursday, May 1st from 5:00 – 7:00 PM. Maya Brooks, the Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the North Carolina Museum of Art will join the artist in conversation. This will be Hamilton’s first solo exhibition with SOCO Gallery.

Soil and Stars includes works shaped by the artist’s cultural and personal history that connect to larger universal stories of the land and human life. Featuring floral-embellished fencing masks that activate an other-worldly gaze into the celestial landscapes of Hamilton’s oil painting, the exhibition provides an overview of how the artist’s various mediums all connect through time and place.

Included in the exhibition is Hamilton’s most recent film, Celestine (Florida Storm). Filmed in the terrains of Northern Florida, the work gazes up into the brilliance of the night sky, inviting viewers to sense the land laid out beneath them. The film's soundscape carries an operatic rendition of "Florida Storm," a hymn commemorating the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926. In response to the film’s meditation, Hamilton states, “You think about these histories of these natural disasters, and then combine those with these human-made disasters…how they land on top of each other, and how these storms are actually political things, and social things.”

While the artist has previously painted on wood and found objects, Toward the gates of Celestia represents her first works of oil on linen. The painting calls the viewer to the sky, where stars are abstracted into crosses in a range of blues, reds, blacks, and whites. The film and painting, in tandem, evoke the notion that the sky embodies a perpetual flow of time, highlighting the tension between the land and the celestial.

Included alongside the film and painting, are Hamilton’s photographs and vintage fencing masks, mediums both significant to her practice. Each mask is ornamented in varying materials — wooden flowers, upholstery tacks, and a rhinestone fringe. Inspired by an image of Black American WWII soldiers fencing, the masks began as props in her photographs and later became stand-alone artworks. They represent both the disruption of social hierarchy and a defense against societal expectation.

The artist’s deep connection to place comes from her past in Kentucky, Florida, and Tennessee. She leans into haunting and ancestral themes in her work, drawing on her experiences of Black womanhood and southern land. In Soil and Stars, Allison Janae Hamilton invites the viewer to traverse the parallel paths of the earth and the heavens, grounded and gazing upward.

Allison Janae Hamilton (b. 1984, Lexington, KY)

Born in Kentucky and raised in Florida, Hamilton also spent time at her maternal family’s farm and homestead in the rural flatlands of western Tennessee. Her relationship with these places forms the cornerstone of her practice—particularly her interest in landscape. In Hamilton’s treatment of land, the natural environment is the central protagonist, rather than a backdrop, in the unfolding of historic and contemporary narratives. Blending land-centered folklore and personal family narratives, she engages haunting—yet epic—mythologies that address the social and political concerns of today’s changing southern terrain, including land loss, environmental justice, climate change, and sustainability. Each work contains narratives that are pieced together from folktales, hunting and farming rituals, African-American nature writing, and Baptist hymns. Drawing from all of these references, she envisions what an epic myth looks and feels like in rural terrain.

Hamilton has exhibited widely across the United States and abroad. Her work has been the subject of institutional solo exhibitions at the Georgia Museum of Art, the Joslyn Art Museum, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), and Atlanta Contemporary, as well as a commissioned solo project with Creative Time. Her sculpture, Love is like the sea… (2023) is currently on view in the Poydras Corridor Sculpture Exhibition, presented by The Helis Foundation in New Orleans, LA. Hamilton was recently awarded the VIA Art Fund Grant for an upcoming film, Venus of Ossabaw. The film will be exhibited at the Telfair Museum, Savannah, GA, as part of the 2026 exhibition Off the Coast of Paradise: Ossabaw Island, Georgia, 1961–Now. Select recent group exhibitions include there is this We, Sculpture Milwaukee; The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (traveling); Shifting Horizons, Nevada Museum of Art; Enunciated Life, California African Art Museum; More, More, More, TANK Shanghai; and Indicators: Artists on Climate Change, Storm King Art Center. Work by the artist is held in public collections such as the Hood Museum of Art, The Menil Collection, Nasher Museum of Art, Nevada Museum of Art, and Speed Museum of Art, among others. Hamilton has participated in a range of fellowships and residencies, including at the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York, NY; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; and Fundación Botín, Santander, Spain. She is the recipient of the Creative Capital Award and the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant. Hamilton holds a PhD in American Studies from New York University and an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University. She lives and works in New York.