Carole Harris and Jova Lynne: 

Conversations in Color

January 24 - March 7, 2026

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Opening Reception: Saturday, January 24, 5-7 pm

At Matéria Eastern Market (1343 E. Fisher Freeway)

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Matéria is pleased to present Conversations in Color, a two-person exhibition of new works by Detroit fiber artist Carole Harris and Detroit-based multidisciplinary artist Jova Lynne. The project also marks Matéria’s first activation at Detroit’s historic Eastern Market.

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Conversations in Color brings together the visual reflections of two black women of different generations practicing in the city of Detroit today, investigating ideas of memory, embodiment and identity through different subjects and mediums, both using color as their emotional center.

 

Harris’ work focuses on the impact of time and memory, through the investigation of their effects on materials. Her work celebrates the beauty in the frayed, the decaying and the repaired. She aims to capture the patina of color softened by time, place and memory, as well as feature the nicks, scratches, scars and other marks left by nature or humans on constructed and natural surfaces. The creative layering of multiple materials and marks are evocative of the generational layers of memory, time, place and people in cloth and paper.

 

Jova Lynne’s works in Conversations in Color are part of A Key of Blue, a new series within Lynne’s Mitosis project, extending her ongoing investigation into color theory as a language of power, perception, and possibility. Lynne approaches color not only as a formal device but as a conceptual framework—how hues shape emotion, identity, and systems of meaning. Blue, in particular, carries contradictions: tranquility and infinity, yet historically associated with distance, detachment, and control. In pigment history, blue was once rare and sacred—ultramarine extracted through exploitative labor—while in scientific discourse, blue wavelengths marked discovery, charting oceans and skies as new frontiers of dominance.

 

In this series, blue is reimagined as a key—a passage to embodiment and self-determination. Drawing from the Lady in Blue in Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem for colored girls, Lynne channels her incantatory cadence and reclamation of “stuff” as a metaphor for autonomy. Here, blue becomes a vibration, a ritual, a refusal of containment.



This chromatic inquiry also engages Lynne’s ongoing research into the legacies of medical science and its impact on Black life—histories that have too often reduced the body to data, measurement, and hierarchy. Where eugenic frameworks once sought to categorize and control life through charts and color-coded systems, this work turns to color as a language of freedom rather than constraint. Blue becomes an act of reclamation—an answer to the clinical gaze—with each image offering a space where the body is not objectified but honored as presence, rhythm, and depth.

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Conversations in Color opens to the public on Saturday, January 24, with a reception with the artists from 5 pm to 7 pm at Matéria's new activation at Detroit's historic Eastern Market and will be on view through March 7, 2026.

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