EXPO CHICAGO 2026

April 9 -April 12

Profile Section - Booth 313

Jova Lynne: Red

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Matéria is pleased to present at the 13th edition of EXPO CHICAGO, taking place on April 9–12, 2026 at Navy Pier's Festival Hall. 



Highlights of the 2026 edition include a major partnership with the forthcoming Obama Presidential Center, with dedicated sections curated by its Director, Dr. Louise Bernard; Focus, the emerging galleries section curated by Katie A. Pfohl of the Detroit Institute of Arts; Profile featuring solo booths and focused projects by established international galleries, curated by Essence Harden; and a continued collaboration with the Galleries Association of Korea (GAoK).

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For EXPO CHICAGO 2026, Matéria is bringing together a special installation of new works by Detroit-based multidisciplinary artist Jova Lynne. The solo presentation focuses on the artist’s recent explorations of the language of color, where color is seen as producing meaning, rather than merely representing it.

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Lynne uses photography, sculpture, and installation, drawing from Caribbean diasporic experience, material culture, and Black musical traditions to examine how histories are recorded, mythologized, and passed on. The artist treats primary colors as foundational sources—much like rhythm and tone in jazz, where repetition, improvisation, and subtle shifts create new emotional and historical registers. Red emerges as a generative force. Often coded as alarm or anger, red is reconsidered here as a site of vitality, joy, and insistence.

 

Lynne draws from figures such as Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, and Sun Ra, whose approaches to Black musical traditions transformed sound into a vessel for memory, resistance, and cosmological imagination. Holiday’s voice—marked by its intimate phrasing and emotional gravity—transformed the jazz standard into a site of testimony, most notably in performances like Strange Fruit, where music became a form of historical witnessing. Like musical tones that linger and overlap, memories and histories persist through repeated encounters, shaping perception long after their point of origin. And in this work color is treated not as surface, but as an energetic condition—something that travels, accumulates, and reverberates over time. Red becomes a living language shaped by time, sound, and vibration—activated through presence, attention, and return.

 

In Red, Lynne invites us to reflect on the shifting relationship between self, lineage, and collective memory. 

 

Matéria will share the booth space with gallery Third Born, from Mexico City, who will be presenting work by artist Sidony O'Neal.