Ragged Sanctuary: Black Lives Matter, COVID-19 and the Art of Hopeful Transcendence

May 2 - August 5, 2022

Engage with mixed-media artist, performer, and poet Deta Galloway’s immersive paintings. Experience musical recordings of songs created to accompany the art. Hear poetic musings to heal body and soul from past and present trauma.

About the Artist: Deta Galloway is a multi-media and multi-genre Boston-based artist who produces paintings, poems, and music that reflect her experience growing up in Jamaica, her work as a nurse and a healer, and her abiding faith in forces both seen and unseen.

“Ragged Sanctuary,” her first solo show at the Mary L. Fifield Art Gallery, features work that explores the darkness and trauma of the last two years while keeping an eye on the mystical strength and supernatural powers that surround us. “These are the forces that can help us. And you must become familiar with them and know that they will help us,” she says.

Many of Deta’s paintings are like portals – whole histories and narratives – and a form of visual storytelling and spiritual exploration. Given the difficulties of the COVID-19 pandemic and other events, “Ragged Sanctuary” functions as a place for healing – a place that, however battered and bruised and tattered, is a refuge and a home, as well as a place of power.

The show contains one of Deta’s shrines as well as multimedia presentations of her poetry and music. Her paintings reflect the evolution of her artistic practice to include iridescence as a medium – something that helps capture what she calls “the shimmering inside me.” This technique, she says, has helped her capture feelings of joy and light that persist despite the trauma of recent years.

Deta’s works have been featured nationally and internationally for nearly four decades, and she has been a warm and welcoming presence in previous BHCC exhibitions and events. Her live performances have been seen on festival stages, including the Indiana Women’s Music Festival, among others. Five of her watercolors were featured in a film on African American watercolors, 1866 to the present; these watercolors are now part of the Smithsonian’s collections.

Her works are in the holdings of the Danforth Art Museum, the Etheridge Knight Archives of Martin University, and the Northeastern University Archive, and have been collected by Kofi Kayiga, Taj Mahal, Arthur W. Clewes, Xavier Crenshaw, and Edmund Barry Gaither. She has exhibited at the Rose Art Museum of Brandeis University, the National Museum of Senegal, the Pao Arts Center in Boston’s Chinatown, Bunker Hill Community College, and the National Center for Afro-American Artists in Roxbury.

Her poems explore journeys, immigration, pandemics, and the strength of the natural world. She has been published in Stone Soup and other journals. A trip to Paris to attend the Bi-annual Conference of the Plastic Arts of the African Diaspora yielded an invitation to appear at the at the Sorbonne ‘s 100-year anniversary celebration of American poet Langston Hughes.

Deta Galloway was born in Kingston, Jamaica in the West Indies. She emigrated to America at age eighteen with an American husband. Upon his death, she was left widowed to raise a new daughter in a new homeland. She is educated in professional nursing, Human Services and Management, and specializes in Behavioral Nursing. She has lived and traveled in the U.S. South and lived for nearly two decades in Georgia before returning to the Boston area to reside.

Deta’s use of oils and acrylics was influenced by the paint mediums that her mother used in Jamaica. Her mother would boil plants to create a color, and she would add olive oil or other oils, and make what they called “inka” or a dye. Deta would mix lye and ashes from the fires and create whitewash. She drew with charcoal, only realizing later this was a medium one could buy. She also works in watercolors and began adding iridescence to her paintings a decade ago.

Deta began writing poetry at thirteen and has been published in several anthologies and journals. As a young mother and nurse, she met Gwendolyn Brooks, one of the most highly regarded, influential, and widely read poets of 20th-century American poetry and first Black author to win the Pulitzer Prize. Brooks encouraged Deta to do more readings of her work and to find a way to do less medicine and more poetry. “So even though I continued working to educate my daughter and make sure that she had some opportunities that in some ways I missed because of the early death of my very supportive husband and the transition of my career from wanting to become a psychiatrist to nursing, I held on very strongly to the art, no matter what,” Deta says.