Nafís M. White transforms commonplace objects and materials into works of profound aesthetic and cultural resonance. Her Providence studio, filled with raw materials, emanates creative energy—like an art lab for unquantifiable experiments. Colorful Oculus sculptures hang on the walls, their braids and coils dynamically winding and undulating into circular shapes in an array of vivid colors. Overhead, a brilliant cluster of bejeweled running shoes dangle by their tied laces from a large ceiling pipe like a sparkling constellation, evoking the urban practice of shoe-tossing. Around the room, various unlikely materials await alteration: plastic bins of Black hair stacked from floor to ceiling, a large table with glass jars of licorice, small piles of oyster shells, ornate silver vessels, and rows of small black ceramic disks fresh from the kiln. Just as a poet selects words to make a poem, White pulls from these raw elements to make her sculptures. Her lexicon is the cultural significance of objects, her “poetry” a celebration of Black life and identity through a creative process not of lamentation and suffering, but of exuberance and acknowledgment.
This celebratory spirit permeates her studio. Seated on a velvet couch during my visit, I watch as White settles on the sofa across from me and draws a card from her Oblique Strategies deck and lays it on the coffee table between us. Created in 1975 by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, the deck offers prompts to help artists overcome creative blocks—Eno famously used it while producing albums for David Bowie and the Talking Heads. By chance, White frequently draws the same card, and today is no different: “Repetition is a form of change.”
The card’s wisdom—that new perspectives can emerge from repeating an activity or technique—illuminates White’s practice, particularly her Oculus sculptures. Drawing on her diverse background of African American, African, English, Scottish, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Jewish biological, adoptive, and chosen families, White blends Black hairstyling techniques—braiding, weaving, and beading—with Victorian memento mori hair weaving practices like coiling to create sculptures that she calls “Afro-Victorian.” With vibrant colors, coiled braids, and hyacinth elements, these works—ranging from one to six feet in diameter—pulse with life, engaging viewers in unexpected ways. Through repetitive techniques and evolving forms, each Oculus is unique, embodying Eno’s paradox.
These sculptures raise ideas far beyond their physical forms. Using the same techniques that the Victorians employed for treasured locks, but with Black hair, White suggests Black hair deserves equal reverence. Much larger and more colorful than Victorian hair jewelry, the Oculus works command attention as contemporary sculpture while celebrating the vibrancy and joy of Black life. Created not from mourning but from unadulterated ebullience, they function as their name suggests—not as wounds on the wall, but as windows or, in the artist’s words, “portals.”
Beyond their metaphorical power, the Oculus worksalso speak through their materials and process. Exhibition labels reveal the poetic materials list: “Black hair, Embodied Knowledge, Ancestral Recall, the Audacity of Survival, and bobby pins.” These words inform us that White uses only bobby pins to construct her sculptures and that, while unplanned, each work draws on a reservoir of knowledge acquired from lived experience. Above all, these works remind viewers of the boldness it takes to claim space for Black people, identities, and cultures.
This claim on space is especially powerful when the material itself becomes the message. Like other contemporary artists such as Mickalene Thomas, whose collages honor her mother through carefully chosen materials, White understands that content and material are inseparable. The Oculus works insist that Black hair, styling, and beauty products are not only worthy of preservation, but also deserve to become fine art exhibited in museums and galleries, where, as White has explained, they were “never imagined to take up space and esteem.” As museums reckon with colonial legacies and institutional racism, White’s work reframes and reclaims these spaces for Black narratives.
The durability of hair further reinforces White’s cultural arguments. Impervious to decay, it becomes an apt medium for asserting permanence and strength. This choice carries historical weight: as sociologist Orlando Patterson explained in Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (1982), white enslavers cut the hair of enslaved Africans in a cruel attempt to obliterate their humanity, identity, and culture. More recently, racism and cultural erasure have taken the form of discrimination against Black hair textures and styles, prompting passage of CROWN Acts, which protect against such discrimination, in some American states. Against this backdrop of historical and contemporary violence and erasure, the Oculus works become acts of defiance and affirmation, connecting with viewers on visual, spiritual, and intellectual levels simultaneously.
Engagement and connection form an essential part of White’s practice, which extends beyond individual studio work and the traditional display of art to foster collective and participatory experience. As she has written: “Community is my anchor, and building with others is my passion.” For her 2023 installation All In, After Tony Feher at the Contemporary Arts Center in Providence, White invited community volunteers to help construct the work. Laying out thousands of hair bobbles, she asked her collaborators to spread the colorful plastic orbs into a 12-foot-wide circle on the floor over which she placed prisms. In the naturally lit gallery, the circular sculpture was illuminated like a stained-glass window. Refracting light, the bobbles and prisms projected shapes and rainbows onto the white walls. Radiant with memory and light, All In evoked childhood hair rituals—relatable to anyone who has ever styled or seen hair worn in ponytails and braids. Transforming personal history into shared recollection, the installation offered another circular portal into memory, into a collective and amplified experience of girlhood. On the final day of the exhibition, White invited visitors to take the bobbles and prisms home, dissolving boundaries between artist and audience, between artwork and life. In this manner, members of the community helped make and unmake the work, completing the life cycle of the installation.
White continued this participatory approach with Self Portrait, an installation at San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora in 2024, in which she covered a 12-foot-long table with elegant jars of black licorice from around the world. Visitors, provided with customized menus and silver tongs, were asked to taste licorice from various jars. Some were sweet or unexpectedly salty or spicy. This multisensory portrait challenged monolithic assumptions of Black female identity and offered an intimate experience of cultural complexity. While functioning as a metaphor for the artist’s body or self, the licorice brought its own cultural and historical associations to bear on the work. Cultivated from the Glycyrrhiza glabra plant in the Middle East, Asia, and the Mediterranean, licorice was traded in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. It was used for medicine, rituals, and ceremonies and, by the 18th century, consumed as candy. In this context, the licorice of Self Portrait serves as a powerful metaphor for globalism and trade, reinforcing how material and meaning converge in White’s practice.
In another recent installation, White turned her attention from personal narrative to historical tribute. Bernoon’s Fountain (2023) honors Emmanuel Bernoon, a formerly enslaved Black man who became a successful entrepreneur in 18th-century Providence. While the title nods to a Victorian drinking fountain in England, the work celebrates Bernoon’s upscale oyster and ale house. Using locally sourced oyster shells, Gorham silver (made in Providence), Swarovski crystals, gold leaf, and English teacups, White created a sculptural installation that activated the gallery walls with tilting mismatched teacups and saucers, gilded oysters, strands of pearls, decorative silver vessels, and “deified oysters” on gold platters recalling halos in medieval paintings or adornment and devotional items from ancient Egypt and Nubia. The dynamic cascade conjured an off-kilter banquet—“like the Mad Hatter’s tea party,” White explains—capturing the liveliness of Bernoon’s oyster house, its tabletops, and guests. The gilded oysters symbolize “humble riches,” while the pearls spilling from them recall the transformative pressure that creates beauty—sand into pearl, hardship into enterprise, adversity into art.
Like an oyster protecting itself by making a pearl, the theme of survival in White’s sculptures is addressed through growth. With no beginnings or ends, her circular sculptures embody endless movement and resilience. Repetition in White’s practice is never static; it is, as Eno suggested, a form of change—an act of cultural recovery, reinvention, and joy.
White’s work is on view in “Guiding Ethos,” curated by Jennie Gao, at the Trout Museum of Art in Appleton, Wisconsin, through January 18, 2026.
