DETROIT: LAKELA BROWN & MARIO MOORE

Beneath Our Feet

May 31 - July 30, 2025

LIBRARY STREET COLLECTIVE
1260 Library Street
Detroit, MI

LaKela Brown and Mario Moore Unearth Layers of History and Value in Beneath Our Feet

Now on view at Library Street Collective through July 30, 2025, Beneath Our Feet brings together Detroit-born artists LaKela Brown and Mario Moore in a powerful two-person exhibition exploring land, labor, and legacy. Through sculpture and painting, the artists examine how land shapes identity and agency, and who holds the right to narrate its meaning.

Brown’s sculptural reliefs blend the visual languages of ancient storytelling and 1990s hip-hop culture, reclaiming personal and cultural symbols often excluded from traditional art history. Moore’s paintings, rich with diasporic symbolism and inspired by Dutch devotional still life, elevate everyday objects to icons of Black resilience and self-determination.

At the exhibition’s center is The Smoke Coin, a monumental bronze bas-relief collaboratively created by the artists—one side bearing a portrait of Brown by Moore, the other a bouquet of collard greens sculpted by Brown. Together, it becomes a meditation on value, representation, and care.

Beneath Our Feet invites viewers to rethink what lies below the surface—of land, of history, and of ourselves—and to imagine new systems of worth rooted in community and shared inheritance.

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