Review: When is reflection not enough? On ‘Outside’ At Hawkins HQ

Outside, a group exhibition that serves as a homecoming of two Atlanta artists, debuted at the end of September at Hawkins HQ. Curated by Rosa Duffy, the exhibition brought Taylor Simmons and Gerald Lovell, two artists born in Atlanta and now living and working in New York, home to join Jurell Ceyetano in exploring the intersection of personal identity, memory and community — as stated in the exhibition text. The curatorial framing that Duffy presents is straightforward and aims to let the strong works speak for themselves. However I left Hawkins HQ with a lingering feeling that the exhibition had been moving toward something but stopped just a few steps short of reaching it. 

What I keep returning to in an attempt to satisfy this feeling that I can’t quite name is a line from the exhibition text: “Outside serves as an act of resistance during a time when Black folks face the counteract of being pushed underground. To be outside is to refuse erasure and to claim one’s right to exist in public, in community and on one’s own terms.”

Resistance. I left the show wondering: What exactly is being resisted? If it’s the White gaze, I struggle to see why three Black men led by a Black woman curator in a city known as the Black mecca would feel compelled to make work in response to White interpretations of Blackness. If that is the goal, then I question for whom this show was made.

If the goal is to challenge the onslaught of negative images in American visual culture, then Jurell Cayetano’s No Love Deep Web (2025) — a still life featuring weed, pills and a magnum condom on the armrest of a chair — and Gerald Lovell’s Mr. Gotitall Keeps it on Him (2025) — a painting of a Black hand pulling a bottle of Hennessy from a pocket — while fun, risk falling into stereotype and trope by propagating ideas of Black debauchery pushed by media and the American system, without having this conversation furthered with the inclusion of other pieces. In a show about Black identity and visibility, are drugs, a condom and alcohol present because the artists are Black, or are they Black because they participate in these things? Without additional pieces to further the conversation, these questions muddy the interpretation.

Looking more broadly for a thread tying these artists together, what I found was figuration. The history of figuration and Black identity is long — it is an essential tool to discuss and illustrate different facets of visibility in which figuration becomes visibility itself. During the Harlem Renaissance, figuration became a political tool to counter racist caricatures. By the ’90s, the politics of representation expanded not only how the Black body was seen but also how it was made. The artists in Outside clearly draw from this long history, both visually and thematically, but, again, I found myself wondering what exactly is being resisted? What is this exhibition trying to add to this history and ongoing conversation?

The exhibition’s framing seems to seek a tension between philosopher and scholar Édouard Glissant’s concept of the “right to opacity” with the act of insisting on presence — two distinct modes of freedom: freedom from visibility versus freedom through visibility. The right to opacity is the right to not be fully legible to others, and here it is attempted through figuration. To insist on one’s presence is to desire recognition — a declaration of wanting to be seen. This insistence on visibility is echoed in the exhibition text which states, “Outside signifies presence, visibility and participation, an assertion of one’s place in the world, especially in spaces where visibility is often denied.” This isn’t an impossible balance, but Outside — in attempting to showcase both at once — risks not doing enough of either. To its credit, the show works within the constraints of space and scope, yet those limits only heighten the need for every inclusion to sharpen the conversation.

I felt that Simmons’ work resonates the most with this duality. His figures hover between presence and disappearance. In paintings like World Round Me (2025), jazz legend and Guggenheim Fellow Charles Mingus takes center stage. A figure to the right of Mingus appears with skin hardening into brick, body pushed and pulled until near dissolution into the background: Blink and you’ll miss them. Frontin’ (2025) takes a similar approach, yet this time featuring more fully rendered faces. The leading figure faces the audience with his unconcerned gaze just enough to pose the question: Is he is looking past me or directly at me? 

Simmons’ use of collage layering oil, spray paint and image transfers creates an effect that simultaneously comes together and also destabilizes the plane. It is as if differing worlds fold in on themselves, each layer hoping to prove its existence — yearning to be seen through the one above it. His figures are pushed enough to obscure them, while their gazes confront the viewer, as in Last Time I Checked (2025).

Lovell’s work in the show, on the other hand, leans further into the right to opacity than an assertion of presence. His signature impasto peaks catch and scatter the light, obscuring facial features while maintaining a physical presence. In Lunatico (2025), the viewer is placed inside a jazz club, facing a quartet mid-performance. Lovell gives his White figures clarity while the Black brass player’s face is rendered in thick, valley-like strokes, ignoring specificity but honoring the way light plays across its surface.

Yet Lovell’s figures do not confront the viewer, intrude in space or assert themselves as directly as those of Kerry James Marshall or Titus Kaphar. This isn’t a critique on Lovell’s work but instead raises questions within the curatorial framing. It feels as though the conversation is half formed — a sentence instead of a paragraph. The show is scratching at the surface of that deeper tension that it never quite seems to reach.

The work of Cayetano, by contrast, leans completely into asserting presence. Working from his phone’s photo gallery, he embraces the camera’s natural distortion. Paintings like Forces (2025) and Sound Table (2025) reinterpret the idea of outside and this concept of uncertainty of Blackness in America and instead serves as documentation. In his works, he offers proof of an existence of uninhibited Blackness that takes up space and is unbothered by societal conventions and the impact of the White gaze. His figures are rendered smoothly; there’s a warmth to the figures’ skin and an application of paint that feels as if one is with him in person, recounting a memory by his side.

Even after sitting with the show I keep questioning: What is the final takeaway? Does Outside merely retrace the familiar conversations around Black visibility and resistance that we observe in Atlanta time and time again? The show gestures toward the dialogues between opacity and visibility, resistance and rest, but never quite pushes the bounds of any one position. The result is a reflection that’s striking but ultimately reads as too safe, too contained — a brushstroke that feels too broad for a conversation so complex. It mirrors our present conditions — Rosa Duffy’s curation and Hawkins HQ certainly accomplish that — but after the reflection fades, I’m left wishing for an exhibition that is able to imagine something beyond the mirror itself.

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Montenez Lowery is a multidisciplinary Black American artist working in Atlanta and utilizing pinhole photography to explore identity, cultural memory and the complexities of interpersonal relationships. Lowery is interested in photographic material and process and how they can be incorporated to enrich the themes he tackles. He has earned a BFA in photography from the Ernest G. Welch School of Art and Design at Georgia State University. He was awarded The Larry and Gwen Walker Award and shortlisted for the Sony World Photography Awards Student Competition.