Hair Is the Garden We Wear™ Curated by Tzu Poré

Collectors are invited into a space where material intelligence and lived experience converge. The works in HGWW examine themes of ancestral technologies, adornment as cosmology, the body as landscape, and the politics of care, offering a contemporary lens on how Black communities cultivate, protect, and transmit knowledge.

Featuring new and recent works by Yvette Rock, Lisa Anderson, Geoffrey “Geo” Edwards, Nia Crutcher, Henton Stinson, Ari Green, and Tzu Poré, this exhibition extends the canon through practices that honor lineage while imagining new futures.

HGWW is presented by EMB Contemporary Collective, a Detroit‑based platform supporting artists who carry cultural memory forward with rigor, vision, and ceremonial pride.

Y‑Arts at the Boll Family YMCA · CCS Alumni Detroit · Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan
Your partnership strengthens the public visibility and institutional credibility of this project. You extend the reach of HGWW and affirm its place within Detroit’s contemporary cultural landscape.

The Germaine Project (TGP) · Just Because We Care (JBWC) · SHFT
Your solidarity and devotion to collective uplift hold the fabric of our community together. You embody the shared responsibility of tending what has been overlooked, uprooted, or forgotten.

Barber Station – Detroit · Evolve Style Studio – Grosse Pointe Woods
Authenticity is a hallmark of credibility. The support of minority‑owned businesses rooted in the very industries that cultivate, protect, and honor Black hair carries special weight. Your endorsement affirms the lived, embodied subject of this fine‑art exhibition: Hair Is The Garden We Wear™.

A meditation on the tension, power, and lineage carried in Black hair. Rock anchors her own shed locs into a field of black and gold, confronting the violations placed on our hair while affirming its sovereignty as archive, evidence, and inheritance—flowing into glory.

A cartography of the Diaspora rendered through texture, pattern, and ancestral memory. Nia Crutcher maps Black worlds in motion, treating hair as the connective terrain that binds continents, stories, and lineages into a single living geography.

Edwards shapes clay as ancestral record, carving a profile that rises from the vessel like memory surfacing through earth. The form echoes the labor, lineage, and spiritual technologies carried by Black hands, treating the pot as both container and testimony—an object where history is held, honored, and made present.

A vertical reckoning and remembrance, Totem threads the legacy of Greenwood into the HGWW cosmology—treating Black history, like Black hair, as living archive and ancestral evidence. Through fire, testimony, and celestial markers, Poré constructs a lineage‑tower that confronts erasure while honoring the resilience that shapes our cultural inheritance. Loaned from the collection of Gerald Ashby, the work stands as a charged pillar within the exhibition’s exploration of memory, sovereignty, and sacred design.

A record of Poré’s early mastery in symbolic design barbering, this archival feature marks the moment his precision, narrative instinct, and cultural craftsmanship entered public view. Within HGWW, the piece stands as evidence of the lineage that informs his fine‑art practice—hair as canvas, story, and ancestral technology—long before it expanded into mixed‑media, land‑based, and curatorial forms.

A civic acknowledgment of Poré’s cultural stewardship, this award stands as evidence of the lineage that shapes his practice—where art, hair, and community care operate as interconnected systems of design. Within HGWW, it marks the public recognition of a lifelong commitment to cultivating Black cultural memory and expanding Detroit’s contemporary art landscape.

A recent institutional articulation of the HGWW pedagogy, this poster documents last October’s public program presented through the University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities—an ongoing promotional ally of the project. The program affirmed Black hair as archive, cosmology, and cultural technology, grounding the exhibition’s contemporary fine‑art framework in active scholarship and community dialogue.

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Host or Publisher Tzu Poré – Curator –EMB Contemporary Collective