“Folks at Intimate Play” by SHAN Wallace | Closing Reception + Artist Talk

Current Space is proud to present:
“Folks at Intimate Play,” an exhibition of works by SHAN Wallace

Please join us for the Closing Reception & Artist Talk for both this exhibition and “Katey and Jessie” by Jessie and Katey (on view in the Project Space).

The reception is from 3-6pm, with talks starting at 4pm.

Exhibition Duration: Sept 25 – Nov 7, 2026
Opening Reception: Friday, Sept 25 from 7-10pm
Closing Reception & Artist Talk: Saturday, Nov 7, 3-6pm
Gallery Hours: Saturdays from 1-5pm, during public events, or by appointment

“Folks at Intimate Play” is a site of camaraderie where folklore, eroticism, and play operate as forms of perseverance and communal rites. Through collage, video, sculpture, and printmaking practices including; intaglio, monotype, and lithography, I engage and memorialize inherited Black traditions: vernacular language and forms, duplicity and contradiction, conundrums and curses, eroticism, magic, and local lore. The works materialize from an interest and participation in how Black folk tradition and tragedy transforms through play, wit, performance, and invention.

This exhibition considers folklore and tradition as a temporal and spatial articulation of memory, ritual, and eroticism—something lived, performed, and passed between bodies, memory, play, and place. Here, play is not separate from grief, labor, desire, or ritual, but intertwined with them. Humor, eroticism, and storytelling become strategies of endurance, intimacy, and defiance.

“Folks at Intimate Play” moves between personal and communal memory, drawing from inherited beliefs, rites, sayings, gestures, stories, and improvised forms of knowing. The exhibition extends an invitation into my formal and informal curiosities surrounding the presence of eroticism within play, and play within eroticism. In doing so, the works ask how pleasure, myth, contradiction, and folk expression continue to shape Black folk life and collective imagination.

SHAN Wallace (b. 1991) is a nomadic award-winning interdisciplinary artist, archivist, and image-maker, from Baltimore, MD. Wallace utilizes a range of mediums to weave narratives and imagine new stories. Rooted in image-making techniques such as photography, film, and collage, as well as in situ installations, these mediums serve as the foundation of her artistic practice.

She has exhibited work internationally in galleries and museums, including The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles, CA, Elsewhere Museum in Greensboro, NC, The New Gallery of Modern Art in Charlotte, NC, Maryland’s Reginald F. Lewis Museum, The Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, Gavlak Gallery Los Angeles, The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C., August Wilson Center in Pittsburgh, Mehari Sequar Gallery in Washington D.C., The Museum of Contemporary African Diaspora Arts in New York, Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Flxst Contemporary in Chicago, IL, Prince George’s African American Museum, The Peale Center in Baltimore, MD, and NXTHVN in New Haven, CT,.

Her work is held in both public and private collections across the U.S., including The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Mint Museum, The Whitney Museum, and Johns Hopkins University, as well as various private collections.

SHAN lives and works in many spaces between Brooklyn, New York and Baltimore, MD.

Select publications and clients: The New York Times, Apple, Google, Essence, Vanity Fair, Calvin Klein, Vogue, Hypebeast, The Washington Post, Charlotte Observer, Trace Media, The Cut True Laurels, Baltimore Magazine, Huck Magazine, the Baltimore Beat, Vogue Italia, The Baltimore Banner, MotherJones, ItsNiceThat, V Magazine, Paper Magazine, Photograph Mag, CNN, The Architect’s Newspaper, The Charlotte Post, and Dazed Magazine.