RICHMOND, VA.- The Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University presents three solo exhibitions of works by multidisciplinary artists Tony Cokes, Cassi Namoda and Diane Severin Nguyen, from September 18, 2026, to February 21, 2027, at the Markel Center.
The fall exhibitions include a survey of works created over more than three decades by Richmond-born Cokes, new site-specific commissions by the internationally recognized Namoda, and a sonic installation piece by Severin Nguyen, all of whom are recognized for distinctive practices that span film, photography, painting, sculpture, installation and performance.
Tony Cokes: Texts, Tracks, Talks (1992 - 2026) is a survey of Richmond native Tony Cokes (b. 1956, Richmond, Virginia), who creates politically charged works that reveal ideologies in popular culture, addressing structural racism, power, and visibility. The exhibition brings together two bodies of work that move in parallel, occasionally colliding: Cokes’s talks and lectures, and his word portraits. The exhibition traces Cokes’s sustained commitment to the video essay as a form for conveying ideas and unsettling the very act of reading.
Since the early 1990s, Cokes’s video essays have increasingly pared away the image. Early works incorporated filmed footage; over time, imagery thinned, then receded entirely, leaving fields of saturated color, scrolling text, and engineered sound. The image lingers as residue and as memory. In The Book of Love, that residue takes the form of the artist’s late mother, an image both intimate and untouchable. And although music does not feature in this seminal word portrait, sound remains one of the most persistent aspects of the artist’s work. Cokes is often described by scholars and curators as a DJ who employs dubbing, sampling, and remixing—core strategies within Black musical production.
His tightly choreographed video essays sample and remix fragments from the media landscape—layering found text over vibrant colors and carefully selected soundtracks—to draw attention to the ways information is consumed and encourage deeper reflection.
At the center of the exhibition is a newly commissioned work Against Monumentality, 2026 on anti-monumentality, a line of inquiry that began when Cokes was a student in Richmond—a city long staged as a showroom for the nation’s most troubling monuments. In Against Monumentality, 2026, text and sound circulate around monuments that have been removed or no longer exist—both in the world and within the work itself. Cokes commits to impermanence, and editing becomes both method and ethic. The work refutes the monument’s claim to permanence and authority, challenging the desire to freeze history into stone.
Other works in the exhibition extend Cokes’s investment in the lecture as form. Words by the cultural theorist and Marxist philosopher Mark Fisher recur throughout. Lectures from Evil.13.5 (4 OE) feature Okwui Enwezor, whose curatorial practice reshaped contemporary art discourse by centering postcolonial and global perspectives, and Testament A: MF FKA K-P X KE RIP, which invokes Kodwo Eshun, whose writing and artistic work probe Black diasporic culture and expansive futures.
The exhibition concludes with Word Portraits, works that assemble sound and text to sketch figures through citation rather than likeness. Cultural icons such as Britney Spears, Kanye West, David Bowie, Paul Revere Williams, and Michael Jackson appear not as stable identities, but as constellations of language, rumor, and speculation, providing viewers with portraits that mirror the people and the media systems that produced them.
In 2024, Cokes was named a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellow, an honor bestowed on individuals who show exceptional creativity in their work, in recognition for “creating video works that recontextualize historical and cultural moments.” Texts, Tracks, Talks (1992 - 2026) marks his homecoming to Richmond and VCU’s School of the Arts, where he earned his MFA in sculpture in 1985.
The exhibition is curated by Amber Esseiva, Senior Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs.
Cassi Namoda: Life is the Seamstress of Dreams is the first institutional exhibition in the United States dedicated to the work of Cassi Namoda (b.1988, Maputo, Mozambique), whose paintings explore the culture, folklore, and mythologies of Mozambique across the nation’s colonial and postcolonial eras. Drawing on her childhood in Mozambique, Haiti, Indonesia, and New York, and years of extensive travel across continents and coastal cities, Namoda creates worlds that feel both intimate and expansive. Her paintings hover between the familiar and the fantastical, finding resonance in both the deeply personal and what might be collectively felt. Memory and daily life weave together across more than 20 paintings in the exhibition created between 2018 and 2026.
Life is the Seamstress of Dreams positions Namoda’s longtime interest in painting aspects of dreamt and waking life through a postcolonial African and lusophone prism and the lingering echoes of colonial histories that thread through lived experience. Through layered color, expressive gestural brushwork, and emotional charge, Namoda opens portals where memory takes on a living presence. Reality bends, histories resurface, and dreams offer new ways to reencounter the world. Her lively and colorful scenes draw from a pastiche of Pan-African literary and artistic references, including the short stories of Mozambican writer and former political prisoner Luis Bernardo Honwana, the avant-garde postcolonial films of Ousmane Sembène, and the photographs of Ricardo Rangel, which documented Maputo’s scenes of clandestine interracial nightlife.
A recurring point of investigation for Namoda is her portrayal of Black female heroines, or the Marias, whom she situates in liminal spaces of desire, angst, and the divine.Through the Maria figure, Namoda explores tensions between cultural tradition and societal transformation, intimacy and autonomy, duty and self-possession.
The loaned and newly commissioned paintings to be exhibited, as well as selected films, reflect Namoda’s longstanding practice of collecting, archiving, and weaving together found images and footage into dreamspaces, landscapes, and emotive worlds.
With a particular interest in global craft as a mode of devotion, knowledge transmission, and storytelling, Namoda and the ICA engaged Milan-based design studio Casa Amar to produce Sona sand drawing-inspired handwoven textiles. Celebrated designer Charles Dorrance-King collaborated with the ICA on the exhibition and lighting design for the presentation in the ICA’s 2nd floor galleries.
The exhibition is curated by Jessica Bell Brown, Executive Director of the ICA.
Diane Severin Nguyen: WAR SONGS duet is an adaptation of Diane Severin Nguyen’s (b. 1990, Carson City, California) performance piece WAR SONGS, which was commissioned by New York’s 2025 Performa Biennial. WAR SONGS duet is a kinetic and sonic installation that examines the material realities of today and the lasting effects pop media has on our collective subconscious. The exhibition remixes 1970s protest music with contemporary pop, reimagining and distilling once-live performances on an abandoned stage set.
An observation on how public sentiment and political identity are mediated through pop culture and media, the work features a fictional protest band named WAR SONGS that covers and mixes “99 Red Balloons” by Nena, a Cold War-era protest song, and “Party in the USA” by Miley Cyrus. The installation creates unlikely musical and cultural mash-ups that are at once uncanny, haunting, and clever, juxtaposing Western excess and emptiness with youthful abandon.
Severin Nguyen also references psychological tactics used during the war, particularly those of Trịnh Thị Ngọ, known as Hanoi Hannah, an English-speaking Vietnamese radio personality whose broadcasts sought to evoke sympathy from American GIs and encouraged them to abandon their posts. WAR SONGS duet prompts visitors to consider not only the political character of pop music but also the proliferation of media and its global consequences more broadly.
Following the debut of the performance piece WAR SONGS at the 2025 Performa Biennial, it traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2026. A version of this performance will take place in Richmond, Virginia, in Spring 2027.
The exhibition is curated by Egbert Vongmalaithong, Assistant Curator at the ICA.
