moniquemeloche is pleased to present David Shrobe: Natural Sovereignty, the artist’s second
solo exhibition with the gallery. Through assemblage, collage, drawing, and painting, the works
on view draw from oral histories, family portraits, and online archives to present the vitality of
family life among Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities. Pulling from the
past to project new possibilities of the future, Shrobe considers the backyard and garden as an
extension of the home and a site of sustenance, survival, and resistance.
 

Natural Sovereignty is the last body of work created in the artist’s longtime studio in Harlem, NY.
Next month, the artist will vacate his studio in the apartment that has housed his family for
nearly a century. Slices of the domestic materialize through found objects such as tabletops,
doors, molding, mirror frames, wood flooring, and textiles. The artist collects these objects over
long periods of time–often found within the surrounding blocks near his building–filling every
corner of his studio. In a process driven by intuition, Shrobe’s labor-intensive practice reflects
the cultural tapestry woven by his ancestral predecessors. Layered hand carved wood panels
frame the narrative and create the push and pull of exterior and interior realities. The figures
within Shrobe’s liminal spaces seamlessly integrate with their natural and cosmic environments,
depicting everyday family life amongst growers and traditional healers. As we glimpse into the
landscape of flora and fauna, we see the backyard as a sanctuary, a space of work, pride,
wellness, and leisure. For the artist, they are spaces for self-governance, community, and
legacy; worlds that return us to the natural sovereignty of the human being.

Inspired by bell hooks’ reflection on photography, several of Shrobe’s assemblage paintings are
drawn from turn of the century photographs of Black and Indigenous Americans, representing
autonomy for people of color and a declaration of their presence. The camera and photography,
as described by hooks, offered African Americans a way to empower themselves through
counterhegemonic representation and offered the possibility of immediate intervention. In Art on
My Mind: Visual Politics, hooks writes: “photography has been and is central to that aspect of
decolonization that calls us back to the past and offers a way to reclaim and renew life-affirming
bonds.” 1 Shrobe’s works serve as declarations, depicting families in their complete humanity, in
harmony with the natural environment. While the artist also recalls his own family photos as a
starting point, his subjects as well as the materials used undergo a transformation, becoming
generative of new meanings and inviting a set of associations and experiences of the familiar or
uncanny in each work. Female figures in the works often represent the women in his family,
while other characters embody the artist with similar tendencies or disposition yet exist in
another reality.
 

Natural Sovereignty showcases the artist’s process of image making and its essential
connection to pictorial genealogies. By rendering his figures in nature, Shrobe suggests that our
complete freedom survives within our inherent connection to each other and the natural world;
that we may find oneness by planting our feet in the ground.
 

David Shrobe’s work is currently included in the traveling group exhibition Multiplicity: Blackness
in Contemporary American Collage, opening at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston on February
18 through May 12, 2024, followed by the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., July 6 –
September 22, 2024.

1 hooks, bell. Art on My Mind: Visual Politics. New York: The New York Press. 1995. Print.