Love Stories

Love Stories (2022) is exactly that: a love story between me and dance, and how I cam to grow in the art form while learning more about and further appreciating my Blackness in the process. This painting is an ode to the resilience of Black dancers before me - Alvin, Ailey, Katherine Dunham, Judith Jamison, Pearl Primus, Debbie Allen, Arthur Mitchell, and so many more - who, no doubt, internalized the feeling of being the only Black dancer in the room, but also created magic and beauty through the expression of Blackness through performance. Beginning my love of dance at a very young age, Love Stories centers on the same image and memory of the little Black ballerinas finding their way. 

Gabrielle Mitchell-Bonds is an artist and writer studying Art History and History & Literature at Harvard. Gab's interdisciplinary artistic practice centers the Black female body, often utilizing archival and historical research of Blackness at large. In 2023, she won third place in the Congressional Art Competition in St.Louis, MO, for her piece “Why is the child crying?,” a work inspired by Alice Walker’s novel Possessing the Secret of Joy. This spring, her work was featured in We Own the Night, an exhibition curated by Harvard’s Black Arts Collective, which brought together 30 Black artists based in New England.