Published: May 30, 2026; Aithor: Julia Sonrisa
Address: 54 Halsey Street 2nd floor, Newark, NJ 07102, United States
Phone: +1 973-242-1903
Web: https://www.expressnewark.org/Independent, drop-in sessions, each offering a complete collage-making experience.
Layered Stories is a 5-day series designed as independent, drop-in sessions, each offering a complete collage-making experience. Participants can attend one day or all five, exploring different themes, techniques, and approaches to collage without needing prior attendance or experience.
Each date is free and open to the public:
Level: All experience levels welcome
Materials: Some materials provided; participants are encouraged to bring personal images (including family photos), magazines, fabrics, or found objects.
Focus: Play, spontaneity, and creative instinct
Focus: Narrative and personal meaning
Focus: Material exploration
Focus: Personal history and archival materials
Focus: Community and collective making
Kimmah Dennis (b. 1996, Yamoussoukro, Côte d’Ivoire) is a Liberian-Ivorian painter exploring displacement, identity, and inherited memory. Through a fusion of materials, methods, and visual languages, she constructs layered narratives that bridge a diasporic past with an expansive present, envisioning future possibilities shaped by resilience and adaptation. Born during the First Liberian Civil War, Dennis draws from the trauma of forced displacement, government instability, and survival. The experience of uprooting at a moment’s notice profoundly informs her artistic approach, leading her to reject the constraints of a single medium. Instead, she embraces painting, collage, and experimental processes to create compositions that reflect the fragmentation and reconstruction of identity. Peeling paint, torn posters, and graffiti serve as a metaphor for impermanence, cultural hybridity, and the fluid nature of memory. Through these layered surfaces, she invites viewers into a dialogue between past and present, permanence and change, and the intersections of local and global narratives. Offering a meditation on belonging and transformation.
Dennis earned a BFA from Rutgers University and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was awarded the prestigious New Artist Society Full Scholarship Merit Award. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including a recent solo exhibition at Temple University Rome Gallery and the Trolley Barn Gallery in Poughkeepsie, NY. She has also shown at the American Academy in Rome, the New York Academy of Art, the John David Mooney Foundation, the University of Chicago, the Colour Club in Chicago, Shine Studio, Manufacturers Village, the Paul Robeson Gallery, and the Philly Art Collective. Dennis is the recipient of the 2024-25 Terra Foundation Affiliated Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome and the 2025 Silver Art residence and Visiting Professor at Rutgers University-Newark.
Time: 5:00-8:00 pm EST
Free!
Detailed information and discussion of the event.