Love in Excess

In the ballad “Love in Excess,” Black Caribbean singer Ophelia Marie declares her longing for a love that is at once sensuous and ineffable, carnal and otherworldly—a love so great that, as the song’s chorus announces, it could only be fulfilled by an angel. Borrowing its title from Marie’s love anthem, Love in Excess brings together ten Black women and Black queer artists whose works echo the singer’s yearning.

The form of love examined in the exhibition has been explored for millennia by philosophers, poets, and artists, and has been described as the lover’s act of reaching for an inherently absent other—a gesture inhabited by both pain and pleasure. While this acute yearning traditionally evokes notions of erotic desire between people, thinkers have also linked it to the longing for alternative social realities, as well as for the divine. This broader understanding reveals longing as an affect that is simultaneously bodily, spiritual, and political.

Anchored in both conceptual inquiry and embodied experience, the artists featured in Love in Excess grapple with this affect in the face of the complex intersections of gender, race, and sexuality. From the perspective of Black queerness and Black femininity, they employ various media to mine loneliness, loss, failure, absence, and longing, as well as the pain and pleasure that reflect their felt experience as both subjects and objects of love and desire.

Featured artists include Gwladys Gambie, Lídia Lisboa, Ophelia Marie, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Tatiana Nascimento, Ode, Madelynn Poulson, Katherine Simóne Reynolds, Ntozake Shange, Cauleen Smith, and D'Angelo Lovell Williams.

Love in Excess is curated by Maysa Martins, Visual Arts Center 2024–26 Curatorial Fellow.

Exhibition support for Gwladys Gambie’s participation is provided by Villa Albertine, Ambassade de France aux États-Unis, Houston.