Celestial Bodies is a powerful reclamation of identity, history, and spirit. In this exhibition, artist Rashad Malik Davis explores the intersection of Blackness and Queerness, tracing a deeply personal journey shaped by love, loss, and rediscovery. Growing up in environments that framed queerness as incompatible with Black identity, Davis grappled with an internal divide that forced parts of himself into silence.
While studying anthropology in college, Davis began to understand Queerness not as a modern deviation, but as an ancient and vital presence across many indigenous African cultures. These societies honored gender-nonconforming and queer individuals as spiritually significant, essential to social and cosmic balance. Celestial Bodies reflects on this legacy while examining how colonialism disrupted these systems, erasing histories rooted in reverence rather than rejection.
The exhibition features five 24” × 36” acrylic paintings on canvas portraying real-life figures and deities from indigenous African spiritual traditions, alongside four hand-cut wooden masks measuring approximately 20” × 8”. Together, these works honor ancestral knowledge, celebrate queer African histories, and invite viewers to reconnect with narratives of wholeness, power, and magic.
Celestial Bodies is both a personal offering and a collective remembrance. By placing these figures on canvas, Davis invites audiences to witness a lineage of Queerness that has always existed: sacred, celebrated, and celestial.
About the Artist
Rashad Malik Davis is an author, illustrator, educator, and dreamer. He is a graduate of Tufts University, where he majored in anthropology and minored in Mandarin Chinese. Davis is the illustrator of the best-selling children’s book Sunne’s Gift.
His debut self-published book, Carefree, Like Me!: Chapter 1 – Root the Brave, won the 2017 Best Indie Book Award in the Children’s category. Its sequel, Carefree, Like Me!: Chapter 2 – Sacra the Joyous, followed in 2018. The seven-part series explores themes of cultural diversity and inclusion, fantasy, empathy, and emotional literacy, drawing inspiration from Davis’s own life experiences, his spirituality, and his love of adventure stories. He is represented by Sera Rivers of the Spielberg Literary Agency.
For more information, visit ramalikillustrations.com.
