Opening Reception: Thursday, May 1, 6-9pm

Exhibition on view: May 2-10, 2025

On view gallery hours: Wednesday – Saturday, 12 – 5pm, and by appointment by contacting kingleah@usc.edu

Roski Graduate Gallery (Los Angeles Arts District) 1262 Palmetto St, Los Angeles, CA 90013

See more here: https://roski.usc.edu/leah-king/

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

An exploration into futurity as a mindset for healing, this show uses sonic meditations, visual collage, and interactive digital installation to journey through forms of joy. Drawing from nightlife studies, ancestral stories, and science fiction, the works incorporate the legacies of generational healing within Black queer musicology as a framework to examine modes of safety-as-resistance.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Leah King is a multimedia artist working in sound, visual art, and performance. She creates intricately layered collages and multisensory installations that explore race, gender, power, and queerness through a futurist lens. Her most recent works center photos found in her family archive paired with audio of her relatives’ voices, to produce multimedia collages and soundscapes that feature historical references, religious songs, vocal harmonies, and original electronic music to explore abstracted methods of ancestral storytelling.

King’s work has been supported by Brooklyn Arts Council, Berlin Music Board, Museum of the African Diaspora, Center for Cultural Innovation, Headlands Center for the Arts, Puffin Foundation, and Los Angeles Center for Photography. Her work has been shown at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Root Division Gallery, Barrett Art Gallery, Sovern Gallery LA, and the San Francisco Contemporary Jewish Museum where she was an inaugural artist-in-residence. She was a Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Political Power Fellow, Converse Rubber Tracks Berlin Artist Resident, and has presented her research at San Francisco State University, New York University, California College of the Arts, and Technische Universität in Berlin, Germany.