Of All the Worlds We Could Have Dreamed
works by Samantha Modder
April 3 – May 31, 2026
Opening Reception / Meet the Artist: Friday, April 3 / 5 – 8pm
Samantha Modder’s work feels like stepping into a fairytale drawn in ballpoint pen and then blown up to the scale of a building. The artist creates large-scale, digitally manipulated drawings printed on adhesive paper — murals that reshape the entire space.
“Of All the Worlds We Could Have Dreamed” follows a single Black woman and her alter-egos moving through a world built entirely from her imagination. It’s part storybook, part dreamscape, and part test lab — a place where she explores power, resistance, rest, and the realities Black women navigate every day. Black hair becomes a protagonist here, driving the narrative in curls, coils, and shapes that feel both soft and defiant.
Artist Statement:
Samantha Modder work figuratively in pen, collage, and digital media to portray larger-than-life Black, female characters taking up space in real and imagined worlds. In her most recent series, she presents a subjective Black woman’s fairytale to process interlocking structures of oppression. Like a storybook made into a mural, the installations are digitally manipulated ballpoint pen drawings that follow a Black woman in her nightdress and striped socks in a world made up of only her and her duplicates. The work is an allegory for our contemporary condition, confronting questions of power, exploitation, and resistance.
The artist positions this work within the speculative practice of the Black imaginary—a centering of Black dreams and fantasies to create alternate spaces of both comfort and confrontation. The spaces she creates are less utopia and more speculative test lab, a way to decenter broken realities and focus instead on the imaginary to help understand and rethink oppressive structures. Black hair in particular serves as a powerful protagonist in her work pushing the narrative forward in soft curls and defiant shapes.
As her work towers above you, the artist hopes you will step back into a space of childhood, wonder, and possibility. That you would, in the best of ways, feel small and open, ready and willing to hear one more story.
