Scope Miami 2025: Miami Art Week

Desmond Beach: Hush ‘Arbors’

Curated by Dr. teddy raShaan

Presented by Richard Beavers Gallery & Art Like ME, Inc.

In Hush ‘Arbors’, Desmond Beach honors the "hush harbors" of the antebellum South—clandestine sanctuaries where enslaved people stole away to worship hidden from their captors. These secret clearings were the birthplace of the "invisible institution" that became the Black Church, a space where Christianity, Traditional African Religions, and Hoodoo merged beyond the reach of surveillance.

Drawing on historical accounts of congregants hanging wet quilts to muffle the sound of their prayers, Beach’s work pulses with this inheritance. His vibrant quilts feature intergenerational figures—witnesses to a spiritual resistance that refuses erasure. The colors sing with resilience: our resistance is music, and our pain is conjure.a

Beach mandates us to locate our own spaces of freedom and to ask whose voices we drown out today. Hush ‘Arbors’ posits that the sanctuary is not a relic, but a continuum. Where sound was once muffled, it now demands to be heard because ecstasy no longer requires silence.