Erinma Adaeze (b.2002) invites you on a journey through spaces of importance in her life. The works on view serve as postcards from New York, Lagos, and Maryland. Adaeze implores the viewer to transcend these places to explore the memories linked to the vintage stamps, magazines, photographs, and album covers making up her digital collages. Erinma tells the story of her own childhood, inner monologue, and perspective on daily life in tandem with experiences of migration, colonialism, and political unrest in older generations of her family. While these postcards make visual reference to their respective locations, the viewer is called to consider the space between them.

This exhibition brings together 10 works from Erinma Adaeze’s 2025 postcard series. Postcards not only bear resemblance to the cities they represent, they also work to capture major tensions that persist in those areas. Adaeze’s digital collage process blurs the line between abstract and figurative art. The suspended installation, Untitled, is a collection of works on paper using watercolor and collage. The artist considers them “studies” or simplified versions of her typical digital collage works. Untitled calls the viewer to lean in and digest the short messages dancing overhead.

Banana Island is a postcard from Banana Island, Lagos; an artificial island off the coast of Ikoyi where the city’s rich and expat populations reign. The work highlights the working class in Lagos, often erased from popular depictions of the area. A common motif in Adaeze’s work: the woman bearing load on her head symbolizes the burden of a growing wealthy, international population on a city of enormous inequity and classism. Banana Island uses the iconic Chiquita Banana sticker to make a direct link to the imperial history of the phrase “banana republic:” an unstable economy based on a single product, often yielding to the powers of foreign influence.

Heavy is the Head is a postcard from the artist’s birthplace, Gaithersburg, Maryland, depicting the anxiety, depression, and societal pressures of childhood and early adolescence. The motif of the woman (or girl) portering goods on her head reappears here, and thus serves as a link to Nigeria.The burden that this figure bears appears as a crown to the segmented crowd of onlookers.

The reuse of historical photographs, magazines, and advertisements in order to signal dysfunction in the lived experience of the artist is what unites each work presented in Postcards. While separated by miles, the stories unfolding in these scenes could take place in any location or time frame. Erinma Adaeze invites you not only to ponder the aesthetics of each city, but the space between them.