Between Us – Davariz Broaden & Murjoni Merriweather Exhibition 2025

Exhibition

Between Us

Davariz Broaden & Murjoni Merriweather
August 9 — October 8, 2025

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Louis Buhl & Co. is pleased to present Between Us, an exhibition featuring new paintings and sculptures by Davariz Broaden and Murjoni Merriweather. Opening August 9, 2025, the exhibition brings together two artists whose practices center Black identity, community, and self-expression. Presented in dialogue, their works offer a powerful and nuanced look at how Black life is shaped, represented, and celebrated.

Broaden’s oil paintings use bold, gestural brushwork and warm, expressive palettes to capture everyday moments of connection, movement, and care. His compositions depict groups of figures dispersed across the canvas at varying scales and depths, creating a layered space and sense of momentum. Some figures appear mid-gesture, others turn their backs, while a few meet the viewer’s gaze—together indicating motion towards a shared and unknown destination. As we take in his figures, Broaden prompts us to consider the real-world power structures that exert influence over Black communities, often without genuine connection or accountability. Are the communities he represents being watched to maintain control, or supported towards growth and progress? In posing this question, Broaden offers portraits grounded in strength and joy, shifting the focus from how Black communities are often perceived to how they experience themselves.

Where Broaden’s figures suggest a quiet openness through his multifigural compositions, Merriweather’s meet the viewer directly—singular, bold, and unapologetically grounded. Her life-size busts, adorned with braids, grills, and other expressions of Black style, celebrate Black aesthetics as legitimate, dynamic, and deeply generative. Each sculpture is named and imbued with distinct personality, asserting its position and commanding space. Rejecting Eurocentric beauty standards, Merriweather challenges reductive stereotypes with confidence and pride, elevating cultural markers as acts of resistance. In doing so, her work not only reclaims representation, but honors Black identity as something to be seen on its own terms.

Through painting and sculpture, Broaden and Merriweather create a dialogue rooted in autonomy and cultural dignity, offering two distinct but complementary perspectives that challenge imposed narratives. Between Us calls attention to the politics of visibility and the power of self-representation, offering space for both reflection and recognition.

Between Us is on view from August 9th through October 8th at Louis Buhl & Co.