Body Memory | Group Show

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to present Body Memory, a group exhibition featuring figurative works that explore themes of visibility, empathy, resilience, and collective memory. The exhibition brings together drawings, paintings, photography, and mixed-media works by Rebecca Campbell, Zackary Drucker, Hely Omar González, Elsa María Meléndez, Derriann Pharr, Levon Riggins, Joshua AM Ross, Manuel Hernández Sánchez, Jessica Vollrath, James Williams II, and José Delgado Zúñiga. Body Memory is on view from June 16, 2026, to August 15, 2026. An opening reception will be held Sunday, June 14, 2026, from 12:00 – 3:00 pm. 

Body Memory asks how collective memory is formed, how we see each other through images, and what it means to carry those imbued encounters within us. It proposes that seeing is never passive: it is an embodied act shaped by history, power, and imagination—one that determines how we show up for each other and participate in the ongoing acts of learning, unlearning, formation, and transformation.

At the center of Body Memory is the intervention of figurative art itself. Against histories of commodification and subjugation in both art historical and popular visual culture, the artists in this exhibition raise the figure to prominence as a means of reclamation. Black and Brown bodies, queer bodies, women's bodies, and forms of bodily vulnerability—including gestures of reflection, resistance, and body language and body horror—refuse reduction into stereotype, fetish, or passivity.

Instead, these figures insist upon complexity, interiority, and presence. Through strategies of figuration, the artists confront inherited systems of looking that have historically objectified marginalized bodies, redirecting the politics of the gaze toward recognition rather than consumption. The works celebrate acts of transcendence to resist suppression—synthesizing storytelling, aesthetics, and materials with body and mind, to bring visibility to overlooked histories and lived experiences, while inviting viewers to reimagine futures.