This Is How It Is Right Now begins with photography. These images document boyhood—quiet, present, and shaping the frame. In a photographic canon that has historically overlooked images of fatherhood, particularly intimate and sustained ones, this work insists on its visibility.
Created in collaboration with Shabazz’s sons, the photographs function as both record and raw material. They generate and inform the painted portraits and drawings throughout the space, revealing the photographic understructure beneath the finished works. Images are carried forward, translated, and layered rather than resolved.
Arranged as a constellation rather than a sequence, the exhibition resists closure. It offers no single narrative—only a clear record of presence, process, and becoming, held exactly as it is, right now.
