In The Sky Was Never the Limit, Grace Kisa blends sculpture and abstract painting to reimagine space travel through a personal lens. On view at the Emma Darnell Aviation Museum.
In the worlds artist Grace Kisa creates, the sky isn’t a destination – it’s just the beginning.
Kisa’s latest exhibition, The Sky Was Never the Limit, on view at the Emma Darnell Aviation Museum at the Fulton County Airport through this weekend, reimagines space travel and cosmic exploration through a deeply personal and culturally rooted lens. The show title is itself a critique of the phrase, “The sky’s the limit.” It’s an idiom Kisa finds inherently limiting.
“People say, ‘The sky’s the limit,’ but that already feels like a boundary,” she explains. “There’s an entire universe beyond it. I wanted to reflect that.”
So instead, Kisa’s work looks far beyond the sky – to galaxies, stars, and imagined futures, colored by memories of her Trekkie mother’s Kenyan cosmology tales, a 1970s childhood spent watching Mork & Mindy and Buck Rogers, and that time in 1988 when she saw The Brother From Another Planet for the first time.
“It’s not just about looking forward,” Kisa says. “It’s about bringing the past with you.”
That sense of time-traveling memory is central to The Sky Was Never the Limit. Influenced by her own experience immigrating to the U.S. as a fourth grader, Kisa’s vibrant paintings and mixed-media sculptures challenge the idea of futurism and migration as joyless or cold. Her cosmic vision is colorful, symbolic, organic, and human. Her bright acrylic paintings are “maps.” Her sculptures, “portals” and “pathways,” are adorned with beads, feathers, and shells.
“I wanted to show that the future doesn’t have to be cold or distant,” Kisa says. “It can be full of warmth, memory, and beauty.
You can see that approach in the soothing palette of deep purples and blues used throughout The Sky Was Never the Limit. Indigo, a recurring color in the show, carries historical and spiritual weight. “It’s a color of depth and knowledge,” Kisa says. “There’s power in reclaiming it – not just aesthetically, but spiritually.”
Related:
• Celebrating Black fatherhood at ZuCot Gallery
• The Casspir Project lands at Emma Darnell Aviation Museum and Conference Center
Look closely, and you’ll spot Easter eggs woven into the work, including nods to Egyptian iconography, sci-fi author Octavia Butler, poet Sonia Sanchez, and General Harriet Tubman. These are quiet but intentional references grounded in the ancestral storytelling Kisa learned as a child.
This is the final week to view The Sky Was Never the Limit at the Emma Darnell Aviation Museum. The show is free and open to the public.
And don’t miss Kisa’s artist talk, happening from 12–2 p.m. on Saturday, June 7, at the museum, an opportunity to hear directly from the artist about the stories, symbols, and spiritual frameworks behind her work.
