Crowning the women of ‘NU AFRICANS’ at Hammonds House

Before they became warriors and queens lining the walls of Hammonds House Museum, some of the models in “NU AFRICANS,” the Hammonds House Museum exhibition by mixed-media artist Maurice Evans and sculptor Grace Kisa, needed convincing they were worthy of representing power and beauty.

NU AFRICANS” photo collage of a standing woman in a spiked crown, holding spikes, framed by colorful painted shapes on wood. — In “Elektromagnetizmah,” a work from “NU AFRICANS,” Maurice Evans sets his photograph of a model, crowned in Grace Kisa’s radiating spikes and holding a burst of them at her waist, inside painted swirls of lavender, coral and blue on exposed wood. (Courtesy of Hammonds House Museum)

When “NU AFRICANS” debuted in 2020, the pandemic forced the show online. It returned in September 2026 with roughly 30 portraits of Black women. Kisa costumed each model. Evans photographed them.

Evans printed his favorite images and mounted them on wood panels he cut into curves and waves, shapes meant to “evoke the energy” coming off the women’s bodies.

In one, a woman nine months pregnant stands in profile against a field of gold, haloed in silver. “I love the image because it represents the beginning, the creation,” Evans said.

Evans and Kisa will talk about how the work came together during “Practice, Process, Purpose,” an artist talk at the museum Sunday, Oct. 25. Arts administrator and advocate Oronike Odeleye will lead the conversation.

Ahead of the discussion, we caught up with Evan and Kisa to talk finding power and beauty in the feminine form.

The ‘NU AFRICANS’ women

Evan cast most of the women. And, not everyone arrived at his studio sure of herself.

During one shoot, Kisa was dressing a woman of larger stature when the phone rang. It was the model’’s mother, calling to check on how the casting went, concerned her daughter’s weight would keep her from participating. Kisa recalled the daughter’s answer, delivered “a little bit in wonder”: “I’m in the makeup chair now.”

Another moment stuck with Evans. After one shoot, he clicked through a model’s images on his computer as she praised them. But, then she asked when they would get to her photos. They were looking at her photos.

“It was important to me to present these women in a certain way,” he said, “because it hurts my feelings that, for whatever reason, being beat down by society or whatever’s going on, they have low self-esteem. Y’all don’t see yourselves. You don’t see what I see.”

Kisa has crafted a career of representing black people, women, in particular, as regal, confident beings. Born in Kenya, she makes work shaped by a life spent moving between places and cultures. “I draw from my experience,” she said. “In my family, in my clan, women are lauded.”

On the second floor of “NU AFRICANS” at Hammonds House Museum, five mannequins wear the wood, fiber and braided pieces Grace Kisa made for the women featured in the exhbition’s portraits. (Courtesy of Grace Kisa)

Creating goddesses

Before sketching a single costume idea, Kisa did homework. She and Evans watched documentaries and dug into the history of women warriors in Africa, the Caribbean and the United States.

Kisa shaped cornrows and plaits into crowns, then worked in beads, yarn and wire. In one portrait, “Untitled,” black spikes burst from a braided halo around a woman’s head, and silver filigree is painted across her brow.

Kisa’s hair work goes back to her childhood in Kenya in the 1970s, when threaded styles were common. She remembers women on the streets of Nairobi with their hair in “architectural sculptures, these crowns.”

Evans called the styles “somewhat futuristic and ancient at the same time.” “

On the second floor of “NU AFRICANS,” a wall of five mannequins holds pieces the women wore in the photographs.

Near the audiovisual room, where behind-the-scenes and performance videos by Evans and dancer Rashida Abdullah play, another wall holds headpieces that read at first as elaborate hairstyles. Up close, they become crowns and shields.

Grace Kisa’s “NU AFRICANS” braided sculpture with coiled brown braids, burgundy braid accents, wooden flower beads and blue beads. — One of Grace Kisa’s crowns and shields from “NU AFRICANS,” made of tight brown braids coiled into spirals, traced with burgundy braid and set with wooden flowers and blue beads. (Courtesy of Grace Kisa)

Next for ‘NU AFRICANS’?

The crowns aren’t finished with Kisa. “Creatively, I’m going to be expanding on these crown and shield pieces,” she said.

She’ll do some of that work during as one of five artists in the inaugural cohort of the yearlong CTR Culture Studios Incubator residents. “I’m going to be doing some costume design, some painting, some printmaking, some sculpture,” she said.

Evans is pushing his own practice in new directions. He also wants to fold more photography, filmmaking and music into his work.” I don’t want it to be limited to paper or canvas,” he said. “I want it to be whatever it’s gonna be.”

“NU AFRICANS” isn’t finished either. “ We still want it to be a book,” Evans said. And he’s composed an original soundtrack for the project, meant to be heard while turning the pages.

“NU AFRICANS” is on view at Hammonds House Museum through Dec. 13.