Artist Lava Thomas is the next contemporary artist to transform the Museum’s Sloping Gallery with a new site-specific installation. Based in Berkeley, California, Thomas is celebrated for her meticulous, large-scale drawings and portraiture that explore visibility, memory, and embodied presence. In Lava Thomas: In Our Own Regard, Thomas brings her personal archive of family photographs—on which her drawings are based—into conversation with the Carter’s collection, examining how portraiture can preserve individual and collective histories.

At the center of the installation is Looking Back II (2015), a 6-by-6-foot graphite, charcoal, watercolor, and conté pencil work on paper recently acquired by the Carter. The work is presented alongside seven additional large-scale portraits and a newly commissioned, artist-designed wallpaper featuring historic negatives from the Carter’s Mary Everhard Collection, which documents Black "Exoduster" communities in early 20th-century Kansas. Together, the works bring personal and institutional archives into view, asserting the presence and dignity of those often left out of American history.