Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator, Inc. (DVCAI) invites audiences to experience its curatorial initiative, The Container Project, at DVCAI at Barry University. The exhibition includes a six-month run of activations and interactive works from November 20, 2025, to April 17, 2026. Curated by DVCAI Founder, Curator Rosie Gordon-Wallace, based in Miami, and independent curator and creative wellness strategist Breeana Thorne, based in Los Angeles, the trans-coastal, transcontinental, and Caribbean diasporic projectposes the question, “What’s in Your Container?” [DVCAI is located at the Monsignor William Barry Library, Barry University, 11300 NE 2nd Avenue, Miami, Florida.] See below for participating artists, full schedule, and more information.
Exhibiting artists: Rimaj Barrientos, Jevon Alexander Brown, Patricia Cooke, Michael Elliott, Natou Fall, Rosa Naday Garmendia, Miguel Keerveld, Shayla Marshall, Sydney Rose Maubert, Lance Minto-Strouse, Shawna Moulton, Kurt Nahar, Amarachi Odimba, Evelyn Politzer, L.A. Samuelson, Asser Saint-Val with Jessica Freites, Clara Toro, and Leandro Vazquez; exhibition design by Danielle Coates, visual Identity by Izia Lindsay, and photography by Roy A. Wallace. The exhibition’s scholarship is developed by DVCAI Scholar-in-Residence, Alix Pierre, PhD, Senior Lecturer, African Diaspora and the World at Spelman College, and Grace Aneiza Ali, Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History and affiliated faculty in the Native American and Indigenous Studies Center at Florida State University.
The shipping container—a vessel of movement, transportation, and memory—serves as a lens through which we explore the personal and collective histories of containment. For Caribbean communities, containers and barrels symbolize both migration and support: they carry essentials, treasures, and the intangible legacies of family, culture, and resilience. These structures, physical and metaphorical, hold the weight of memory, trauma, care, and joy, reflecting the ways we navigate histories shaped by colonialism, displacement, and global exchange.
The works on view serve as sites of refuge—both physical and emotional. In response, artists turn inward, using their creative practice as containers for memory, grief, harmony, and regeneration. Students and visitors are invited to consider their own vessels of memory.
What’s in Your Container?How do we hold our histories? What structures sustain us? And, how can we transform grief and loss into acts of preservation, care, and renewed community?
“The Container Project challenges us to see both the fragility and the resilience of memory, and encourages us to preserve the legacies of the past while imagining new forms of collective care and renewal.” – Breeana Thorne, Curator.
Schedule of Events Visit the project during regularly scheduled Library hours. Please check the Library website for https://www.barry.edu/en/library/working-hours for other holiday closures, exceptions, and updates.
Opening Week and Performance:
Thursday, November 20, 2025, The Container Project, Opening Event, 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm
Featured Performance at 7:00 pm
TUAPUTI is an interactive art installation and performance by multidisciplinary and visual artist Asser Saint-Val, created in collaboration with conduit and intuitive movement practitioner Jessica Freites. The work explores the metaphysical theme of containment through the boundless force of inner magic, drawing on diasporic spiritual traditions and esoteric systems.
Saturday, November 22, 2025, Performance and Artist Talk, 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm: Telegraph Valley is an installation and performance created and performed by L.A. Samuelson, in collaboration with Dramaturg Elle Hong and Sound Artist Adam Stone. Assembled from house frames, ladders, floating decks, and one dancer, Telegraph Valley makes momentary dwellings out of holes and passageways, attempting to deconstruct the body as a “house for the soul.” A conversation with the artist follows shortly after the performance.
Miami Art Week Events and Hours: December 1 – December 7, 2025: The exhibition will be on view during the Library’s regular hours. Two Performance Salons will be offered featuring the performance of Telegraph Valley and highlighting The Container Project’s interactive stations, experimental works, and community dialogs.
Monday, Dec. 1, 2025, Performance Salon 1: 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm: Performance at 6:00 pm
Tuesday, Dec. 2, 2025, Performance Salon 1: 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm: Performance at 6:00 pm
Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator (DVCAI) is a non-profit arts organization dedicated to promoting, nurturing, and cultivating the vision and diverse creativity of emerging artists from the Caribbean and Latin American Diaspora through experimentation, exhibitions, artists-in-residence programs, international cultural exchanges, Artist Catalyst Awards, and dialogue in contemporary art. DVCAI partners with funding and presenting organizations to enhance residency experiences in the Caribbean, nationally, and internationally. For more information, please visit https://www.diasporavibe.org/ and follow our activities on https://www.instagram.com/dvcai/, https://www.facebook.com/diasporavibe/, and https://x.com/DiasporaVibe.