Where Salt Meets Water and Where Memory Becomes Tide

Keisha Scarville’s monumental Brooklyn Museum installation transforms photography into a site of healing, remembrance and diasporic belonging.

This season, the Brooklyn Museum’s Iris Cantor Plaza becomes a space of reflection through ‘Where Salt Meets Black Water’, a powerful new installation by Brooklyn-born artist Keisha Scarville. Recipient of the 2026 UOVO Prize, Scarville brings her deeply personal visual language into the public realm, inviting audiences to encounter photography not merely as an image, but as a living archive.

Drawing from her acclaimed series Mama’s Clothes, Scarville layers black-and-white portraits and still lifes onto patterns derived from garments her late mother, Alma, once wore. The resulting works move between presence and absence, intimacy and monumentality, tracing the emotional contours of migration, memory and loss. Born to Guyanese parents who immigrated to New York in the 1960s, Scarville’s practice has long explored the complexities of diasporic inheritance and the ways personal histories become collective narratives.

The exhibition’s title references Guyana’s mineral-rich black waters, long associated with restoration and healing. Across the museum’s plaza, these symbolic currents flow through photographs that ask viewers to pause, gather and remember. In Scarville’s hands, fabric becomes witness, photography becomes ritual, and public space becomes a vessel for communal renewal.