LaKela Brown and Mario Moore Beneath Our Feet

Library Street Collective is pleased to present Beneath Our Feet, a two-person exhibition with LaKela Brown and Mario Moore. Bringing together a mix of painting and sculpture, the pair of artists collaboratively examine the symbolic intersections of land, economic agency, and narrative authorship.

Brown and Moore both hail from Detroit, a city whose legacy of industry, labor, and cultural production deeply informs each artist’s distinct practice. In Beneath Our Feet, they reflect on the wealth held in the earth beneath us—and the enduring question of who holds the rights to till, own, and shape that land. Through materially rich processes and symbolically layered imagery, they consider land not just as property, but as history, inheritance, and possibility. While their reflections speak broadly to the Black American experience, they are simultaneously rooted in Detroit’s local terrain, where stories of migration, ownership, and resilience are embedded in the landscape.

Brown’s sculptural reliefs recall ancient modes of visual storytelling, such as hieroglyphic carvings or cuneiform tablets, while drawing on imagery rooted in 1990s hip-hop culture. In her latest works, she centers subjects of deep personal and cultural resonance—often objects familiar to her family that have long been excluded from formal art contexts—as a way of locating herself and her community within the art historical canon, advancing a visual language that is both accessible and affirming. Like Brown, Moore’s paintings brim with objects significant to the Black diaspora, from watermelon, emblematic of the economic agency of Black men in the Antebellum South, to hibiscus, a symbol of resilience. His new works draw on the tradition of Dutch and Flemish devotional painting—particularly garland paintings—redirecting reverence from religious icons to symbols of land, labor, and self-determination, and in doing so, inspiring a reconsideration of what society deems worthy of veneration today.