Don’t Touch Me combats stereotypes concerning Black womanhood through the multimedia work of Ewuresi Archer, Imani Badillo, MB, Sydney Kay, CHIMI, and Vivica Satterwhite. Combining painting, sculpture, fiber, printmaking, and photography, the exhibition reframes misconceptions about the Black femme experience to highlight the vulnerability, gentleness, and care held within maintaining the right to consent. The highly textural work shown in Don’t Touch Me aims to create a safe space for Black femme expression, focusing on the joy and affirmation found in maintaining one’s bodily autonomy.
Opening Reception: Friday, August 1 from 6-9pm. Artist talk at 7:30pm.
About the Artists
Ewuresi Archer is a Ghanaian painter and printmaker based in Cleveland, Ohio. She graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2022 with a BFA in Painting, an emphasis in Printmaking and a concentration in Creative Writing.
Her work puts Ghanaian culture on a pedestal while acknowledging how it coexists with Western influence. This coexistence has always been present in her life, and she explores that duality through her art. Archer uses a glowing, saturated color palette with scrappy, energetic marks to depict everyday moments; pounding fufu, getting a haircut, eating foods that carry memory and tradition. She scrapes back into her canvas with a palette knife and distorts prints to the edge of abstraction, leaving just enough for the viewer to recognize what they’re seeing. This distortion mirrors her own longing, her nostalgia for a culture that always felt slightly out of reach due to her upbringing. These paintings are both an invitation and a reclamation. An invitation to those unfamiliar with Archers culture, to witness and celebrate it. Her art is a love letter; A reclamation for herself and others like her who were made to feel like their culture wasn’t enough. She wants us to see the beauty, the power, and the value in what has always been ours.
Imani Badillo is a fiber artist and curator exploring community relationships and shared memory through found, scrap, and natural materials. Influenced by familial traditions, the communal exchange of swaps and skill-sharing throughout the Midwest, and the ever-growing waste associated with the mass production of clothing and textiles, they work to create a regional gift economy–a network of relationships built upon mutual gratitude. Imani has exhibited their work and research in Northeast Ohio and beyond, including at YARDS Project (Cleveland), The Luminary (St. Louis), and the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.
MB is a multidisciplinary visual artist based in Cleveland, Ohio. Her work spans abstract painting, sculpture, and experimental mixed media, often incorporating unconventional materials such as ash, fruit, found objects, and ceramics. Working primarily with acrylic and oil paint, MB creates emotionally charged, process driven pieces that explore themes of transformation, release, and personal mythology. Her intuitive practice often includes destructive or somatic actions—throwing, burning and layering that is a form of exploring emotional alchemy.
MB’s work has been exhibited throughout Northeast Ohio, including in the Shabang Queer Art Show, Black Arts Showcase, Heights Art: Regional Perspectives, Vessel City Artist Expo, Sculpture Center & Edra Soto installation Journal, and Human Heart Studio, Regeneration Galla. She has also served as an Exhibit Assistant where she supported large-scale sculptural installations and refined her fabrication skills. In addition to their studio work, MB is deeply involved and passionate about local arts sustainability, administration and community-based programming.
Sydney Nicole Kay is a multimedia artist working primarily in photography, printmaking and ceramics. Originally from the Eastern Shore in Maryland, she received her BFA in Photography from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2021 and is an incoming MFA candidate at Kent State University for Studio Art with a concentration in Printmaking, Photography and Papermaking. She has won numerous awards including a 2024-25 Fall Winter Residency at Visual Arts Center of Richmond, 2024 Denbo Fellowship, 2023 Zygote Press Residency, 2021 Red Bull micro-grant and the 2021 Bivens Fellowship. She has always been interested in new ideas and processes or what she would call “learning to fold the blanket in a different way”. Her goal is to create work that communicates her stories and to share the stories of those who are often under-represented.
Chimamaka Palmer, better known by her stage name CHIMI, is an interdisciplinary storyteller from Southeastern Nigeria. She transmutes her experiences as an African woman in America as the foreground of artistic reckoning on memory, identity, grief, faith, and their emotional valets. As the first child of two pastors, CHIMI had a spiritually charged upbringing in Nigeria and in the U.S. She has transformed these experiences into layerings of sound and visual installations to deliver art that embodies the unseen.
Her visual arts journey was activated after picking up her cousin’s camera during her time in London circa 2017. She fell in love with Photography and has since integrated her artistic practice with collage, printmaking, painting, and sculpture. As a singer and songwriter she has toured and written with international acts like Mourning [A] BLKstar, Lee Baines, Lonnie Holley, & Moor Mother.
My name is Vivica Satterwhite, and I am a photographer born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. I’ve been doing photography for over 10+ years, and always had a keep eye to details and colors. As I got more experienced, I began to focus on capturing the diverse culture of Cleveland and all around with my travels and adventures. My portfolio beautifully showcases the city and my life vibrancy, weaving engaging visual stories with simplicity and depth.
Don’t Touch Me will be open from August 1 – September 20, 2025 during regular gallery hours on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays from 12 p.m.-4 p.m., and by appointment on weekdays. To request an appointment, email info@waterlooarts.org or call 216.692.9500.
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