This powerful exhibition, curated by scholar Tatiana Flores, explores the space between worlds—where ancestral memory, spiritual cosmology, and contemporary life converge. Featuring paintings, works on paper, and sculptural assemblages, Benzant’s work draws from African and Caribbean spiritual traditions to create a living, evolving visual language.

Between the Mist & Shadow presents a multidisciplinary selection of works by Leonardo Benzant that examine liminality and the intersection of spiritual and material realities. Rooted in African and Caribbean cosmologies, the exhibition features paintings, works on paper, and sculptural assemblages that engage ancestral presence, ritual, and transformation. Benzant’s long-developed allegorical figure, the Urban Shaman, serves as a guiding force throughout the exhibition, operating as a conduit between worlds and dimensions. Leonardo Benzant is an artist who bridges the spiritual and the material realities of the African diaspora. In his multidisciplinary practice he is most known for his expressive painting and his elaborate beaded sculptures.

"I started searching for healing, transformation and a sense of purpose by connecting to my roots through African spiritual traditions, cosmologies, oral history and ideography. In addition to the shaman, I use strategies and traits of resistance leaders, trickers and maroons to create my own system, my own cosmology. I'm drawn to these figures as they counter the colonial framework. My work comes out of a belief that African spirituality can be a tool of resistance and self empowerment. "

Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York City, Benzant is Dominican-American with Haitian heritage and lived for a short period on St. Croix, USVI. His practice is informed by his studies and initiations of Kongo and Yoruba origin. He deploys a wide variety of media and found objects to create work that connect African and Caribbean religion, art, history, culture, rituals and modern and contemporary art.

Curator Tatiana Flores is a scholar of the visual culture of the hemispheric Americas, specializing in modern and contemporary Latin American, Caribbean and Latinx art. She is the author of the award-winning monograph Mexico’s Revolutionary Avant-Gardes: From Estridentismo to ¡30-30! (Yale University Press, 2013). Committed to public-facing work, she has been active as an independent curator for over two decades.

Through her research, teaching and service, Flores advocates on behalf of disenfranchised and marginalized communities, artists and historical actors.