Pamela Sneed and Carlos Martiel: Sacred and Profane
FEB 20, 2026 – APR 12, 2026

Sacred and Profane brings together the powerful practices of Pamela Sneed and Carlos Martiel to explore Black presence, erasure, memory, and endurance on Fire Island. During her 2022 BOFFO Residency Fire Island, Sneed began to investigate the little-known history of slave pens on the island, making large-scale watercolors and collages using natural materials like shells, sand, seaweed, and cowrie to imagine the presence and erasure of Black bodies and honor those who may have been held there. Visitors contributed offerings to Sneed’s original project, among them Carlos Martiel, who became, in the form of a photograph, one of the reimagined bodies. In 2024, Martiel also completed a BOFFO Residency, which culminated in Jungle, a durational performance in which his exposed body, surrounded by tropical fruits from Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America, was gradually revealed as attendees consumed the fruit—an indictment of the colonialist and cannibalistic treatment of Black bodies historically and within contemporary LGBTQ spaces.

The exhibition features new artworks by Sneed, including works on paper, poetic interventions on historical records, and mixed-media collages, all extracting from or gesturing toward Fire Island’s hidden Black history. Her works appear alongside Martiel’s Cuerpo (2022), Custody (2025), Gran Poder (2023), and a new performance, No Resurrection, created with his mother to confront the feelings of grief and powerlessness among African American mothers who have lost children to police violence. Together, Sneed’s and Martiel’s work transforms Fire Island and Leslie Lohman Museum of Art into dual sites of Black queer haunting and resistance, embodying what scholar Christina Sharpe calls “residence time”—the enduring afterlife of slavery in salt, water, and memory. Sacred and Profane asserts that to uncover what has been buried is to recover the body as a witness to what was taken and what still remains.

Presented by BOFFO in partnership with Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art

(more info here)