The 11th Hour names a precipice - a moment charged with both urgency and inevitability. It is the moment just before: before change, before arrival, before revelation. For Black artists—makers of memory, meaning, motion, and joy—the 11th hour is not a point of crisis, but of convergence. These artists, MFA graduate students at the Yale School of Art, do not ask for space as they move through the architectures of post-racial institutional neutrality. Instead, they coalesce throughout and amongst the folds hewn by ancestrally-aligned, collective liberatory energies.
In this exhibition, the phrase signals not lateness or delay, but the intensity and immanence of Black presence within institutional temporality. Malcom Tariq’s poetic language envisages a cosmographic projection of “the bottom” as a place of becoming, imagining, building, and entering. Entrusting the reader with heeding the hollow, we’re invited to join, from the nadir, a world previously shaped by those ancestors who dwelled. Here, the artist is not merely a producer of images but a navigator of the fold–a presence that troubles the line between subject and symbol,between body and image, between now and what came before. The work becomes an estuary–fluid, intermingled, a confluence of memory, perception, and material. It is here that the artists thrive: in the interstitials, the bends of time, the folds of selfhood, and the architectures of power.
In this exhibition, the phrase signals not lateness or delay, but the intensity and immanence of Black presence within institutional temporality. Malcom Tariq’s poetic language envisages a cosmographic projection of “the bottom” as a place of becoming, imagining, building, and entering. Entrusting the reader with heeding the hollow, we’re invited to join, from the nadir, a world previously shaped by those ancestors who dwelled. Here, the artist is not merely a producer of images but a navigator of the fold–a presence that troubles the line between subject and symbol,between body and image, between now and what came before. The work becomes an estuary–fluid, intermingled, a confluence of memory, perception, and material. It is here that the artists thrive: in the interstitials, the bends of time, the folds of selfhood, and the architectures of power.