PLATO

In her first solo exhibition with the gallery, Diana Sinclair presents a meditation on water, memory and the psychic and physical effects of the transatlantic passage. Working with cyanotypes on fabric, as well as with sculpture, Sinclair is dedicated to experimenting with materials. She merges historical research and personal experience, weaving together studio portraiture and archival fragments to reflect on the longstanding—and often ruptured—relationship between Black communities and water.

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For Sinclair, water is a charged site of disconnection, grief and potential repair. Having spent seven years as a competitive swimmer while feeling unseen within that space, she returns to water as a site for ancestral veneration and healing. Her works suggest that confronting the Black communities’ relationship to water is a spiritual endeavor. Sinclair questions what it means to be alienated from life’s most vital resource and what it might take to return.

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The majority of the works in Threaded Blue are cyanotypes on fabric stretched over canvas. Cyanotype is a 19th-century camera-less photographic printing technique which uses light-sensitive chemicals on materials such as paper and fabric and UV light to produce blue-tinted prints. Diana has been expanding the medium’s possibilities: she designed a special, large-scale exposure chamber with regulated lights, in which she exposes the light-sensitive fabric covered with semi-transparent prints of the deconstructed polaroids of nude Black subjects, allowing time, water, light and chance to collaborate on the creation of her textured, lyrical images. In another series, tea-toned cyanotypes on fabric are framed in brown wood, referencing the containment and compression of enslaved bodies in the “womb-abyss of the slave ship”– a term first coined by influential author Christina Sharpe in her book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being.

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Throughout the exhibition, Sinclair’s approach merges research and ritual. Her conversations with scholars like Kevin Dawson and Jeff Wiltse—whose work traces aquatic traditions and the racialized politics of water access—provided a foundational backbone for Sinclair’s practice. It was the artist’s initial conversation with Wiltse that inspired her use of pool tiles—ubiquitous in the racially restricted architecture of public swimming pools—in sculpture. Here, the blue tiles are incorporated into a larger-than-life-size sculptural bust of a close friend, evoking both ancient Egyptian monuments and Awol Erizku’s disco ball Nefertiti covered in mirror tiles.

Whether referencing segregated pools, the ocean floor or her own past, Sinclair’s work bears witness to histories embedded in collective memory and bodily experience. The artist sees herself as an antenna—attuned to the whispers of spirits, for which water is a conduit, seeking acknowledgment and release. She also defines her role as an archivist: collecting primary documents, found photographs and visual residues that connect the present to the past. Her works invite the viewers to contemplate displacement, erasure and the potential for return.

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Sinclair’s use of the color blue was initially predicated by the natural tones of the cyanotypes, yet over time, its meaning expanded. The exhibition’s title, Threaded Blue, speaks to the visual and conceptual currents running through the show—across oceans, generations and lived experience. Blue opens up space in portraiture—moving beyond the racialized dichotomy of black and white, and offering a more fluid, expansive way to see and be seen. The color becomes a woven channel—one that carries history and tactile intimacy. At once environmental and emotional, it is a material throughline that links bodies, spirits and stories across time and space.
 

 

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Diana Sinclair (b. 2004, Greenwich, CT) is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher based in Jersey City, NJ. Her practice examines Black identity, water and memory through lens-based media, printmaking and installation. Engaging both historical inquiry and material experimentation, she explores the spiritual and physical dimensions of water as a site of trauma, resistance and transformation.

 

Sinclair’s work investigates the transatlantic slave trade, Black aquatic traditions, and the racialized history of pool segregation in the U.S.—a subject shaped by her seven years as a competitive swimmer. Consulting with historians Kevin Dawson and Jeff Wiltse, she traces the exclusion of Black communities from water spaces and its generational impact. Works like De/Recomposition and Containment employ cyanotypes, Polaroids and organic materials to explore saltwater’s role in both preservation and erasure. Sinclair was a resident at Silver Art Projects at the World Trade Center, New York, 2024-2025. Her work has been exhibited at PLATO (New York), All Street Gallery (New York), Residency Art Gallery (Los Angeles) and Naranjo 141 (Mexico City). She was awarded the Gemma Projects Inaugural Curatorial Grant (2023), and her public installation Reflections was on view at Rockefeller Center (2023–2024).

 

While Sinclair’s current work is grounded in physical materials, it was her early digital work that laid the foundation for her engagement with storytelling and collective memory. Collaborations with the Whitney Houston Foundation and large-scale public installations, including her Rockefeller Center commission, reflect her ongoing interest in how technology and immersive environments bridge historical and contemporary narratives.