SHARED GROUND:
THE WORK OF CULTURE AND CONNECTION

FEATURING ANTOINE WILLIAMS, DOMINIC GREEN, NJAIMEH NJIE, AND SHAUNTÉ GATES

JANUARY 31 - MAY 30, 2025

Capital One’s Art Program presents Shared Ground: The Work of Culture and Connection, an exhibition that celebrates the powerful, transformative work of artists who, through their creative practices, cultivate spaces of culture and connectivity. Featuring the work of Antoine Williams, Dominic Green, Njaimeh Njie, and Shaunté Gates, Shared Ground brings together artists working across mediums and themes who have been a part of the work at The Nicholson Project since its founding just over five years ago. 

Founded as a platform for artist support, neighborhood transformation, and cultural development in Washington, DC, The Nicholson Project’s artist residency, gallery, and neighborhood garden all work in tandem to support artists and serve as an innovative cultural hub for the community it is based in. Through their residencies, exhibitions, and public art installations, the artists in Shared Ground do not simply create art; they forge relationships, build shared narratives, and offer new ways of understanding the world around us.

Antoine Williams’s mixed-media works confront the complexities of history and identity, challenging us to reflect on the structures that shape our lives. Waseme, the Mythic Being of Intersectionality, is one of four works created by Williams for his public art series Mythic Futures, presented in partnership with The Nicholson Project in 2023. Through intricate and layered compositions, Williams engages with the concept of collective memory, prompting us to consider how past experiences inform present realities and future possibilities. His Afrofuturist and surrealist series brought to life contemporary Black folklore in a moment of social, racial, and economic upheaval. Each Mythic Being is a mythological deity the artist created that reflects contemporary Black life, serving as a site for radical Black imagining in public space as a liberated act, one meant to subvert an untenable status quo. 

Dominic Green’s photographs examine how perception shapes our understanding of power, race, and agency in society. His series, Perception x Agency was created for the culminating exhibition from his residency at The Nicholson Project in 2020. This work challenges conventional perceptions of marginalized identities, offering viewers alternative narratives and questioning dominant societal structures. Drawing on the Artist’s previous work as a playwright and filmmaker, this work brings ancient myths into the modern realm, while simultaneously presenting Black people as complete, complex beings, beyond the simplistic caricatures embedded in cultural imagery. Perception x Agency calls forth new mythology around Black and brown bodies missing from literature and culture, asking viewers to harness these ancient myths as vehicles for discovery and growth.

Njaimeh Njie is The Nicholson Project’s first artist-in-resident of 2025. Her series Flight Plans draws on folklore, archives, documentary, and Afrofuturist influences to meditate on flight as freedom. In these selections from the collage series, Njie uses found photos and documentary photos she’s made to build landscapes that form a runway back through time and across space. Along the way, she imagines a chain of ancestors, moving in shadow, telling, sharing, remembering, and preparing for flight.

Shaunté Gates, artist-in-residence at The Nicholson Project in 2023, layers photography, painting, found texts, collage, and family portraits, to create dreamlike landscapes that explore the labyrinthine social constructs of race, class, and the physical sites people inhabit and operate within. Born in Washington, DC, he uses the architecture of the city’s public housing projects as a starting point for each work, building complex compositions that weave together layers of world history, personal memories, American pop culture, and mythology. Through this multidisciplinary approach, Gates’ work engages with the past to present viewers with a more nuanced understanding of the present.

Representing the breadth of artists working with The Nicholson Project, the artists featured in Shared Ground invite us into new spaces for conversation, offering transformative ways to understand the complexities of culture, identity, migration, and history, while building shared understandings that can change the way we perceive the world around us. Shared Ground is more than an exhibition of artwork; it is a reminder that culture and community are not static or singular. They are ever-evolving, forged through collaboration, care, and the shared labor of creating spaces for growth and belonging. Through these four artists, we are offered a vision of the world where art acts as a reflection of our collective experiences and a catalyst for future possibilities.