Celebrating Five Years of Villa Albertine’s Residencies: Artists Discuss Memory, Resistance and the Afro-Diasporic Image

Alexis Peskine is a visual artist working across mixed media, film, and photography whose practice explores Afro-descendant identity at the intersection of spirituality, historical memory, and collective consciousness. Drawing from his Afro-Brazilian maternal heritage and the traditions of Candomblé, his work investigates forms of resistance, transcendence, and transformation through spiritual practices, examining how faith and ritual have empowered communities to endure and reimagine freedom in the face of oppression.

During his Villa Albertine residency in Atlanta, Peskine is developing a feature-length film and an exhibition centered on Afro-spiritual resistance in the American South. Hosted by the African Diaspora Art Museum of Atlanta (ADAMA), the project includes research across Georgia and South Carolina, engaging with Gullah Geechee communities and Hoodoo practitioners.

Peskine graduated from Howard University in 2003, where he won the Verizon HBCU Student Art Competition, and later received a Fulbright Fellowship to pursue his MFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). His 2007 exhibition at MOCADA was featured in The New York Times. He has since exhibited internationally, including at the Black Arts World Festival (2010) and the Dakar Biennale (2016), and has participated in exhibitions, residencies, and biennales across Africa, the Americas, and Europe.

Gay is a storyteller, born and raised in Georgia, whose work draws on the environment and spiritual symbolism of the American South. Blending motifs from regional life, she explores identity, culture, and power through storytelling, highlighting formidable female figures and intergenerational relationships. Her practice -encompassing installations, paintings, performance, photography,
video, and monumental sculptures challenges dominant narratives, reclaims space through personal memory and mythology, and creates immersive environments that invite reflection on self and belonging.

Gay’s recent exhibitions include Repossessions, Spelman College Museum, Atlanta, GA (2026); Ancestral Mirrors, Clark Atlanta Art Museum, Atlanta, GA (2025); Four Women, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston, MA (2024); Atlanta Biennial, Atlanta Contemporary (2021); Le Monde Bossale, Montreal, Canada, in (2021); Adorned, McColl Center for Arts and Innovation, Charlotte, NC (2020); and Holding Space for Nobility, Ackland Museum, Chapel Hill, NC (2020).

Gay exhibits her works and procures residencies within the United States, Europe, Japan, and South Africa. She is a Do-Good Fellow recipient, an Emory University Arts and Social Justice Fellow, (2020) and a Hudgens Prize Finalist (2022). Currently, Gay is a adjunct at Spelman College, the Visual Artist-in-Residence at Oglethorpe University, (2022-23), recipient of the Radcliffe Bailey Award for Excellence in Visual Art and is one of five Georgia Women to Watch selected by the Georgia Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts (2023) and most recently awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) for Celebrating America250: Arts Projects through Albany Museum of Art (2026).

Armelle Tulunda’s artistic practice explores questions of identity, memory, and belonging through astronomy and ancestral Congolese cosmologies. Observing the night sky and reconnecting with Congolese beliefs and legends, her work creates a bridge between personal history and collective memory.

Her practice often inhabits a space of paradox, reflecting her experience of being born in France to Congolese parents. Moving between light and darkness, scientific knowledge and personal narrative, Tulunda draws inspiration from satellite imagery and NASA materials while employing craft-based techniques. In continuity with her Perspectives installation series, her research in Savannah investigates the traces of Congolese cosmology preserved among enslaved communities in the American South, despite centuries of colonial erasure.

Tulunda (born 1994 in Colombes, France) lives and works in the Paris region. Her work has been presented at venues including Mucem (Marseille), the Mulhouse Photo Biennale, Hangar Y (Meudon), the Museum of Fine Arts of Nancy, La Villette (Paris), CAC – La Synagogue de Delme, and Ugly Duck (London). She received support from the Grand Est Region’s Emerging Visual Arts program in 2021 and 2023, as well as a mobility grant from the Goethe-Institut and the European Union.

Ngnima Sarr, known as T.I.E, is a multifaceted Senegalese artist, singer, poetess, songwriter, and music producer, leading projects like T.I.E, The Love Process and Exilians. She also created the immersive show Lâcher L’homme inspired by Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks. Additionally, she recently participated in the thought-provoking piece Freedom, I’ll have lived your dream until the full last day, curated by Felwine Sarr, showcased in New York and North Carolina with the support of Villa Albertine’s Face Theater and FUSED programs. T.I.E’s work is rooted in an Afro-eco-feminist vision, evident in her installation Mawu’s Daughters, which premiered in Dakar during Partcours 2022. She is a former resident of Villa Albertine Atlanta.

Clarke Brown is the Special Projects Curator at the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, where she creates exhibitions that explore history and visual culture through art of the African Diaspora. Prior to her current role, Clarke was the inaugural Curatorial Fellow for the Winifred and Kevin P. Reilly Initiative for Underrepresented Artists at the Louisiana State University Art Museum in Baton Rouge, LA. Recently, she was named a 2025 Fellow for the Professional Alliance for Curators of Color (PACC) through the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC). Clarke holds an MA in Museum Studies from New York University and a BA in History from Spelman College.