After Touch: Mimosa Pudica
Crystal z campbell
Exhibition Dates:
September 18 - October 30, 2026
Opening Reception:
Friday, September 18, 2026, 5:00-9:00pm
Rivalry is pleased to announce Aftertouch: Mimosa Pudica, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with Crystal Z Campbell. The exhibition expands Campbell’s ongoing exploration of “underloved” histories through new collages and sculptures that are inspired by the touch-sensitive mimosa pudica plant. Drawing from herbarium collections, archival materials, ceramics, painting, and cast bronze and iron, the work examines colonial histories, migration, and ecological memory.
WORKS
More coming soon…
Installation ImageS
Coming soon…
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Photo: Portrait of Crystal Z Campbell by Brandon Watson. Courtesy of the photographer.
Crystal Z Campbell (b. 1980) is a visual artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of Black, Filipinx, and Chinese descents whose works center the psychogeographic, historical perception, and the underloved.
A featured filmmaker at the 67th Flaherty Film Seminar programmed by Almudena Escobar López and Sky Hopinka, Campbell’s films and visual art have screened and exhibited internationally: European Media Arts Festival (EMAF), Berlinale Film Festival Expanded, Artists Space, National Gallery of Art, MIT List Visual Arts Center, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, The Drawing Center, Nest, ICA-Philadelphia, Museum of Modern Art, BLOCK Museum, REDCAT, Artissima, Studio Museum of Harlem, Bemis, Project Row Houses, Knoxville Museum of Art, Gallerie im Turm, SculptureCenter, Semana Cinema de Negro in Belo Horizonte, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, amongst others. Campbell’s film REVOLVER received the Silver Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival (an Academy Award Qualifying Festival). Campbell had their first solo museum exhibition at St. Louis Art Museum in Fall 2024.
Other honors include a 2024 NYFA/NYSCA Fellow in Film/Video, 2022 Creative Capital Award, Harvard Radcliffe Film Study Center & David and Roberta Logie Fellowship, 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts, Pollock-Krasner Award, MAP Fund, MacDowell, Mid-America Arts Alliance, Skowhegan, Rijksakademie, Whitney ISP, Franklin Furnace, Tulsa Artist Fellowship, Black Spatial Relics, and DUKE DocX Fellowship. Campbell’s writing is featured in two artist books published by Visual Studies Workshop Press, World Literature Today, Monday Journal, GARAGE, and Hyperallergic. Campbell’s work is held at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, NY, Philbrook Museum, Gilcrease Museum, Duke University, Harvard University, the Beth Rudin DeWoody collection, and other provide collections in the US and Italy. Campbell is currently an Associate Professor in Art and Media Study at the University at Buffalo and visiting MFA faculty at Bard College. They live and work between Oklahoma and New York