Embers Held
Works by LeRease Clark
On View February 2, 2026 – March 22, 2026
Moses Williams Center, 1st Floor
Curated by Daisy Brown, Embers Held gathers works made across years of Baltimore artist LeRease Clark’s life.
LeRease Clark is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist and exhibit installer based in Baltimore, MD. Drawing from personal experience, ancestral memory, and spiritual insight, Clark creates work rooted in emotional truth, sacred darkness, and the power of transformation. Working with the chaos of charcoal, they dive into the depths of identity, grief, healing, and divine femininity.
As part of the exhibition team at The Peale, Clark has installed major shows including the Sondheim Semifinalists Exhibition, Chromafugue [Leroy E. Hoffberger School of Painting], and Off the Wall [Baker Artist Awards].
With every piece and project, LeRease brings care, depth, and a commitment to realness – making art that reflects the unseen, the remembered, and the rising.
Artist Statement
“Embers Held gathers works made across years of returning to the same questions, guided by a desire to stay close to what remains after intensity. That return has inspired both the images and the way they are made.
I work primarily with charcoal, a material shaped by fire and restraint, allowing figures to emerge slowly, held in shadow and memory. Through touch, pressure, and pause, I stay with states that resist closure – bodies that carry history, darkness that remains charged, intimacy that does not require exposure.
In this way, the exhibition moves away from ideas of progress or reinvention and towards tending – returning inward and staying with what emerges, allowing what has been held in shadow to settle through time and care. Each work functions as an ember, sustained through attention rather than force.”
