What We Have Always Known: An Exploration of Ancestral Intelligence, Modern Science, and the Future of Human Health

At the center of Zainab Sumu's practice are the Sandé/Sowo traditions of Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Côte d'Ivoire. She engages these traditions not as static historical references, but as living systems of knowledge carried through lineage, material, land, ritual, feminine authority, and the intelligence of making. Working across fiber, sculpture, painting, and printmaking, Zainab draws upon materials including jute, yarn, chiffon, leather, velvet, beads, cowrie shells, calabash, reed, ink, charcoal, and watercolor. Through weaving, construction, transformation, and experimentation, her works ask us to consider the forms knowledge can take when it is carried not only through written or institutional systems, but through the hand, the body, the environment, cultural practice, memory, and community. Across the exhibition, knowledge emerges as survival, wisdom, reclamation, continuity, authority, medicine, translation, and innovation. Works from Zainab's Sowo series move from the intelligence of plant life and adaptation in Freetown to questions of migration, global commerce, reclamation, feminine authority, the body, spirituality, and healing. Her Sowei mask monotypes extend woven forms into experimental printmaking, using the construction of the fiber works themselves as part of a new process of artistic discovery. Together, the works challenge the assumption that tradition and innovation exist on opposite ends of a spectrum, revealing how inherited cultural practices can serve as powerful sites of contemporary inquiry, experimentation, and new possibilities.

Curated and produced by Nucarta in partnership with RSM Gallery at Bentley University. Nucarta is an interdisciplinary platform advancing art, science, innovation, and health research. Committed to amplifying Global Majority artists, Nucarta challenges boundaries between creative and scientific inquiry, recognizing artistic practice as vital to cultural discourse and racial health equity innovation.