Melly hosts Marilyn Nance's first European exhibition

Marilyn Nance started taking pictures of everyday life in New York City at the age of eighteen. At the age of twenty-three, she travelled with a US delegation to Nigeria as a technical officer, where she made a vivid visual record. She has since been making images of historical events, family traditions, community gatherings, travel and intimate everyday moments for five decades. At Art Institute Melly, her first European exhibition is Spirit Faith Grace Rage. On view until Sunday 26 April 2026.

The exhibition showcases Marilyn's dedication to capturing life within the African diaspora and managing personal archives as essential sources of historical knowledge. The exhibition features a selection of photographs complemented by sound clips collected by Marilyn and brought together by artist and technologist Ali Santana.

While researching and organising her photo archive, Marilyn began using the title Spirit Faith Grace Rage to connect her work, spread across time and space. Marilyn sees Spirit as the underlying energy of an event; Faith as the confidence that everything contributes to the bigger picture; Grace acknowledges the spiral of time and the beauty, love and joy present in the everyday; Rage is the accumulated energy that manifests and moves us forward.

In the exhibition, the photographs carefully selected by Marilyn form a coherent set of timeless gestures, connecting reunions, rituals, embraces, dance, stages, street or church scenes, demonstrations and living rooms. Sound clips collected by Marilyn over the years and compiled by artist and technologist Ali Santana permeate the exhibition space with the social and intimate atmospheres from which the images emerge.

These ideas are at the heart of the exhibition, which brings together photographs that transcend time, place and social context, revealing the connections between the lives of African-Americans, the African diaspora and global histories of resistance and celebration.