Under a Groove - an art exhibition for BHM 2026

Celebrate Black History Month with Under a Groove, a group exhibition featuring Ghanaian and Nigerian artists exploring kinship & community.

What connects us? What do we mean when we use the word "community"? And how do we hold the collective and the individual together, not as opposites, but as two forces that need each other to exist at all?

Under a Groove brings together two Ghanaian and three Nigerian artists in a powerful exploration of kinship, memory, spirituality and belonging. Inspired by Ubuntu, the exhibition celebrates the shared groove of community precisely through the distinct rhythms of individual lives - not despite them.

This thought-provoking group exhibition brings together the work of distinguished Ghanaian and Nigerian artists Sophia Oshodin, Cecilia Lamptey-Botchway, Paul Majek, Ray Soko and Kwesi Awotwi. Working across painting, portraiture and visual storytelling, the artists offer compelling perspectives on friendship, family, memory, spirituality and cultural inheritance, inviting us to reflect on the nature of kinship and community.

Inspired by Ubuntu ("I am because we are"), the exhibition proposes that individuality and collectivity are not competing forces but a single, continuous exchange: the self is formed in relation, and the collective is made of selves. Community isn't the erasure of difference into sameness - it's the space where difference becomes legible, where each person's particularity finds its place because others are there to receive it. We are bound by shared histories, rituals and collective experience, and within that shared structure, each of us carries our own rhythm. Like musicians improvising within the same composition, or dancers moving within a common groove, we express ourselves in distinct ways because we remain connected to something larger than ourselves — the groove doesn't restrict the improvisation; it's what makes the improvisation meaningful. The works on view sit inside this dynamic interplay, showing how the individual and the collective produce each other in real time, and how our unique stories become the very material from which the ever-evolving rhythm of community and our shared future is made.

CasildART exists inside this same logic. We are a not-for-profit gallery built to showcase the work of contemporary Black artists - and we understand that a gallery, like a community, is made real by the individuals who choose to be part of it. When you purchase a work, you are not simply acquiring an object; you are joining the groove - materially supporting the artist and the gallery, and helping to catalyse change in the art world, one distinct contribution at a time.

Come and visit us. All are welcome!