Professor Pamela Sneed in 'Sacred and Profane' at Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art

Adjunct Associate Professor Pamela Sneed is exhibiting work alongside Carlos Martiel in Sacred and Profane at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. The exhibition opened on February 20 and will run through April 12, 2026.

Sacred and Profane includes “works on paper, poetic interventions on historical records, and mixed-media collages, all extracting from or gesturing toward Fire Island’s hidden Black history,” reads the press release. All of the works are intended “to explore Black presence, erasure, memory, and endurance on Fire Island.”

Prior to Sacred and Profane, Sneed was part of the 2022 BOFFO Residency Fire Island, where she explored the little-known history of "slave pens" on the island, "making large-scale watercolors and collages using natural materials like shells, sand, seaweed, and cowrie to imagine the presence and erasure of Black bodies and honor those who may have been held there." The exhibition at Leslie-Lohman grew out of this exploration, and the joint exhibition "asserts that to uncover what has been buried is to recover the body as a witness to what was taken and what still remains."

More Information about Sacred and Profane can be found here.

Sneed is a New York based poet, performer and visual artist. She is the author of Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom Than Slavery, KONG and Other Works, Sweet Dreams, and Funeral Diva published by City Lights in Oct 2020. Funeral Diva was featured in the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Lit Hub, Art Net, and more. Funeral Diva won the 2021 Lambda Lesbian Poetry Award and was recommended by The New York Times alongside Barack Obama’s memoir. Additionally, in 2021, she was a panelist for The David Zwirner Gallery’s More Life exhibit, and has spoken at Bard Center for Humanities, The Ford Foundation, The Gordon Parks Foundation, Columbia University, The New School, New York Public Library, The Brooklyn Museum, MOMA, DIA, NYU’s Center For Humanities. She has published in The Paris Review, Frieze Magazine, Art Forum, The Academy of American Poets, The Brooklyn Rail, THEM, BOMB, and most recently Poetry Magazine. She has appeared in Nikki Giovanni’s The 100 Best African American Poems.