Church of Broken Pieces by photographer Shawn Theodore is coming to Brooklyn fresh from a three-month run at The African American Museum in Philadelphia. Opening at the Richard Beavers Gallery, BedStuy’s destination space for established and emerging visuals artists. Shawn Theodore is a Philadelphia based; multidisciplinary artist working in photography; video and collage.

His practice embodies a defiant brand of black artistry; one that focuses on the fragmentation and manipulation of African American and African Diaspora identities and otherness, while exploring concepts of race, spirituality, patriarchy; matriarchy, and class structure within disappearing Black communities.

Shawn’s images have been selected as the lead photograph for the second time by Apple’s#ShotoniPhone Instagram page, also the image “Being Black Outweighs One’s Blues” was selected to use as the cover of the Smithsonian Magazines, Sept 2016 issue announcing the grand opening of the National Museum of African American History & Culture.

This is an homage to an ever-changing, ever-moving Diaspora, a dynamic people who remain unfettered and unburdened, moving with full spirits, celebratory of themselves even in the face of uncertain morality. There are no broken pieces here, everything is whole, black and unique, separated from the invisible, separated from the incorrect construct of the 'black monolith' of identity.

(Shawn Theodore)