Leilah Babirye & Reverend Joyce McDonald
Marc Selwyn Fine Art and Hoffman Donahue are delighted to announce 427 Camden. This second-floor space located at 427 N Camden Drive in Beverly Hills opens September 30 featuring a solo presentation by Adam Alessi organized by Hoffman Donahue, with exhibitions alternating between the two galleries thereafter. 427 Camden also houses Hoffman Donahue’s Los Angeles offices. Marc Selwyn Fine Art continues full-time exhibitions at their Camden Annex downstairs and on South Santa Monica Boulevard. In addition to their own programming, the galleries will occasionally invite respected colleagues to present special projects. We’re thrilled to open on Camden Drive, joining a vibrant community of friends and neighbors including Michael Werner Gallery, Mameg, Gagosian, Christie's, and Sotheby's.
Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to present a two-person exhibition of new work by Leilah Babirye and Reverend Joyce McDonald. Though born a generation apart and on opposite sides of the world, Babirye and McDonald each create deeply personal figurative sculptures that bear witness to their lived experiences of marginalization, survival, activism, and healing. Together, Babirye and McDonald each offer a powerful meditation on the body as a site for resistance and as a vessel shaped by struggle, reclaimed through creativity, and ultimately uplifted through the act of making.
Leilah Babirye, born in Kampala, Uganda, is an artist and activist who fled her home country due to persecution as a gay woman and LGBTQ+ advocate. She was granted asylum in the United States in 2018. Babirye’s physical portraits span sculptural media exploring themes of identity, resilience, and queer visibility. These totemic figures pay homage to LGBTQ+ individuals who have been ostracized by Ugandan society. Babirye titles her works in the show using common names from her native Luganda language— Kenyangi (The One Who is Loved), Masiko (Hope), and Isabirye (The One Who Has Been Blessed) II,—a reverent embrace of her heritage and the Western and Central African traditions that inspire her work as well as the queer—kuchu—African community.
The ceramic works in this exhibition exemplify the artist’s distinct material vocabulary: layered, painterly glazes adorned with industrial hardware; braids woven from bicycle tire inner tubes; and carved, waxed, burned, and burnished wood bases. The largest work in the exhibition, Nkugwa from the Kuchu Mamba (Lungfish) Clan II, is a cast bronze sculpture imbued with bold monumental physicality, permanence, and resonant power.
A self-taught, multidisciplinary artist, activist, and ordained minister, Reverend Joyce McDonald brings decades of lived experience to her practice. McDonald’s intimately scaled sculptures are instilled with themes that have shaped her life – hope, grace, and healing - but also hardship and loss. As a self-described “testimonial artist,” McDonald openly shares her own story, which includes her battle with addiction, her life and activism as an HIV positive woman, and her spiritual journey, to help inspire confidence and dignity in the lives of others.
In this exhibition, McDonald shares a selection of recent works that confront systems of oppression while affirming the power of the spirit to transcend them. Each piece is both a sermon and a testimony—deeply rooted in Black spiritual traditions, family, recovery communities, and the belief that creativity is a divine gift. Crafted from humble materials such as air-dry clay, Mod Podge, fabric paint, as well as glazed and fired clay, McDonald’s tactile surfaces record the delicate traces of her hand highlighting the direct intimacy with their maker. A sculptural relief made of air-dry clay, Keba, is one of McDonald’s many sculptures that memorialize and celebrate family. The work is a representation of the artist’s daughter, her eyes closed and her expression radiating serenity and calm. The Covering, a fired ceramic with a metallic glaze, also describes the intimate bond between a parent and child. Here, a mother holds a swaddled baby close to her face, a tender gesture of love and protection. Other works on view such as Stillness, Self Care, and Beauty in the Midst (Intended Love) enshrine the artist’s wider experiences of healing and transcendence.
Leilah Babirye has presented solo exhibitions at the de Young Museum, San Francisco; Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Bretton, UK; Gordon Robichaux, New York; Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin; Stephen Friedman Gallery, London; and Rebecca Camacho Presents, San Francisco. In 2024, Babirye’s work was included in Stranieri Ovunque - Foreigners Everywhere: 60th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice. Her work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; and RISD Museum, Rhode Island, Providence.
Reverend Joyce McDonald has presented solo exhibitions at The Bronx Museum and Gordon Robichaux in New York and Maureen Paley in London. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions including in Los Angeles at Marc Selwyn Gallery and Parker Gallery and in New York as part of the exhibitions at apexart, the Museum of the City of New York, the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, and Judson Memorial Church. Her work is held in the collections of The Bronx Museum, New York; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; and the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.