Floating Metal: UNDERcurrents In My Father's Garden

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The FSU Museum of Fine Arts invites you to "Floating Metal: UNDERcurrents In My Father's Garden," on view from August 24, 2026 - March 13, 2027.

“Floating Metal” brings together sculpture, image, video, performance, and sound to honor the artistic legacy of Ed Love (1936-1999) and the intergenerational creative practice of choreographer and performer nia love (b. 1963). The exhibition extends nia love’s long-term serial projects g1(host) and UNDERcurrents, which explore the enduring histories of the Middle Passage and transatlantic slavery. This newest iteration continues to invite audiences to probe the seam between catastrophic history and everyday memory, pivoting on the elemental medium of water.

The exhibition also marks the first museum presentation of Ed Love’s Beloved series (1988) with metal sculptures commemorating black historical figures, completed shortly before his untimely passing in 1999. As a representative yet under-recognized artist of the Black Arts generation, Ed Love is known for welding discarded metal salvaged from scrap yards into powerful totems of global black consciousness. Likewise driven by the social force and weight of blackness, nia love’s multi-modal movement practice aims to breach the propriety of “dance,” refashioning it as gesture–the embodied memory of movement, geographies, and scales of time gathered and shared through black forms of life and culture.

The presentation of Floating Metal: UNDERcurrents In My Father’s Garden by nia love was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Foundation and the Mellon Foundation. Additional support comes from FSU’s Council on Research + Creativity (CRC).