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New York, NY – May 22, 2025 – The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation is pleased to announce Dr. Gervais Marsh as the recipient of its 2025 Curatorial Open Call. Marsh will curate An Inherent Undoing (working title), a group exhibition planning to examine the im/possibility of reparation in a world shaped by violent racial, class, ableist, environmental, and capitalist fissures. The exhibition, currently in development, will open in March 2026 at The 8th Floor, the Foundation’s gallery space near Union Square, New York.
In their curatorial proposal, Marsh asks: “If cracks extend to the profound depths of the societal core, causing a foundational rupture, then is repair possible without a structural undoing?” They posit that the gravity of the fracture is perhaps too immense to even contemplate any form of amends. We live within the interstices of fragmented realities. Rather than flatten the complexities that have accumulated into histories of harm, the exhibition asks what can be understood from reckoning with the failures and the limits of repair; underscoring the material and psychic stakes while seeking to complicate repair as a concept, and interrogating attempts to obscure responsibility for causing harm.
Grappling with state violence, ongoing genocide, anti-Black logics, settler colonialism, and a continued disregard for the natural world, An Inherent Undoing redirects attention to what is overlooked, highlights otherwise possibilities that can arise, and considers what is strategically veiled under the pretense of reconciling legacies of trauma and injury. What else can exist beside the imperative to repair? Can there be political potency channeled through despair and destruction? If there is potential for reparation, how can it be approached as a deeply rooted process that centers the holistic needs of those who have been harmed? An Inherent Undoing will be a sustained meditation on negotiating societies that are radically broken, while also recognizing that this does not constitute the totality of life.
Dr. Gervais Marsh is a writer, curator and scholar based in New York City, whose practice meditates on questions of relation, intimacy, and the limits of reconciliation. Guided by a desire to foster emotional resonances through texts, exhibition making, public art and programming, they seek to ignite ongoing reflection rather than definitive answers. They think alongside artists across all mediums, nurturing an interweaving of texts from expansive areas of thought. With a commitment to citation influenced by Black Feminisms, they believe that knowledge is created collectively, and lean into the vulnerability of uncertainty, recognizing that not everything can be known. Affirming modes of meaning making that circumvent the grips of racial capitalism, they prioritize listening, introspection and thoughtful dialogue as critical to intentional study. They received a PhD in Performance Studies and work on the curatorial team at Creative Time as the Artist Research Manager. They were a recent curatorial fellow with the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Marsh’s writing has been published widely in artist monographs, exhibition catalogs and arts journals and they teach undergraduate/graduate courses at the intersections of Black Feminist Theory, Praxis and Performance, Black Queer Studies, Caribbean Studies and Visual Culture. They grew up in Kingston, Jamaica, a home that shapes their understanding of self and relationship to the world. gervaismarsh.com
About the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation
The Foundation believes in art as a cornerstone of cohesive, sustainable communities and greater participation in civic life. In its mission to make art available to the broader public, in particular to underserved communities, the Foundation provides direct support to, and facilitates partnerships between, cultural organizations and advocates of social justice across the public and private sectors. Through grantmaking, the Foundation supported cross-disciplinary work connecting art with social justice via experimental collaborations, as well as extending cultural resources to organizations and areas of New York City in need. sdrubin.org
About The 8th Floor
The 8th Floor is an independent exhibition and event space established in 2010 by Shelley and Donald Rubin to promote artistic and cultural initiatives. Inspired by The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, the gallery is committed to broadening the access and availability of art to New York audiences. Seeking further cultural exchange, The 8th Floor explores the potential of art as an instrument for social change in the 21st century, through an annual program of innovative contemporary art exhibitions and an events program comprised of performances, salon-style discussions, and those organized by external partners. the8thfloor.org
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