OUR ARTISTS

JAMES MISHIO

Josie Girand

ari kim

Liz Scheer

Galerie Shibumi, in collaboration with Artemartis, is proud to announce the first New York solo exhibition of Ghanaian artist James Mishio ( b. 1997), opening at Galerie Shibumi. The exhibition, titled “REFUSAL OF ERASURE (NOTHING GOES QUIET HERE),” marks a significant moment in Mishio’s career and a milestone in the gallery’s commitment to presenting urgent voices in contemporary art.

“Look again. Listen closely.

What you ignore has something to say.

What’s been left behind still breathes.”

This exhibition unfolds in two parts—Refusal of Erasure and Nothing Goes Quiet Here—each one calling the viewer into a deeper conversation. Not just with James Mishio’s work, but with the rhythms of memory, material, and meaning that live quietly beneath the surface of our everyday world. Together, these titles frame an experience that challenges how we define value, beauty, and waste—and who gets to decide.

Each piece in the exhibition is a deliberate interruption of disappearance. Mishio doesn’t simply use found fabrics—he listens to them. He stitches, layers, and reimagines them into powerful visual statements that hold memory, cultural history, and personal resonance. In doing so, he restores dignity to what society has cast off. His art becomes a way of insisting that nothing—no material, no story—is truly disposable.

Nothing Goes Quiet Here expands this idea into the realm of sound, silence, and survival. The title suggests a space where even the quietest threads carry weight. Where silence itself hums with testimony. Nothing in this gallery space fades into the background; every work insists on being heard, seen, and felt. Mishio’s practice reveals the persistent echoes that live in fabric folds, frayed edges, and patched surfaces. Each work is a site of resistance, a vessel of endurance, a whisper that refuses to be silenced.

take a closer look into James Mishio’s practice

Together, these titles frame a powerful ethos: that art is not just about making—it is about remembering, witnessing, and reimagining. Mishio’s process speaks to a larger cycle of care, sustainability, and cultural memory. He invites us to reconsider our own habits of consumption and discarding, asking: “What are we throwing away? Who are we forgetting?”

This exhibition is not quiet. It is not passive. It is a living archive—an act of holding on, of lifting up, of speaking back. It is a declaration that what has been erased can be remembered. That what has been discarded can be re-seen. That nothing, truly, goes quiet here.