ATLANTA, GA.- “Preservation is not simply survival—it is continuity, awareness, daily resistance, care and righteous imagining. Saving Our Sacred Selves examines how we preserve our individual and collective selves and what should be carried forward or relinquished.

Grounded in the artist’s introspective inquiry, the exhibition straddles the tension between what the world forgets and what we fight to remember—our stories, our legacy, and the unseen, but critical, bonds that shape who we are. The work draws upon the prophetic frameworks of Black women writers and thinkers—most notably Alice Walker, Octavia Butler, and Toni Morrison— as reminders that imagining is a radical act, that predicting what’s ahead can be practical, and that what we tend to with care, survives. This exhibition offers large-scale narrative paintings, tonal portraits, landscapes, and domestic objects that emerge to present a visual and spatial introspection of daily life and the translation of those moments to the larger narrative of cultural exploration. Throughout this intergenerational investigation and dialogue, nature herself bears witness.

This exhibition, and all that is good within it, is dedicated to the memory of loved ones lost and the other 92%.” –Ayana Ross

Ayana Ross (b.1977, Savannah, GA) is a Georgia native, currently living and working in the metro Atlanta area. Ross is a figurative oil painter whose work explores the intergenerational impact of social themes, including topics of identity, race, equity, and the broader evaluation of our value systems. She combines traditional oil painting techniques, using figurative realism, with decorative elements and design.
Ornamentation and patterning serve to establish a visual language that evokes nostalgia, elevates her subjects, and provides historical and cultural context—functioning both aesthetically and symbolically.

Ross received a Master of Arts degree in Painting from Savannah College of Art and Design (2021). She has been recognized as the 2021 winner of the Bennett Prize, the 2022 recipient of the NBAF Horizons Award in Visual Arts, a Spring 2024 Mellon Arts and Practitioner Fellow through Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, a 2024 Eben Demarest Award recipient, and most recently, the 2026 Duncanson Artist -In -Residence at the Taft Museum. Her work is included in public and private collections, including The Bennett Collection, Savannah College of Art and Design permanent collection, the Muskegon Museum of Art, and the Reading Public Museum.