HARLEM, NY.- Curtiss Jacobs Gallery will present A Little Sugar in My Bowl, a new exhibition of works by Ransome, opening Sunday, September 13.

Rooted in his own African American family history, Ransome has developed a deeply personal visual language through which the stories of one family become part of a much larger story of Black America.

His lineage reaches back to Southern sharecroppers and forward through the Great Migration, but these paintings refuse to allow struggle to become the entirety of that history. Instead, Ransome asks us to look at what Black families created, protected and carried with them: love, beauty, dignity, style, humor, aspiration, intimacy, memory and joy.

Across the exhibition, children run and dance beneath the gaze of ancestors. Women command space with extraordinary presence. Families, lovers, workers and elders populate images that move effortlessly between private memory and collective history.

Ransome combines painting with patterned and collaged papers, constructing his surfaces much as memory itself is constructed: through fragments preserved, rearranged and passed from one generation to another. His use of pattern recalls domestic textiles and quilting traditions, while his method of assembling disparate visual elements shares something with the improvisation and sampling of Black music. These influences have long been central to the artist's practice.





The title, A Little Sugar in My Bowl, captures the spirit of the exhibition.

Here, sweetness is not sentimentality, nor is it an escape from history. It is sustenance.

It is the pleasure, affection, beauty and humanity people create even when circumstances would seem determined to deny them those things.

Ultimately, A Little Sugar in My Bowl asks us to consider inheritance differently: not simply what Black families survived, but what made that survival meaningful.