Alim Smith, “Floating” and “Thought A New Dress Would Make it Better”, 2025, Oil on canvas
Paintings by Alim Smith
Taylor Gordon, “To Be A Black Woman”, 2023, Oil on canvas
Taylor Gordon, “Dear Tay”, 2023, Oil on canvas with cardboard
Manuel Ramos, “Abuela Gorin”, 2025, Oil on canvas
Manuel Ramos, “Abuela Olga”, 2025, Oil on canvas
Currently on view at John William Gallery in Wilmington is Colorful Voices: Taylor Gordon, Alim Smith, Manuel Ramos, featuring unique paintings by the three Delaware artists.
From the gallery about the exhibition-
Colorful Voices: Taylor Gordon, Alim Smith, Manuel Ramos brings together three distinctive practices that articulate the richness of contemporary community life through color, portraiture, and cultural reference. The exhibition seeks to foreground the vitality of local voices while offering a space in which viewers might consider how identity, humor, and heritage are translated into visual form.
Taylor Gordon’s paintings situate themselves within the lineage of Black contemporary art, yet remain deeply personal. Her chromatic sensibility infuses each figure with layered emotional resonance, encouraging conversations around beauty, resilience, and the multiplicity of Black experience beyond reductive narratives. Manuel Ramos, or “RAmos ART,” approaches portraiture with a keen attentiveness to light and surface, imbuing his sitters with an understated dignity that resonates quietly yet powerfully. Emerging from a self-taught practice shaped during the pandemic, his canvases record moments of presence that hover between the intimate and universal. Alim Smith, or “Yesterday Nite,” works in a spontaneous visual language, fusing surrealism, popular culture, and sly humor. His rhythmic compositions and vivid palette translate music, memory, and cultural archetypes into forms at once playful and incisive.
Together these artists propose color as more than visual pleasure: it becomes a conduit for empathy, critique, and joy. Colorful Voices invites us to engage with works that are celebratory yet searching, attuned to both the textures of daily life and the broader currents shaping our communities. In gathering their practices, the exhibition hopes to affirm art’s capacity to nurture dialogue and to render visible the stories that animate shared experience.
This exhibition is on view until 12/18/25.
Alim Smith’s work may look familiar- he created work for the television series Atlanta and the cover art for Mac Miller‘s second posthumous album, Balloonerism, released earlier this year. Miller reached out to him in 2018, after finding his work on Instagram. Smith was recently nominated for a Grammy award for “Best Recording Package” for this album.
Mac Miller’s “Balloonerism” cover art by Alim Smith