Brother, Brother: The Interior Lives of Black Men offers a critical intervention in masculinity studies by challenging long-held stereotypes and reductive representations of Black men. Too often, images of Black masculinity have been shaped by tropes of aggression, absence, or pathology. This exhibition instead illuminates the complexity of Black men’s lives, emphasizing emotional depth, quiet reflection, tenderness, and unbowed dignity.

In her essay “From Angry Boys to Angry Men”, bell hooks reminds us that Black boys endure a “double jeopardy”. Racial biases subject Black men and boys to patriarchal norms that suppress vulnerability, but also burden them with a psychohistory that frames them as “castrated, ineffectual, irresponsible, and not real men.”

Brother, Brother resists this cycle of distortion. Through 30 works drawn from the CCH Pounder-Koné Collection, the exhibition insists on visibility for the intimate, nuanced, and interior experiences of Black men, inviting audiences to reimagine masculinity not as constraint, but as a site of liberation, wholeness, and self-determination.