Events
Concert Series:
Friday, September 5, 8 PM
Saturday, September 13, 8 PM
Saturday, September 20, 8 PM
Friday, September 26, 8 PM
Recordings and show catalogs available at the gallery.
An art show and concert series at TAG Gallery
September 3-27, 2025
In times when compassion is called weakness and self-definition deemed dangerous, artists Pam Douglas and musician Raya Yarbrough refuse to be silenced. This mother-daughter collaboration transforms what those in power label “improper ideology” into a defiant celebration of truth-telling through art.
IMPROPER IDEOLOGY merges painting, sculpture, poetry, and music into immersive experiences that challenge visitors to inhabit both physical and emotional landscapes. Douglas’s mixed-media works don’t merely illustrate Yarbrough’s poems—they embody them. Text flows across weathered surfaces, intertwines with found objects, and cascades from hanging installations, creating environments where words become tactile and images sing.
The exhibition’s innovative format spreads longer poems across multiple works, inviting viewers to move through space as they would through verses. In “For So Long,” seven tree branches protrude from the gallery wall, each carrying fragments of text that accumulate into meaning. “I Wish You This Afternoon” suspends six panels in a semi-circle, surrounding visitors in a cocoon of words and imagery. These installations transform reading into a physical act of discovery.
Throughout the works, faces emerge from textured grounds—ancestors, witnesses, and prophets rendered in charcoal and mixed media. They gaze out from layers of paint, collaged text, and natural materials, their expressions both vulnerable and resolute. Douglas’s technique of combining drawing, painting, collage, and found objects creates surfaces that feel archaeological, as if these urgent messages have been unearthed from some future time.
Yarbrough’s accompanying poetry speaks to displacement, memory, and the search for authentic connection in an increasingly fractured world. Her words weave through themes of cultural erasure, environmental destruction, and the persistence of hope despite overwhelming odds. Lines like “I remember a place I’ve never been / but I exist because of it” capture the disorienting experience of inherited trauma and resilient identity.
The four evening concerts featuring Yarbrough with a string quintet extend the exhibition’s reach beyond the visual, demonstrating how art forms can amplify each other’s power. Her voice—shaped by jazz traditions and eclectic pop sensibilities—carries these poems into new dimensions of meaning.
This collaboration emerges from a shared belief that art must respond to crisis with both beauty and resistance. In a time when speaking truth feels increasingly dangerous, Douglas and Yarbrough model what artists can accomplish when they refuse to separate aesthetic concerns from urgent human needs. Their work asks not for outside intervention but insists on our interconnected power to create change.
IMPROPER IDEOLOGY stands as both sanctuary and call to action—a space where visitors can find solace in shared struggle and inspiration to continue the work of justice. In the face of fascism and cultural erasure, this exhibition demonstrates that the most radical act may be the simple insistence on seeing each other’s full humanity.
All profits benefit organizations working toward compassion and justice for all human beings.
-Kristine Shomaker
Some samples from the show.
This Is Not America
by Raya Yarbrough
This is not America,
this is twisted wood in sand.
This is 10 million years
in this stone, in my hand.
This is the dirt beneath the factory.
Dirt beneath the church.
Dirt which holds, refractory
to governmental girth.
We drive and we stride
and we fall and we ride
without thought,
on the crumbled blood of mountains.
But this is not America,
these are fathoms and tides.
These are homes of loons and otters
only human hands divide.
This is the hiss of reeds
a sea above a sea,
an old spiritual, moaning,
in the language of the Hickory.
From ancient river spines
boils brine from the fault,
and we have forgotten ourselves,
as the children of salt.
But this is not America,
this is 5:09 pm
and the cobweb in the window
has caught fire again
in the lift of summer’s nothings,
spectral breaths which lift the weave
to breathe through phantom tendons
on the edge of this eve.
Now the wind chimes, now a shadow
following the ring,
none of these have ever been at war
with anything.
I call to this land
by the name given to it
by the Bear and the Orca,
by the fox and the crow.
The name we can hold in our hands
in the driftwood
I Untangle the Chimes
By Raya Yarbrough
I Untangle the Chimes
When there is nothing I can do about the world,
I untangle the chimes.
They complicate themselves
in the wind.
When I hear
the silver ting of syllables,
the spell exchanged
between hollow metal reeds,
I know that I will soon be useful.
I know the abrupt chorus
in the emergency of a squirrel’s foot.
And the shatter song
from the children’s chaos.
I lesten for days
until the flutter rings are gone.
Then I walk out into the garden.
Past the broadcast news of the ashes of my hometown.
Past the pixelated faces of children limp, and wrapped in white, in the holy land.
Past the smug of oligarchs, claiming Jesus like a brand name.
Past my profile in the mirror, growing gaunt and gray of these things.
I sit down at the bough of the tree
at the mess of jingle and string.
Reed by reed,
I unweave, and unweave.
And reed by hollow reed,
they begin again
to sing.
Maybe this is it
By Raya Yarbrough
Maybe this is it.
A sliver of light from a star
causing afternoon
diagonal across the stucco wall.
Dragonfly somewhere to the left.
breath of summer.
God is all over this place
and I’m drinking tequila.
Here,
with this glass of dirty water
a collection of bones, I
scooped idle in a lawn chair,
feel
this memory that wails
against the chest
from the inside.
Here,
drunk and longing,
we troubled specks in the beam,
putter around
picking up illusions to adore
and to suffer by.
It’s easier
to make the small things big,
and the big things peripheral.
I know
because otherwise,
I open
and my chest breaks
into a terror of love
for beholding
this ugly stucco wall
and I don’t know myself
from starlight.
The Streets
By Raya Yarbrough
My aunt took me down to Harlem, down to Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd.
She talked to me about history, and struggle,
and my head took it in, as the history of struggle.
And my life went on.
Colorless conversations.
Happy white-noise.
Then I woke up, and her words were not history.
Place your hand on the asphalt.
The streets are hot.
They never cooled.
If You Would
By Raya Yarbrough
If you would drop the mask,
and show your lines.
If you would sleep through one night, with all the screens unplugged.
If you would ask for directions when you’re lost,
instead of bombing the road.
If you would own your “colored” drinking fountains,
as much as you owned your reality TV stars.
If you would protect the woman
the way you covet the womb.
If you would protect the womb,
the way you covet the gun.
If you would allow your eyes,
you would see the holy ghost
on a crosstown bus
and realize you have spit on countless prophets,
bitten in the face with addiction.
If you would allow your chest,
you would wheeze with Watts and Harlem and Ferguson
until you heaved up the blood from all that asphalt.
America,
If you would allow yourself
to know your pain,
you would be bleak
and drained as salt flats,
scarred
and opened,
at last,
to a bruised, and hobbling,
love.
