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
