Leilah Babirye: Embaga ya Naki ne Naki (Wedding of Naki and Naki), marks the artist’s first solo museum exhibition on the east coast, premiering a new body of work in an installation imagined as an opulent, queer wedding. Babirye’s large-scale sculptures are created through the artist’s deft carving of wood and expressive work with ceramics, adorning her sculptures with discarded everyday items—transforming metal gears and bicycle chains into elaborate headdresses, and rubber inner tubes into braided tresses. In her practice, Babirye reclaims these materials, using technical traditions from western and central Africa to create works that uplift and celebrate LGBTQ identities—an ethos driven by her own experience fleeing Uganda and seeking asylum in New York City after being outed as gay.

The exhibition is accompanied by an important publication on Babirye’s work featuring a discussion between Babirye and Margaret Nagawa, the artist’s former professor, as well as a scholarly essay by Natasha Becker, who analyzes Babirye’s work in the context of African sculptural practices and contemporary art.