Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Compressed Tenses brings together a body of work that turns portraiture into something layered, unstable and deliberately open-ended. On view from October 2 to December 20, 2026 at the Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery, the exhibition focuses on Sepuya’s studio practice, where friends, artists, collaborators and the artist himself appear through mirrors, fragments and partial views.
Sepuya’s photographs do not treat the studio as a neutral background. It becomes an active space where bodies, objects and photographic equipment sit in the same frame. Backdrops, lenses, lights and reflections remain visible, giving the images a self-conscious structure that makes the mechanics of picture-making part of the portrait itself. In early work made in his Brooklyn apartment, presence and absence carry equal weight. In later work from Los Angeles, the compositions become more intricate, but the same tension remains: much is visible, yet nothing is fully given away.
The exhibition also highlights Sepuya’s collage practice, which runs alongside the studio photographs. Using small laser-printed images, he tears and reassembles fragments into new compositions that echo the logic of his larger works. These pieces extend his interest in queer visibility, Black identity and the history of the homoerotic image, while keeping the surface raw and physical. Fingerprints, smudges and dust are left intact, which gives the work a material presence that resists polished finish.
Curated by Michael Goodson, director of the gallery, Compressed Tenses places Sepuya’s practice in dialogue with photography’s longer history of looking, staging and withholding. The exhibition does not settle on a single reading of the portrait. Instead, it presents portraiture as a site of friction, where intimacy, performance and the apparatus of photography remain closely bound.
That balance gives the exhibition its strength. Sepuya’s images are carefully made, but they never feel closed. They leave room for uncertainty, and that is where much of their force lies.
Image: Collage 2020-038, 2020. Collaged photographs on Bristol board, 11 × 14 inches. Courtesy of the artist © Paul Mpagi Sepuya
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