They left our faces out of the garden. We came back to plant our own.

Garden of the Nine Muses is a two-day solo exhibition by Brooklyn artist Afrocentric Keyy (Kiarra Elliott) — a reimagining of classical mythology through a diasporic lens. Each painting in the series resurrects one of the nine Greek Muses not as a distant ideal, but as a living, breathing Black woman. Rooted in memory, lineage, and divine femininity, the work asks a question mythology never did: What if she had always looked like us?

Painted in oil on reclaimed wood, each piece carries more than color. The wood grain beneath the surface — with its knots, its rings, its history of growth — mirrors the grain of human DNA. Every brushstroke is an act of ancestral memory.