Every summer, Martha’s Vineyard becomes a beacon of Black refuge and reflection. Against the backdrop of the annual Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival, the island is a layered gathering place and cultural commons where Black families, artists, filmmakers, writers, and entrepreneurs encounter one another outside the usual machinery that determines which work gets seen and remembered. This year, Anchors & Currents extends that conversation to the oeuvre of several emerging visual artists. 

Conceived by studioQL co-founders Mecca Pryor and sisters Morgan A. Webster and Taylor Webster, the inaugural exhibition assembles nine artists whose practices collectively consider what it means to make Black life visible without flattening it into a single aesthetic interpretation. The works of the exhibiting artists vary across interpretations of Black interiority and interrogation, ranging from portraiture and textile work to large-scale oil and digital renderings. 

The program of the Anchors and Currents weekend was split into phases, starting with private appointment hours introducing the works to inquiring Martha’s Vineyard visitors, followed by a Cognac & Caviar exclusive happy hour hosted by Taylor Thompson and Sesana Allen, and closing with a private Collector’s Dinner before evening DJ sets by Stonie Blue on Night 1, and Dennis Free on Night 2. 

Hennessy curated the weekend’s hi-fi listening lounge, coined the Hennessy Sound Lounge, that positioned a constant flow of music alongside the visual art. Hennessy’s role in the collaboration was most visible through the infrastructure of the gathering. 

“It was important for Hennessy to partner with studioQL to create an immersive and authentic, multisensorial experience that celebrates craftsmanship, legacy while championing the arts,” says Antoine Varlet, Senior Vice President, Hennessy U.S. “A moment rooted in connection and creative exchange, The Hennessy Sound Lounge at Martha’s Vineyard spotlighted the long-standing community and emerging talents shaping culture today through intentional conversation and a dedicated art, music and design showcase.”

From the historic Inkwell Beach Club, the brand helped provide the conditions for artists, collectors and cultural workers to inhabit a shared environment. The art remained the organizing force, and hospitality expanded the encounter’s length and texture.

For Pryor, who helped shape the exhibition’s curatorial language, water was an organizing principle. “We knew we wanted water to be the through line, not only literally, but metaphorically,” she says. “The ‘anchors’ represent the history and deep-rooted legacy of Martha’s Vineyard, while the ‘currents’ speak to its evolution and how the island continues to change and shape itself today.” An anchor suggests grounding, an allusion to the histories, families, geographies and visual traditions that tether the culture of the Vineyard and of the Black community at large. A current suggests something more complex, referencing the shifts and unpredictable movement of life that inform artistic expression and interpersonal reflection. 

That framework makes particular sense on the Vineyard, an island where generations of Black visitors have gone for leisure, reunion, and ease often withheld elsewhere. studioQL approaches that history with the understanding that belonging is something produced through ritual and repetition. Morgan A. Webster describes the Vineyard in those terms. “Martha’s Vineyard has always felt like more than a place to us. It is memory, family, stillness, and home,” she says. “Some of my earliest memories are of waking up at sunrise with my grandfather, stepping into the morning air, smelling the salt, and taking in the quiet of the island before the day began. Those moments stayed with me. The Vineyard became a place where we returned to rest, reconnect, and remember what matters.”

The roots of studioQL reach into that family history. The idea for the platform emerged around a kitchen table on the island through a conversation about art, community, and the kind of space the founders wished existed. Anchors & Currents became an extension of the question implied by that conversation, asking what type of cultural spaces become possible when their makers begin from intimacy and genuine curiosity. 

Within the cohort of exhibiting artists were various interpretations of Black interiority in visual form. Daveed Baptiste, Zoë Carson, Ashley Chew, Megan Gabrielle Harris, Akea Brionne, Adrian Armstrong, Kristen White, Kyle Olani Adams and Alonzo Adams artistically spoke to various iterations of Black life across their respective mediums. Attendees were able to learn more about their praxis during the Collector’s Dinner, a deliberate space intended to allow event facilitators, guests, and artists to engage.

Haitian-American artist and designer Daveed Baptiste employed multidisciplinary practice to treat clothing as a vessel of cultural memory. Within the context of Anchors & Currents, his work enters a larger conversation about the transformation of inheritance into contemporary visual language. Baptiste designed the uniforms for Hennessy and studioQL waitstaff, adorning them in ecru and gold tones with geographic accents. 

Ashley Chew’s work interrogates self-presentation, color and adornment, offering a number of large-scale portraits in vivid orange, oceanic blue, and yellow tones. Akea Brionne presented large scale jacquard, glitter, and oil pastel pieces that served as centerpieces in the exhibition hall. Conversely, Alonzo Adams’ paintings constructed high-contrast scenes of large-scale oil portraiture. Kristen White utilized a towel-texture painting to present scenes of beachside Black life that are both plural and intimate, figurative and abstract. Meanwhile, Kyle Olani Adams exhibited a graphite and pencil hyperrealistic portrait that sold during private appointments. 

The curatorial approach for the show operated “at the intersection of storytelling, culture, and opportunity,” as studioQL cofounder Mecca Pryor described. Pryor’s background as a journalist informs her instinct for curating these pieces. “My ear is always to the street,” she says. “I’m constantly paying attention to what’s emerging, particularly when it comes to independent designers and artists.” Her curatorial practice relies on that same attentiveness, searching for artists whose work feels responsive to the culture surrounding it.

Art here enters into proximity with fashion, music, hospitality, design and conversation. These disciplines share a social environment and their adjacency reflects the way culture is encountered by the people gathered on the island.

Taylor Webster says studioQL itself is a project invested in that theme of intersectionality. “We never wanted to come to the Vineyard simply to host an event,” she says. “We wanted to create something that felt like a contribution. Something that could exist in conversation with the island.” For her, that meant “making room for artists and creatives whose perspectives reflect the world we actually live in, where art doesn’t exist in isolation from music, fashion, design, architecture, or community.”

There is also a personal history underneath the curatorial one. Taylor and Morgan Webster grew up visiting the island, and returning to build studioQL there made the gathering feel like an act of revision through adulthood.

“There was something very full-circle about bringing studioQL to Martha’s Vineyard,” Taylor says. “We grew up coming here, so this place carries a lot of memory for us. But as you get older, you also start to see a place differently. You begin to understand the invisible lines around who feels like they belong, who gets to create, who gets to gather, and whose stories become part of the larger cultural narrative.”

Taylor Webster speaks about studioQL as something still in the process of becoming. “It’s not a finished idea, and I don’t want it to be,” she says. “It’s a space to follow our curiosity, to bring people together, and to give ourselves permission to explore what culture can look like when you aren’t confined to one discipline or one definition of success.” This freedom permits studioQL to follow artists into unexpected disciplines and allow the relationships formed around the work to influence the shape of whatever comes next. Pryor describes the project through a similar temporal lens. “studioQL is interested in the space between what has been and what’s next,” she says. “Anchors & Currents is a reflection of that ethos, using history as an anchor while allowing culture, creativity, and new perspectives to move us forward.”

The weekend resonated across the star-studded island visitors who call the Vineyard home in the early weeks of August. Exhibition attendees included comedian Dave Chappelle, celebrity stylist Jason Bolden, and Gabrielle Union-Wade, Danielle Brooks, Sterling K. Brown, Bre-Z, Russell Hornsby, Eric Johnson, D-Nice, Henry Lewis Gates Jr., Mickalene Thomas, Wanda and Jacques Webster Sr., among others.

The most compelling possibility raised by Anchors & Currents concerns what happens after the gathering ends. The ecosystem depends on the relationships that surpass the event, bringing together collectors who continue following an artist’s work, collaborators who find each other again, and audiences who begin imagining themselves as participants within worlds that once appeared closed.

Presenting the work on Martha’s Vineyard during one of the most significant annual gatherings of Black cultural makers allows the exhibition to forge these ties with more sustainability. Collectors encounter artists alongside filmmakers, entrepreneurs, painters, musicians and other leaders who comprise the ecosystem of Black accomplishment. As a result, conversations about patronage and legacy happen alongside discussions of family and inheritance.