THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS AT FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY
PRESENTS
Floating Metal: UNDERcurrents In My Father's Garden
PERFORMANCE INSTALLATION OF CHOREOGRAPHER, nia love
Featuring works by her late father, Ed Love
TALLAHASSEE, FL, June 15, 2026– This fall, the Florida State University Museum of FineArts (MoFA) will present a major performance and exhibition of choreographer nia love (b.1963), featuring artworks by her late father Ed Love (1936-1999), and a program of four collaborative evening-length performances. Commencing with the performance program on August 27, 2026, Floating Metal: UNDERcurrents In My Father’s Garden will immerse audiences in dance, live jazz music, and video projection, and offer the first museum presentation of images from Ed Love’s Beloved series (1988) as well as a series of Love’s metal sculptures commemorating black historical figures completed shortly before his untimely passing in 1999. As a representative yet under-recognized artist of the Black Arts generation,Ed Love is known for welding discarded metal salvaged from scrap yards into powerful totems of global black consciousness. Likewise driven by the social force and weight of blackness, nia love’s multi-modal movement practice aims to breach the propriety of “dance,” refashioning it as gesture–the embodied memory of movement, geographies, and scales of time gathered and shared through black forms of life and culture.
Floating Metal: UNDERcurrents In My Father’s Garden extends nia love’s long-term serial projects g1(host) and UNDERcurrents, which explore the enduring histories of the Middle Passage and transatlantic slavery. This newest iteration continues to invite audiences to probe the seam between catastrophic history and everyday memory, pivoting on the elemental medium of water. Sparked by her own memory of the last phone call with her father before he passed, where he spoke of having had a “water dream” but pressed for time couldn’t further elaborate, Floating Metal explores the broken lines of transmission and vexed matter of inheritance in Afro-diasporic history which unsettle normal patrimonial procedures. This history of ongoing rupture compels inventive, ulterior methods of claiming fractured legacies: sifting sediments in the ocean, listening to fleeting memories for clues, assembling fragments of lost dreams as choreographic prompts. How do we reclaim an inheritance of history and art when its line of transmission is cut by premature death and unlivable oceanic passage?
MoFA is a resonant site for staging these questions, as the location where Ed Love taught and worked for a decade until his passing, and where nia love acquired her MFA in dance—during Ed Love’s tenure—and to which she has recently returned as a professor of dance. Circling back into the intimate weight of his legacy as an artist and teacher, she meditates on the accumulation and dispersal of time and material that tether their respective labors.
Floating Metal: UNDERcurrents In My Father’s Garden spotlights love’s ongoing collaborations across media and forms. In addition to Ed Love’s featured sculptural tableau and images, the core of the exhibition will be an immersive Live Performance Camera Obscura (LPCO) installation encompassing the museum’s central gallery. Realized by photographic artist and LPCO creator George Del Barrio with key assistance from Ian Chen, this darkened apparatus allows performers and audience members to generate movement in a recessed space which is projected as imagery on the surrounding architectural surfaces. Movement collaborators Cyan Hunter, Marco Farroni, Makeda-Lily Love-Roney, Jesse Phillips-Fein, Jelani Taylor, Diana Uribe, and Jessica Ziegler join nia love in animating this device with choreographed scores and improvised actions.
Another feature of the exhibition is “The Ship”– a mobile, modular installation which navigates performers and audience members through the galleries. Created in collaboration with architect-artist Jerome Haferd and designer Mouhamadou Dieng of Jerome Haferd Studio, this abstracted vessel assembly offers a metaphorical and material platform for choreography, opening its frame for audience participation and reflection on the prodigious shapeshifting and often brutal world making power of ships and their attendant architectures. Additional video projections– featuring footage from love’s deep sea diving research and composed with filmmakers Aidan Un, Rhonda Haynes, and Orion Gordon– layer and immerse the installation in a watery milieu. Renowned composers/musicians Antoine Roney, Kojo Roney, Emanuel Ruffler, and Clarence Seay further propel the scene with live music scores (production sound by Adrian M. Martinez). Within this whirl of activity and speculation, Floating Metal:UNDERcurrents In My Father’s Garden blurs distinctions of audience and performance, animate and inanimate, land and water, past and present.
The performance program of Floating Metal: UNDERcurrents In My Father’s Garden will run from August 27th-29th: August 27th and 28th, at 5:30 pm, and August 29th at 11:30 am and 3:30 pm.
A public reception marking the opening of the exhibition will be held Thursday, September 3, from 5:30-7:30 pm.
For ticketing information please visit MoFA.fsu.edu.
Floating Metal: UNDERcurrents In My Father’s Garden is co-curated by nia love and BeninFord, independent curator. MoFA will publish a companion catalogue to the exhibition to be released in spring 2027, featuring new essays by Christina Sharpe, Nzinga Metzger, and Fred Moten.
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Ed Love was an artist and educator born in Los Angeles, CA in 1936. Known for his powerful welded steel works that explore themes of identity, spirituality, and transformation, Love developed a distinctive visual language that blended industrial strength with cultural symbolism, often drawing from African iconography and the African American experience. He was a central figure in the Black Arts Movement on the West and East coasts and maintained deep ties with a generation of influential artists, including Richard Hunt, Betye Saar, John Outterbridge, Charles White, and Noah Purifoy. His work reflected a commitment to both his personal expression and social consciousness, using abstraction and symbolism to speak to liberation, ancestral memory, and spiritual elevation. A lifelong educator as well as an artist, Ed Love taught sculpture at both Howard University and Florida State University, where he influenced countless students. His teaching emphasized not only technical mastery but also the importance of art as a form of cultural storytelling and resistance. In 1987, in recognition of his artistic excellence and impact, Love was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He held landmark solo exhibitions at the Corcoran Gallery of Art (1976) and the Howard University Gallery of Art (1986). Love’s work is in prestigious permanent collections including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, the High Museum of Art, the DavidC. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, and the Yale University Art Gallery, and is found in numerous private collections throughout the country.
nia love is a choreographer, performer, professor, and somatic practitioner based in New York, NY and Tallahassee, FL. She began her professional dance career as a teenage apprentice with the Ballet Nacional de Cuba. She is a former Fulbright Fellow for her research in Ghana & Mali (2000–02), an Urban Bush Women Choreographic Initiative 2.0 Fellow (2019–21), and was recently named a Guggenheim Fellow (2026). She received the Alvin Ailey New DirectionsLab Choreographer Award (2013), and three Bessie Awards: for performance with Skeleton Architecture (2017), for music composition in g1(host):lostatsea (2021), and for outstanding choreography in UNDERcurrents (2024). She is also a recipient of Dance Theater Workshop’s Suitcase Fund for her work in Tanzania (2013), the MAP Fund (2020), the Herb Alpert Award (2022), the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award (2022), NEFA’s National Dance Project Production Grant (2022), and the FSU Council on Research and Creativity’s SEED grant (2025). Her current project, UNDERcurrents, was commissioned by the Harlem Stage|WaterWorks Established Artist Program (2023). She is currently Associate Professor of Dance atFlorida State University in Tallahassee, FL, and an artistic advisor to Brooklyn Arts Exchange’s Artist-in-Residence program.
FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION, PRESS INQUIRIES OR REQUESTS CONTACT: Jesse Philips Fein at phillipsfein@gmail.com