IN LIGHT OF US

A Monumental Celebration of Imagination, Joy & Possibility

What happens when we give our imagination permission to take up space? Like, really take up space. Fifteen feet tall, larger-than-life, dancing with light and color above the city kind of space.

Meet In Light of Us, our monumental inflatable and projection-mapped installation featuring MATILDA, a character born from a desire to create the kind of imagery we wanted to see more of in the world.

For four nights during BLINK Cincinnati 2026, Matilda came to life above the streets of Over-the-Rhine. Through animation, shifting patterns, color, and light, her surface became a canvas for transformation, inviting thousands of passersby to look up, pause, play, and imagine themselves larger.

But the experience extended well beyond those four nights. We spent a week in Cincinnati connecting with artists, neighbors, visitors, and new friends through an exhibition, creative workshops, conversations, and a whole lot of making.

Here’s a look at how it all came together.

Making the Impossible Possible

Now, let’s talk about how we actually pulled this thing off.

Projecting onto a 15-foot-tall, three-dimensional inflatable is a very different experience from projecting onto a flat wall or screen. Every curve, contour, and change in surface affects how an image lands.

And Matilda has plenty of curves.

What began as a character illustration required us to think through sculpture, fabrication, structural engineering, projection mapping, animation, and the physical realities of installing a monumental inflatable in an outdoor environment.

We had to consider how the object would hold its shape, how it would be anchored, how the projections would wrap around its surface, and how to maintain the integrity of the character through every transformation.

There was a whole lot of experimenting, testing, adjusting, and testing again.

The challenge was to make a highly technical process feel effortless to the audience. We wanted people to experience the wonder of a character coming to life, while behind the scenes, we were figuring out how to make light behave across a giant, rounded, dimensional object.

It took a combination of creative problem-solving, technical exploration, collaboration, and a healthy dose of persistence.

And seeing Matilda illuminated above Cincinnati made every round of testing worth it.

Taking Up Space: Cincinnati Art Week

A Pop-Up, Some Experiments & a Whole Lot of Community

We figured if we were coming to Cincinnati with a giant inflatable, we might as well make a week of it.

From October 3–10, we transformed a space at 1606 Race Street in Over-the-Rhine into our temporary creative home for Cincinnati Art Week.

The In Light of Us pop-up brought together different corners of our practice, from our Soft Spaces work and animal-inspired creations to experimental projections, prototypes, artwork, and collectible objects.

It was an opportunity to share the worlds we create, the processes behind them, and some of the ideas we’re still exploring.

More importantly, it gave us room to connect.

We welcomed visitors into the space for conversations, creative exchanges, and hands-on experiences that explored everything from printed matter to the physical properties of sound.

Press

We were excited to see In Light of Us receive coverage from both Spectrum News and NBC WLWT during BLINK Cincinnati.

Sharing the story of Matilda, the thinking behind the installation, and the process of bringing such an ambitious work to life gave us another opportunity to introduce our practice to new audiences.

A Little Something to Take Home

Artwork, Collectibles & a Few One-of-a-Kinds

Of course, we couldn’t create a whole world around Matilda without making a few things to bring home.

Alongside In Light of Us, we developed a collection of artwork and objects that extend the experience beyond the installation.

Our new releases include screen prints produced in collaboration with DIY Printing, original artist prints, one-of-a-kind works, and a selection of Matilda collectibles.

You’ll also find our Matilda Relics, small sculptural interpretations of the character, each with its own personality and individually painted finish, along with lenticular prints, pillows, and oversized bag charms.

Some pieces are open editions, while others are unique works or available in very limited quantities.

Whether you experienced Matilda towering above Cincinnati or you’re just meeting her for the first time, these pieces are another way to bring a little of that imagination into your own space.

SHOP

What We Carry Forward

There is something special about creating work in public space. You put an idea out into the world, and suddenly it becomes part of the experiences and memories of everyone who encounters it.

For some, Matilda was a familiar face. For others, she was an unexpected discovery while walking through the city. Some stopped for a photograph, some stayed to watch her transformations, and some found their way into our pop-up to learn more about the world she came from.

We love that.

As a collective, much of our practice is rooted in creating opportunities for people to see themselves, engage their curiosity, and participate in the worlds we imagine together.

In Light of Us gave us the opportunity to explore those ideas at a monumental scale while continuing to experiment with the relationship between art, technology, storytelling, and public space.

We’re grateful to BLINK Cincinnati, Cincinnati Art Week, DIY Printing, Victoria Lekson of Prahxas, our collaborators, and everyone who spent time with us throughout this experience.

And to everyone who looked up, wandered in, asked a question, shared a story, or took a little piece of Matilda home, thank you for being part of it.

The work continues, and so does our curiosity.

by Mz. Icar

MEET MATILDA

Before she was 15 feet tall, inflatable, and covered in projected light, Matilda was a tiny character created almost a decade ago by one of our members.

Her story starts around 2007–2008. Online shopping was still relatively new. Selling work with a card at a craft fair felt futuristic. And when it came to cute characters, illustrations, products, and collectibles featuring Black girls and melanated people, there wasn’t much to choose from.

There was plenty of cute. We just rarely got to be part of it.

So, one of our members created her own.

Matilda was created from a desire to see herself in a soft space. A little Black girl who could be playful, curious, weird, stylish, imaginative, tender, adventurous, and completely at home in her own world.

And people connected with her.

Matilda began showing up on artwork and objects and eventually made her way into the world, including an appearance at one of the early AfroPunk block parties in Fort Greene. What started as one person making something she wanted to see became something other people could see themselves in too.

So, why bring her back now?

Almost 2 decades later, we found ourselves thinking about Matilda again.

We’ve been thinking a lot about who gets access to softness. Who gets protected. Who gets to be carefree, strange, joyful, vulnerable, loud, playful, and fully imagined.

We’ve also been thinking about the racial hierarchies embedded in American life, the continued disinvestment in Black and melanated communities, and what it means to keep making spaces for ourselves within all of that.

And suddenly, our tiny mighty character didn’t feel so tiny anymore.

It felt like time to bring Matilda back.

In Light of Us

We are true believers in cultivating the world you want to live in.

We believe in the power of people. In imagination, intention, community, and work. In making room for joy alongside everything else we carry.

In Light of Us takes those ideas and makes them BIG.

For BLINK Cincinnati 2026, Matilda has been transformed into a monumental inflatable sculpture and projection installation. Light, animation, imagery, pattern, history, and imagination move across her surface, allowing this character created years ago to continuously transform in front of us.

Before heading to Cincinnati, Matilda is also showing up right in our own backyard with a new mural at Bed-Stuy Walls in Brooklyn, 651 Lexington Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11221.

A tiny drawing has become a mural.

A character has become a sculpture.

A little idea about seeing ourselves differently has grown to take up a whole lot of space.

Sometimes the tiny mighty is exactly what we need.

Come Play With Us in Cincinnati

We’re taking over Cincinnati for a bit.

Alongside the debut of In Light of Us at BLINK, we’re popping up during Cincinnati Art Week with artwork, pieces from our Soft Spaces and Ride the Animals worlds, Matilda prototypes and experiments, limited editions, live programming, merch, and a few other things we’ve been cooking up.

If you’ve ever thought about traveling to come see one of our projects, this is a good one.

Come see Matilda in all her giant glory and spend some time in our world.

Take a Little Matilda With You

Of course, bringing Matilda back also meant returning her to some of the places where she began: things you can hold, wear, collect, gift, and live with.

We’ve created a collection of In Light of Us and Matilda pieces that pull from the characters, textures, experiments, and visual worlds surrounding the project.

A little piece of the tiny mighty.

by Mz. Icar

THE PEOPLE'S PETITION

PEOPLE'S PETITION

A 45 ft interactive art installation for the African American Museum in Philadelphia

On December 30, 1799, Reverend Absalom Jones and seventy free Black men from Philadelphia submitted a petition to the United States Congress calling for an end to the transatlantic slave trade, protection for free Black people from kidnapping, and a future in which liberty and justice extended to all. Though Congress refused their appeal, the petition remains one of the earliest collective assertions of Black civic participation in the United States.

The People’s Petition extends that act into the present.

Through participatory technology, each visitor contributes a digital signature that joins an ever-growing procession across the installation. The work transforms an archival document into a living civic space where historical testimony and contemporary participation exist together. Every signature affirms that the questions raised in 1799 remain unfinished and that the responsibility to pursue justice belongs to every generation.

by Mz. Icar

RIDE THE ANIMALS

In spring of 2026 this collection of work was exhibited at Street Theory Collective in Cambridge, MA.

The exhibition unfolds as a path. Viewers move alongside textile works that hold fragments of diaspora life, including food, gesture, adornment, and memory, before arriving at a central space of encounter. At the center, a group of ridable animal sculptures invites the body into the work. This shift from looking to riding is intentional.

Across the exhibition, The Mz.Icar Collective drew from African diaspora and Caribbean cultural references shaped by their lived experiences. Their work builds from layered materials and imagery: burlap coffee sacks, braided forms, signage, archival fragments, and illustrated figures that move between memory and imagination.

Fruit appears throughout the work, mango, coconut, soursop, banana, pointing to histories of labor, trade, and migration. Burlap carries those histories forward, holding the weight of movement across land and water. Figures are often dressed with care and precision. Patent leather shoes, pressed clothing, and staged environments speak to protection and the quiet strategies people use to move safely through the world.

This work sits inside the tension between culture and assimilation. It considers what is carried forward and what is softened or set aside in order to survive. It also acknowledges how cultural forms are continuously reworked, repackaged, and resold, often disconnected from the people who made them.

At the same time, the exhibition makes space for joy, softness, and being held. Music, food, and gathering appear as places where the pressure lifts and people are able to exist fully.

The animals hold a different kind of question. To ride is to move, to play, to travel. It is also to be carried, to be guided, or to be burdened. In diaspora life, the line between those states is not always clear.

VIDEOS & BTS

THE EXHIBITION

THE BOOK

We just had to make a book! This vibrant 54-page matte photo book that expands the exhibition into a tactile object you can hold, revisit, and journey through again and again.

Scattered throughout the book are interactive QR codes that unlock augmented reality activations, allowing selected images and artworks to come alive through animation, sound, and layered digital storytelling.

THE BOOK

by Mz. Icar

Laundromat Project Liberation Series: Sound Collage Workshop

SONICS OF THE ANCESTORS

A five-part sound exploration by Mz.Icar Collective
Laundromat Project Liberation Series, Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn

Sonics of the Ancestors was a five-part, process-based series exploring sound as something we hear, feel, make, carry, and remember.

Created as part of The Laundromat Project’s Liberation Series, the project brought artists, musicians, neighbors, and guests together in Bed-Stuy for a sequence of participatory experiments centered around sound, vibration, memory, and collective creation.

Across five gatherings, we explored different ways of encountering sound: making beats together, translating frequencies into visible patterns through vibration, slowing down through sound and meditation, recording voices and stories onto cassette tape, and gathering around a drum circle.

Each session became its own experiment.

We were interested in what could emerge through listening, repetition, improvisation, conversation, and play. Participants moved between analog and digital technologies, using drums, speakers, recording equipment, cassette tapes, sound frequencies, and their own bodies as tools for making and receiving sound.

At the center of the series was a question: What does sound carry?

Rhythm can hold memory. A voice can become an archive. Bass can move through a body before it is understood as music. A recording can preserve a moment long after the people who made it have left the room.

Sonics of the Ancestors considers these experiences as forms of transmission, connecting contemporary experimentation with long histories of rhythm, oral storytelling, gathering, and communal knowledge across the African diaspora.

The five sessions became a living archive of the project: beats made together, voices captured on tape, vibrations made visible, drums shared in a circle, conversations, movement, silence, and the sounds of people occupying a space together.

The video and audio collected here document fragments of that process.

They are traces of what happened in the room, and of what continues to resonate after it.

Voice Recording & Sound Collage
Guest Collaborating artists: Rashid Amir and Eliki Sol 
Using portable mics and phones, participants paired up to capture Bed Stuy’s stories, ambient hum, conversations, rhythms, sirens, and silence, and collaboratively remix these sounds into a living collage. This session was grounded in presence, attuning our ears to the neighborhood’s past, present, and future.

Call to the Ancestors: Communal Drum Circle

Collaborating Artists: Shaun Kelly and Brion Vann

This intergenerational drumming circle invited participants of all ages to explore memory, place, and dreams through guided prompts, drum rhythms, and call-and-response. We learned about the legacy of this practice and synced ourselves.

The Shape of Sound

Guest Collaborating artists: Osei Alleyne

Participants explored visualizing sound and cymatics. Using tools such as a Stylophone Theremin, and speakers paired with a projector, we examined the shape of sound and the connections between language and tone throughout the African Diaspora to create new works.

Community Beatmaking

Collaborating Artists: Isaac Sawyer and Amore Querida

Beat Cypher: Community Beatmaking Session invited participants to become co-producers, using drum machines and collected sounds to build new beats. This session blended traditional rhythms with contemporary beat-making in a collaborative cypher

by Mz. Icar

BLURRED REALITIES

Photo by Doug Coombe courtesy of the MSU Museum

If you happen to find yourself in Lansing, Michigan, please be sure to check out ‘Blurred Realities’ A group show at MSU’s Collab Studio. We’re exhibiting Ile Omi: House of water. It’ll be up until summer.

More about the Exhibition:

We immerse ourselves in fairy tales and science fiction, fully aware that some elements are pure fantasy. Yet, we bristle to find out that a viral video was fabricated or that a striking photograph was generated by AI. Why do we so easily accept some fabrications while questioning others? Blurred Realities invites you to examine the dilemmas tied to dis/mis/information, artificial intelligence, and shifting perceptions of truth. This exhibition is not just about deception; it is about the ways our perceptions are shaped, guided, and sometimes manipulated. How do we determine what is real, what is imagined, and what is meant to deceive?

As technology increasingly influences our perspectives, it also amplifies biases, reshapes conversations, and reinforces divisions. In an era where trust is fragile, we must reconsider not just what we see, but how we see and understand. This exhibition challenges you to think critically, to question the narratives you accept, and to recognize the forces that shape your understanding of the world.

As we mark the 250th anniversary of American democracy, these questions take on even greater urgency. A nation built on the ideals of informed debate and collective decision-making must grapple with how truth is constructed, contested, and controlled. Blurred Realities invites us to reflect on how we navigate this evolving landscape—individually and as a society—in pursuit of a more informed future.

MORE DETAILS

by Mz. Icar

Street Theory Gallery & Collective NEW GALLERY

Join us for the soft opening of Street Theory Gallery & Collective, a new gallery and arts incubator rooted in the heart of Central Square, Cambridge.

This exhibition marks the beginning of a new chapter for Street Theory Collective, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering rising creatives and reimagining how art connects community, culture, and collaboration.

Come celebrate art, community, and the beginning of something special in Central Square, with DJ Big Bear on the 1’s & 2’s!

Event Details:

Street Theory Collective | 541 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA

Artwork and limited-edition prints available for purchase.
Light refreshments and drinks will be served
Wheelchair accessible; nearest MBTA stop: Central Square (Red Line).

This is a 21+ event.

Free and open to the public.

Space will be limited; RSVP does not guarantee entry

The Living Room Gallery Series Featured Artists:

by Mz. Icar

LAUNDROMAT PROJECT

THE LAUNDROMAT PROJECT + LEGENDARY

Not sure if you have happened to stroll by the Laundromat Project’s HQ in Bed-Stuy. Well, if you did, you may have noticed some new nifty work by the collective adorning the window.

We are so thrilled to share that this piece was created for the 2025 Create & Reflect – Window Commission. This window vinyl is an iteration of our piece Sonics of the Ancestors from our Diaphanous series, reimagined specifically for the Bed-Stuy site. At its center is a futuristic portrait layered with sonic and ancestral references, symbolizing a portal where memory, sound, and speculation converge. To ground the piece in Brooklyn, we’ve overlaid an architectural land use map of Bed-Stuy, subtly altered to read “legendary” and “and us,” creating a playful, poetic intervention that bends time and reframes the future as community-centered. Select areas behind the map lines are transparent, allowing natural light to shine through and animate the work throughout the day. This piece acts as both a visual archive and a roadmap toward liberatory possibility.

LEGENDARY: AR OF SONICS OF THE ANCESTORS

For The Laundromat Project’s fundraising event, GATHER, The Mz Icar Collective unveiled an exclusive augmented reality experience tied to our window installation, Legendary, a site-specific remix of our original work Sonics of the Ancestors. This activation transforms the storefront into an interactive portal that expands the visual narrative through motion, sound, and storytelling. Rooted in Bed-Stuy and inspired by Black Quantum Futurism, the piece invites viewers to explore hidden layers of memory, movement, and collective imagination. Through their phones, and provided Headsets guests were able to activate animated visuals and audio elements that can be experienced during the event, creating a multi-sensory encounter with a future shaped by community, culture, and sound.

ABOUT DIAPHANOUS

Diaphanous: In it’s full iteration Diaphanous is a multi room experience. An immersive collection of art telling stories and guiding guests through a whimsical imaginative collection of experiences and material objects. This collection blends art, technology, and history to re-imagine and re-tell stories of the African Diaspora that have been excluded or marginalized due to racial and gender biases. Each offering embodies a theme of something or someone that could only exist now but reframed as if it did exist in a prior time, space, or dimension. we have proken d down this projects into a thematic catagories, Going Places, Ile Omi: House of Water, Soft Spaces and The Bottom End. This group of work is an extension of our Diaphanous series. You can learn more Diaphanous here.

by Mz. Icar

THE REMIX

We made things. Beautiful, wearable, surprising things.

The Remix is a 55-piece collection of one-of-a-kind garments and bags created entirely from upcycled, reclaimed, and deadstock materials. Think towels turned into tote bags, old bedsheets reimagined as jackets, and discarded polo shirts stitched into shorts. We dusted off our sewing machines, raided closets and donation bins, and tapped into the magic of what already exists.

This project is about more than just clothes. It’s a practice in transformation, care, and creative rebellion. We designed style profiles for our collective members, thought deeply about how we want to be seen, and crafted pieces that reflect those wishes, all while reducing waste and rejecting the fast fashion cycle.

Each item holds layers of memory, texture, and intention. From Brooklyn belt factory webbing to vintage ‘80s charms, everything is made with love, storytelling, and a wink. Some pieces are adorned. Some are loud. Most are not for sale (except a few fanny packs), they’re offerings, examples, invitations.

The Remix is a remix of culture, craft, and care. It’s a celebration of process, adornment, and imagining alternatives that feel better, look better, and are better.

The Remix Fanny Packs

by Mz. Icar

ADORNMENT

Adornment is done in collaboration with Tuft the World and can be ordered directly through Tuft the World’s website

by Mz. Icar