Latonya Hicks: When the Lights Came On: Shared Memories and the Things We Keep

When the Lights Came On: Shared Memories and the Things We Keep invites visitors into a reflective, immersive space shaped by nostalgia, memory, and the everyday objects that quietly hold our stories. Created by Latonya Hicks, the exhibition features ten circular mixed-media assemblages built from familiar relics of the 1980s and 90s—beads, lunchboxes, Pez dispensers, and other keepsakes that evoke childhood, home, and shared cultural rhythms. The circular forms suggest wholeness and continuity, mirroring the way memories loop, return, and evolve over time.

The exhibition’s title recalls a moment many recognize: streetlights flickering on as playtime ends and the pull of home begins. Hicks captures that in-between glow—where freedom meets belonging, and personal memory merges with collective experience. Her works feel at once deeply intimate and widely relatable, inviting viewers to recognize fragments of their own past within carefully layered materials.

Rooted in family history and cultural lineage, Hicks’s practice functions as both archive and offering. Inspired by the women who raised her and the homes that shaped her, she transforms found and gifted objects into richly textured assemblages that honor legacy, resilience, and care. When the Lights Came On encourages viewers to slow down, look closely, and reflect on what we carry forward—how ordinary objects become vessels for remembrance, identity, and connection across generations.