Corey Pemberton Living Well is scheduled to open on September 19, 2026, and close on January 31, 2027, at the Mint Museum Uptown in Charlotte, North Carolina, where it will be installed on Level 3. The Mint Museum describes the exhibition as a survey with more than 70 works by Los Angeles-based artist Corey Pemberton, born in 1990, spanning painting, collage, blown glass sculpture, quilts, fiber arts, and recent basketweaving Mint Museum exhibition page.
The show arrives with a clear institutional frame: not simply a display of technical range, but an argument for how domestic interiors, handmade objects, and inherited forms can carry social meaning. Pemberton’s practice, as described by the museum, brings attention to ordinary living spaces inhabited by Black, queer, female, and nonbinary people. That framing matters because the exhibition appears to treat rooms, vessels, fabrics, and decorative objects as active carriers of memory rather than passive background details.
What Corey Pemberton Living Well Presents
Scale, Media, And The Survey Format
A survey exhibition can be a delicate format for an artist born in 1990. It suggests breadth without the settled distance often associated with late-career retrospectives. In this case, the available details point to a show organized around range: mixed media on canvas, collage, glass, textiles, and fiber-based work. The presence of more than 70 works gives the curator room to trace recurring ideas across media rather than treating each material category as a separate chapter.
That cross-media structure is central to how Pemberton’s work is being presented. Painting and collage can hold figure, surface, and interior space. Glass can mimic commercial packaging, decorative inheritance, and fragile domestic display. Quilts and fiber works can bring the logic of use, touch, repair, and intergenerational craft into the gallery. Basketweaving, noted by the museum as a more recent part of the artist’s practice, extends that attention to woven structure and hand-based knowledge.
Corey Pemberton Living Well And Domestic Space
The exhibition’s stated focus on ordinary living spaces calls for careful reading. Domestic space is often described as private, but Pemberton’s subjects, according to the museum description, connect rooms and possessions to respite, personality, memory, and ambition. That phrasing suggests that the home is not treated as an escape from public life alone. It can also be a site where identity is arranged, protected, displayed, and negotiated through the objects people keep close.
For Black, queer, female, and nonbinary individuals, that emphasis may carry particular weight, though the available research does not provide individual statements from sitters or direct artist quotations. A cautious reading is therefore better than a sweeping claim. What can be said is that the museum’s description places people and their environments together, asking viewers to consider how décor, heirlooms, branded goods, craft materials, and light can signal lived experience.
Materials As Cultural Evidence
Glass Between Commodity And Heirloom
The glass objects in the exhibition appear to hold a pointed tension. The Mint Museum identifies replicas of everyday commercial items, including a 40-ounce Old English bottle, a liter of Coca-Cola, and a can of Black Magic hairspray. It also notes forms that evoke decorative heirlooms such as Murano glass and African face jugs, with the latter tied to the history of the African Slave Trade. This range places consumer familiarity beside deeper references to craft, trade, displacement, and survival.
That pairing resists a simple hierarchy between the refined and the everyday. A commercial bottle can carry social codes, neighborhood associations, class markers, or personal memory. A decorative vessel can be admired as design while also bearing the pressure of colonial histories and diasporic inheritance. Pemberton’s use of blown glass, at least as described by the museum, seems to test how an object can shift status when remade by hand and placed inside an art museum.
Fiber, Quilts, And The Question Of Use
Fiber-based work brings a different register of attention. Quilts and woven forms are often read through warmth, labor, domestic care, and communal memory. The research notes do not identify every textile work on view, so any interpretation must remain bounded by what has been publicly described. Still, the inclusion of quilts and fiber arts within the same exhibition as paintings and glass objects suggests that Pemberton is not treating craft as a side practice.
The survey format may help viewers see how material decisions shift the emotional temperature of the work. Paint can stage an interior. Glass can freeze a commodity into a fragile double. Fiber can imply touch, repair, and accumulated time. None of these media needs to dominate the others. Their interaction is likely where the exhibition’s strongest art-historical questions sit.
Curatorial Context And Published Record
The Role Of The Catalogue
A catalogue for Corey Pemberton Living Well is significant because the Mint Museum Store identifies it as the first exhibition catalogue fully dedicated to Pemberton’s work. The catalogue description states that his practice explores African ancestry, American heritage, identity, technique, and materials Mint Museum Store catalogue listing. For an emerging-to-midcareer artist working across several media, that kind of publication can shape how future viewers, students, and curators track the practice.
The catalogue also matters for educational access. Exhibition installations are temporary, but a publication can preserve documentation, essays, and interpretive frameworks after the galleries change. That is especially relevant for artists whose work moves among painting, glass, and fiber, since images alone may not capture scale, surface, weight, or the physical charge of handmade objects.
Institutional And Craft Networks
The research identifies Jen Sudul Edwards, PhD, the Mint’s Chief Curator and Curator of Contemporary Art, as curator of the exhibition. It also notes Pemberton’s residencies at Pittsburgh Glass Center in Pennsylvania, Bruket in Bodø, Norway, and Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina as a Core Fellow. His service on the Boards of Trustees at Penland and the Corning Museum of Glass places him within institutions closely associated with craft education, glass history, and studio practice.
Those details should not be overstated, but they do show that the exhibition sits at the intersection of contemporary art and craft pedagogy. For readers following handmade culture, creator commerce, and artist-led material research, related insights through Shimply, a platform in the same network, can provide adjacent context on how objects circulate between studio, home, market, and collecting culture.
Named Works And Possible Readings
Titles That Point Toward Place And Intimacy
Among the specific works listed for the exhibition are That morning light hits different, 2021; Still Life (Self-portrait), 2022; Law as Odalisque, 2024; 6 am at Morgan Hall, 2019; and It’s warmer at home, 2018. Even without images of each work in front of the reader, these titles point toward recurring concerns: light, self-representation, art-historical pose, place, hour, and the emotional charge of home.
The title Still Life (Self-portrait) is especially suggestive because it links object arrangement to identity. A still life can be read as a portrait by other means: through what is chosen, displayed, consumed, saved, or inherited. It’s warmer at home points to shelter and comfort, but also raises questions about who is granted safety and where that safety is built.
Why The Works Resist One Category
Pemberton’s practice, as publicly described for this exhibition, resists a single material label. Calling it glass art would miss the paintings and textiles. Calling it painting would miss the sculptural and craft-based intelligence of the objects. Calling it domestic portraiture would be useful, but still incomplete. The show’s significance appears to rest on the way these categories press against one another.
That category pressure is useful for art students and early-career artists. It shows how a practice can build coherence through questions rather than through one medium. The consistent question here seems to be how people live with objects, how objects absorb social history, and how handmade forms can reframe the familiar.
Corey Pemberton Living Well At The Mint Museum
For Corey Pemberton Living Well, the most grounded expectation is that visitors will encounter a material survey rather than a narrow presentation of one signature technique. The confirmed dates, venue, media, curator, catalogue, and selected works all point to a substantial museum project built around domestic life, identity, ancestry, and craft knowledge.
The exhibition is funded by PNC, with support from the Ford Foundation and Windgate Foundation, and individual sponsorship from Marty and Weston Andress and Lauren Harkey. Those details place the project within a supported museum framework, but the critical interest remains with the works themselves: their use of glass, fabric, paint, and found cultural references to ask how living spaces hold memory and self-definition.
Because the exhibition had not yet opened as of September 7, 2026, critical response and installation-specific analysis were not available in the provided research. The strongest reading for now is provisional and evidence-based: Pemberton’s survey at the Mint Museum appears positioned to connect contemporary art, craft traditions, and the politics of home without separating beauty from social context.