(Editor’s Note: Louise Mandumbwa was featured in our Winter 2019 Print Edition. Read her story here.)

THE NAME OF A SWEET THING, 2024, Oil on canvas, 34″ x 42″(unstretched)

Hearne Fine Art is hosting The Name of a Sweet Thing, a solo exhibition of new works by Botswana-born, New Haven, CT-based artist Louise Mandumbwa from October 24 – January 9, 2025. Through drawing, painting, and printmaking, Mandumbwa explores the tender, enduring bonds that shape our sense of belonging, relationships that “settle into the body like sugar on the tongue; quiet, intimate, and unforgettable.”

Mandumbwa will appear at the gallery, located at 1001 Wright Avenue, Ste C. in Little Rock, in-person on Sunday, December 7, 2025, at 2:00 PM. To join her Virtual Artist Talk, register HERE to join the conversation or Watch LIVE on Facebook.

The Name of a Sweet Thing gathers an offering, an intimate constellation of gestures, materials, and memories, centered around the enduring tenderness of kinship. Across works on paper, canvas, and sculptural surfaces, Mandumbwa reflects on the relationships that have quietly sustained her across time, geography, and change, particularly those shared among women of the African diaspora.

Connected to both the American South and Northeast over the last decade, Mandumbwa’s work transforms these regions into emotional coordinates, tracing the imprints of shared meals, laughter, and quiet conversations. Through her delicate layering of graphite, charcoal, ink, and paint on materials like concrete, glass, and cast metal—substances often associated with buildings she constructs spaces of memory and care. Texture becomes a kind of storytelling; surface becomes a kind of skin.

In Mandumbwa’s hands, these are not portraits, but translations of emotion, atmosphere, and the fleeting sweetness of human connection. The exhibition invites viewers to slow down and reflect on the ways tenderness travels: how we carry the people who have shaped us, even after they have gone.

ABOUT THE ARTIST: LOUISE MANDUMBWA

Louise Mandumbwa (b. 1996) works in painting, printmaking, and drawing to explore the figurative, botanical, and ideations of home. Her practice is a counter-mapping endeavor that examines memory

through material exploration, the illegible image, and failed translation. An immigrant artist, she revisits sites of familial and diasporic history, appending them with affect and anecdote.

Mandumbwa holds an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University and a BFA in Painting from the University of Central Arkansas. Her work has been featured in recent group exhibitions at Sakhile & Me (Frankfurt, DE,2025), Chili Art Projects (London, UK, 2024), Spurs Gallery (Beijing, CN), David Castillo (Miami, FL), The Wright Museum (Detroit, MI), and Yossi Milo (New York, NY). She was a 2024 recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshield Foundation grant and the Elizabeth Canfield Hicks Award from Yale University. Residencies include the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2024), The Sam and Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts (2022), and Visual Arts at Chautauqua Institution (2019). Mandumbwa lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut.