3RD: The Space In Between — All Street Gallery

NEW YORK, NY – All Street Gallery is proud to present The Space In Between, the culminating exhibition of the inaugural BolsterArts Residency, featuring new works by Grace Lynne Haynes and Cassandra Mayela Allen. On view from May 1 to May 20, 2025, the exhibition brings together two distinct yet resonant practices, both rooted in expansive cultural storytelling and speculative reinterpretations of tradition. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, May 1, from 6–9PM.

Launched in January 2025, the BolsterArts Residency offered Haynes and Mayela Allen fourmonths of dedicated studio space in New York City’s Chinatown. The program, in alignment with BolsterArts’s mission to center artist wellbeing, removed financial barriers to creative practice and provided space for exploration and dialogue. The artists were selected by an esteemed jury of arts professionals: Dejá Belardo (Associate Curator, The Shed), Aida Valdez (Founder, MAD54), and Dr. Margarita Rosa (Independent Curator and 2025 Curator, Future Fairs).

The Space In Between highlights both artists’ commitment to reimagining inherited narratives—Haynes through Afro-Futurist speculation and spiritual symbolism, and Mayela Allen through material translations of indigenous textile traditions. Though their mediums differ, both artists engage deeply with form, memory, and the act of constructing layered cosmologies. Sharing a studio space invited an unspoken dialogue between their practices, fostering new connections between their approaches to worldbuilding.

Grace Lynne Haynes explores the power of the speculative imagination as a means of cultural reclamation. Through vibrant mixed-media works, she examines futurity, femininity, and spirituality within the context of the African diaspora. Her ongoing series The Sea is The Only Highway draws on the Kongo Cosmogram—a symbol mapping the passage between physical and spiritual realms—to conjure supernatural figures that disrupt dominant worldviews. Haynes references science fiction, Black feminist literature, and personal spiritual experiences to create rich visual languages that challenge who gets to envision the future. Her characters demand not only visibility but also a redefinition of reason, history, and myth.

Cassandra Mayela Allen works fluidly across drawing and weaving to articulate a contemporary visual vocabulary that honors and transforms folk traditions. Her newest works, developed during the BolsterArts residency, foreground an intentional interplay between media. Rather than using drawing as a preparatory sketch for textiles, Allen treats each as an autonomous yet interconnected plane. Her weavings push beyond conventional tapestry, structured directly within frames to evoke the presence of painting. Drawing from indigenous and craft practices while chromatically exploring concepts of color interaction and relativity, her work bends the grid—both literally and conceptually—into dynamic meditations on form, lineage, and abstraction. An ode to the universal.

Together, Haynes and Mayela Allen build immersive, symbolic worlds that invite viewers to consider cultural legacy not as fixed inheritance, but as a space of potential transformation. The Space In Between is not just a meeting point of two practices—it is a zone of shared inquiry, material resonance, and spiritual imagination.

About the Artists:

Grace Lynne Haynes is a world builder that imagines new possibilities for empowerment through a symbolic visual language of her own making. Her work continues the Black-American artistic tradition that utilizes the imagination to create alternative realities that we can both dream and exist in. Through these worlds, she explores future possibilities from the lens of a Black woman. Her paintings ask questions about who owns our future, but also who is entitled to reason, speculate, and reckon with it.

Haynes is an inaugural fellow of Kehinde Wiley's Black Rock Senegal artist residency and a Forbes 30 Under 30 Art & Style selected artist. Her work has been featured twice on the cover of The New Yorker and in notable publications such as Whitewall Magazine, New American Paintings, CNN Art & Style, and Elephant. Haynes has exhibited her work internationally at the Dakar Biennale, as well as in Italy, New York, Los Angeles, and most recently, Berlin. Her paintings are in the collection of The California African American Museum, The Bunker Artspace, X Museum in Beijing, Pérez Art Museum, and many other notable collections.

Cassandra Mayela Allen (b. Caracas) is a self-taught artist based in NYC since 2014 after migrating from Venezuela. Her work delves into ideas of identity, migration and belonging, reflecting her personal experiences and engaging with the community through interviews and workshops. She explores textiles' unique storytelling potential, preserving and reimagining memories through material transformation and creative blends of fabric and found materials. While collaboration is vital to her practice, she also produces individual works exploring abstract expressionism through various materials.

Mayela Allen works with mixed media, textiles, installation and social art work. Recent projects and exhibitions include La UNAM (MX), Olympia (NYC), MOCAD (DT), V1 (CPH). She’s been an artist in residence with Modern Ancient Brown (DT), Pocoapoco (MX), Campo Garzón (UY) and Bolster Arts (NYC). Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Bomb Magazine, Elephant Magazine, American Craft Council and Vogue MX. She has been recently accepted into Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2025).

About Bolster Arts:
BolsterArts is built on the belief that artists should be at the center of every conversation. Recognizing the challenges visual artists face in navigating their careers, we focus on curating strategic introductions and studio visits that foster meaningful, long-term connections with curators, institutions, galleries, and collectors. Our goal is to amplify the artist’s voice and ensure their perspective is not only seen, but valued. Launched in 2025, the BolsterArts Residency provides rent-free studio space in Chinatown, NYC to two artists per four-month cycle. Residents are selected through a juried process led by esteemed voices in the field, including Dr. Margarita Rosa, Aida Valdez, Deja Belardo, Amy Rosenblum-Martin, Emily Edwards, Daniella Rose King, and others. The program alleviates financial strain and creates opportunities for critical engagement and exposure. Our inaugural cohort culminated in a two-person exhibition at All Street Gallery. In addition to the residency, our Continuum Fellows program is an invitation-only fellowship supporting rigorous practices by artists working outside NYC, later in their careers, or historically underrepresented. BolsterArts was founded by artist Lydia Nobles to create sustainable, artist-centered models of support—built on the belief that the most meaningful relationships don’t end with a program, but continue to grow with the artist.

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