How can we foster connection and belonging within the museum space? This exhibition, in its seventh iteration, showcases artwork from the most recent two cohorts of The Bronx Museum’s AIM Fellowship program. Within the program, these 28 artists developed structures of connection and community; presented together, their artworks here begin a conversation that invites and extends further communal experience.

Now in its 45th year, AIM is an intensive year-long seminar program in which artists learn skills to help them develop and sustain their careers. In addition to building specific, practical knowledge, the AIM program also fosters and supports the formation of a community of artists.

The seventh AIM biennial is organized in three fluid and overlapping sections. The artworks in this show explore connection and disconnection: to one’s heritage, invoking memory, time, culture, and geography; to society and its norms, practices, and structures, through social and institutional critique; and to other individuals or groups, expressed through ideas of identity, intimacy, and distance. Both individually and seen together, these works map intersections and oppositions, isolation and belonging.

Further, this exhibition considers and demonstrates how The Bronx Museum, site of both the AIM Fellowship itself and this group exhibition of its participants’ work, does and can continue to function as a connective site where communities can form and belonging can be fostered.