Mid ArtObjects

The Things We Live With

Corey Pemberton’s first solo museum exhibition looks at the people and objects that make a room someone’s

Issue 009 · 2 min read

A person in a patterned dress sits in a coral-colored room with plants, a rug and decorative objects.
Corey Pemberton, That morning light hits different, 2021. Artwork reproduction: Mint Museum exhibition page.

There is a forty-ounce bottle of Old English in Corey Pemberton’s first solo museum exhibition.

There’s a liter of Coca-Cola and a can of Black Magic hairspray. There are blown-glass forms that pull from Murano traditions, American face jugs, quilting and basketry.

Living Well, open through January 31 at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, brings together more than seventy paintings, collages, quilts, fiber works and glass objects by the 36-year-old Los Angeles artist. Pemberton trained in craft and material studies at Virginia Commonwealth University and initially built his practice around glass before expanding more deeply into painting. He is also the co-founder and executive director of Crafting the Future, a nonprofit created to expand access to education and opportunity for artists of color. In 2026, he received a United States Artists Fellowship. (The Mint Museum)

Corey Pemberton sits in his studio in front of a colorful quilt and patterned face jugs; photographed by Ruben Diaz in 2026.
Corey Pemberton in his studio, 2026. Photograph: Ruben Diaz. Source: SOCO Gallery.

The exhibition is called Living Well because much of Pemberton’s work takes place at home.

His paintings show Black, queer, female and nonbinary people eating, sitting, talking and resting inside rich domestic scenes full of color, pattern, furniture, textiles, plants, pictures and ordinary possessions. The rooms feel lived in, inhabited. Bodies lean, sit, recline, relax and take up space with personality.

The Mint’s curator Jen Sudul Edwards has described these as people historically less visible within museums, particularly in scenes of private repose and ordinary community. (The Mint Museum)

Pemberton is not depicting marginalization as a scene.

He is interested in what happens when people whose bodies and identities have often fallen outside conventional portraiture are presented as complete people living ordinary lives.

Three differently shaped glass vessels with multicolored woven-looking patterns on a white background.
Glass forms from Corey Pemberton’s practice. Image: Artist’s portfolio.

The interiors help him do that.

Pemberton has spoken about objects as carriers of relationships and memory. The glass work extends that idea by slowing down things we usually encounter quickly. A disposable bottle becomes something someone had to form carefully by hand.

Living Well is partly about who gets represented in museums. It is also about the beautiful, rich private lives of people who collect, share, make and live with objects that both contain and help shape their identities.