Artists EJ Hill and Martin Gonzales first met at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in 2022, where their shared cultural values, material engagement with wood and metal, and an unwavering commitment to play-as-process solidified their connection. Their meeting culminates in Velvet Faith—a reflection of their union as collaborators, bridging their distinct practices and material considerations. 

For their inaugural collaborative exhibition, Hill and Gonzales engage in a tender yet powerful act of creation, producing works that address the complexities of personal and collective transformation. This show emerges from a month-long residency at the museum, where the artists came together without the typical pressures of a formal exhibition-making framework, allowing them to answer more fully to themselves. Unlike other institutional experiences, this was an environment where they could relinquish control and allow the work to emerge on its own terms. For Hill, who had stepped back from the art world in recent years, the invitation to create in this space offered a rare kind of freedom: an opportunity to return on different terms, outside the constraints of expectation. Growing up in Dallas, Gonzales’s history as a high school graffiti artist echo throughout his work, as he navigates the shift from unsanctioned street art to a legitimized institutional setting. Neither artist knew exactly what would emerge or how the exhibition would take shape, but they placed their trust in each other, creating a space where they could freely play, experiment, and let the process unfold. Velvet Faith explores the complex dynamics of intentional community and trust, framed within the intimate context of their collaboration. 

The exhibition is both expansive and carefully honed, a show that is tight in its dialogue and deliberate in its contrasts. Works throughout the gallery respond to the tension between softness and rigidity. At the center of the exhibition, a towering metal bull by Gonzales stands resolutely, facing off with a swatch of red fabric suspended between Hill’s floating cloud forms—a poetic meeting of force and surrender. Gonzales incorporates racehorse flags into his sculptures, mirroring his feelings surrounding power and control, while Hill continues his long engagement with cloud motifs, a theme he has explored since 2013 as a symbol of movement, transformation, and boundlessness. For the exhibition, Gonzales has created works on paper in direct response to Hill’s, reflecting their ongoing dialogue about personal histories: Hill includes a childhood photograph of himself, while Gonzales contributes a self-portrait that recalls the charged memories of his past, marking their shared investment in memory, identity, and self-representation. 

Hill and Gonzales invite viewers into a space of possibility, where the joy and pain of creation meet. More than a showcase of their work, Velvet Faith is a meditation on self-determination, joy, and liberation—liberation from the conventions of institutionalized art-making, from the constraints of market-driven practice, from the expectation that an exhibition must be a preordained thing rather than an unfolding question. On view at a museum that itself embraces risk and resists rigid conventions, Velvet Faith is not just an invitation to witness—it is an invitation to step into a space where the unknown is not only permitted but necessary.