Brenda Singletary Artist Talk
September 10, 2026, 6 – 8 p.m.
On Thursday, September 10, Brenda Singletary, the artist of “We Hold These Truths…”, will be sharing her inspirations and family history that inspired this powerful and uplifting exhibition.
This event is free and open to the public.
Singletary will discuss the imagery, stories and personalities embedded in the artworks displayed in her solo exhibition, “We Hold These Truths…”, that features sculptural, mixed-media paintings celebrating her family’s history of military service—and our nation’s 250th anniversary.
Included in the exhibition are all-new paintings from Singletary’s “Love Letter to a Complicated Nation” series, wherein she combines photography, paint, wire, found objects, textured canvas and other fiber mediums—capturing emotionally complex stories layered with history. As the nation marks its Semiquincentennial anniversary, Singletary shares a body of work that records & reflects on her and her ancestral reality in the United States.
Coming Soon: we reveal our celebrity guest interviewer for the Brenda Singletary Artist Talk !
See what Toledo City Paper’s Steven E. Sloan had to say about the exhibit on August 7 in “Art to Heart: At 20 North Gallery Brenda Singletary’s We Hold These Truths…”!
The exhibit continues through September 19, 2026.
Artist Profile: Brenda Singletary
Meet Brenda Singletary, featured artist of “We Hold These Truths…”
Now through September 19, 20 North Gallery is featuring mixed media & sculptural paintings by Brenda Singletary in the solo exhibition, Brenda Singletary: We Hold These Truths… As part of this moving exhibition, we are highlighting the artist behind the vibrant and reflective works on view.
Born in Detroit, Michigan, educator and internationally-acclaimed artist Brenda Singletary is based in Toledo, Ohio—with her studio in the heart of Downtown.
Throughout her childhood and teenage years in Detroit, Singletary studied art and violin. A member of the Detroit Youth Symphony and encouraged by her parents to become a teacher, Singletary was most drawn to the visual arts. She would go on to be recruited upon graduation by Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan.
During the Civil Rights Movement, Singletary’s father, a World War II veteran, would play recordings of the speeches of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and her aunts shared their stories with her about attending the 1963 March on Washington. Singletary, herself, witnessed riots in Detroit.
For her education, Singletary sought out a historically Black college, deciding upon Morris Brown College (Atlanta, Georgia). It was in Atlanta where she began a career in community affairs, working with television stations before taking the role of Community Affairs Director at WTVC-TV in Chattanooga, Tennessee. A year later, Singletary returned to Atlanta and worked as a private investigator, an organ tuner and again in public affairs before deciding in 1985 to focus on art.
Soon Singletary was selling her paintings nationwide, hosting business seminars for artists and hosting fundraisers in collaboration with non-profit organizations including the NAACP. In 1997, Singletary served as a panel judge for the President’s Commission on White House Fellows program in Washington, D.C. and was commissioned to paint a Fellows portrait for installation in the United States White House. She was invited back in 2001 to speak to the Fellows about her experiences as an African American Artist.
In 2007, Singletary was interviewed in the category of ArtMaker, for The HistoryMakers project, as part of the eponymous institution’s commitment to digitally archiving the personal histories of African Americans. Across seven interview tapes, Singletary talks about her family background in Clarksdale, Mississippi, reflects on her experiences pursuing undergraduate & graduate studies, describes her influences & the arts community in Atlanta and provides her advice to aspiring artists and more. Singletary’s oral history for HistoryMakers is archived in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
Throughout her fine arts career, Singletary has received numerous awards and grants, including from the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus, Atlanta Business League, American Express, The Arts Commission (Toledo, Ohio) and more. Additionally, she completed an artist residency at Camac Centre d’Art in Marnay-sur-Seine (France). Her work forms part of the permanent collections of national and global corporations and has been featured in solo exhibitions across the country, most recently at the Savage Community Gallery of Toledo Museum of Art (Ohio) in 2024.
Singletary currently teaches at the Toledo Museum of Art and in her Downtown Toledo studio.
Artist Statement – 2026
”My work gives form to the invisible – to grief, memory, and transformation – shaped by the lived realities of being black in America. My work is both personal and political, grounded in ancestral resilience and a visual resistance to the systemic erasure of Black cultural and personal historical stories. I use photography, sculptural painting and textured canvas to explore what emotions feel like when made physical – asking, If I could paint grief, what would it look like?
Each gesture, tear and rupture in the surface reflects a deeper reckoning – not only with personal loss, but with the historical and ongoing violence that surrounds Black bodies and spirits. I choose materials that demand effort – bending wire, distressed fabric and layered paint – to mirror the labor of survival and remembrance in a county that often denies our complexity.
Through torn layers, shaped canvas, and rising form, I center the emotional memory of marginalized in both art and society. These emotions don’t exist in isolation; they are shaped by a political environment that constantly tests our worth, our safety, and our visibility. My work becomes a site of resistance and recovery – where personal pain and collective struggle are honored, where spirit is affirmed, and where beauty becomes a declaration of power.” – Brenda Singletary, 2026
The exhibit continues through September 19, 2026.