What History Leaves in Us

On view September 1- 30, 2026
YMCA of Metropolitan Detroit
1401 Broadway St #3a, Detroit, MI 48226

For Ackeem Salmon, history is never confined to the past. It remains present in our bodies, rituals, landscapes, institutions, and ways of remembering. What History Leaves in Us brings together works created between 2013 and 2025, tracing how Salmon’s understanding of history, identity, and place has developed across drawing, photography, and mixed media.

In Dance of Freedom, Salmon looks toward the history of Junkanoo in Jamaica as a living expression of resistance, celebration, and collective freedom. In the Silence of Ruins We Speak responds to periods of political and social instability, considering ruin and silence not as absence, but as places where memory and testimony persist.

Salmon’s migration from Jamaica to Detroit at age sixteen also shapes the exhibition. Leaving home transformed childhood into something remembered across distance—revisited, reconstructed, and sometimes questioned. Over the twelve years that followed, Detroit became the landscape of his foundational adulthood, artistic formation, and civic life. Through layered photographs, drawings, and materials, Jamaica and Detroit are allowed to occupy the same surface, revealing how one place continues to live within another.

These works ask viewers to consider history not only as something we study, but as something we inherit and participate in creating. Which histories remain active in your life? What have you carried from the places that formed you—and what will you choose to transform?