Through Every Window, A Little Light Flows
The Bakery Atlanta’s 2025 Curatorial Fellowship was intended to support an emerging curator looking to gain hands-on experience, expand their practice, and take a meaningful step toward a career in the arts. This program provided one emerging curator with pro bono gallery space, a $1,000 stipend to curate a fine art exhibition, artistic guidance, as well as administrative and marketing support from The Bakery.
Our inaugural Curatorial Fellow was Camisha Butler who curated a group show in December 2025 titled, Through Every Window, A Little Light Flows. Read on to hear from Camisha about her experience curating this exhibition!
Photo by Blake Pipes
I am a craft-based artist who centers storytelling and a celebration of material culture in my practice. My interest in curating grew naturally from that foundation. As an artist, I am constantly thinking about how my work is encountered and if my efforts to preserve craft in a way that is approachable and contemporary resonate with audiences.
About a year before the fellowship was known to me, I began to realize that curating could potentially offer an opportunity to extend that thinking beyond my own practice and into the form of collective authorship.
The announcement of the inaugural Curatorial Fellowship was so perfectly timed for me! I was drawn to this opportunity because it would allow me to explore curating as a form of creation: selecting, situating, and holding space for artists whose work engages memory, skilled handcraft based in contemporary art, and lived experience.
The exhibition theme was born out of my ongoing interest in domestic material culture and how these everyday, seemingly inanimate objects carry emotional, cultural, and political weight, capturing the energy of home. As a textile artist, I have found that inclusion in fine art spaces requires the medium to meet halfway in a pictorial context. I wanted to create a show in which craft can function as a witness and response to contemporary life, while also serving as a platform for craft in the context of contemporary art.
Working with The Bakery Atlanta as a curatorial fellow gave me invaluable insight into the practical and administrative realities of exhibition-making. It reminded me of my experience as an educator and how teaching others made me a better student. One of the unexpected challenges was balancing vision with logistics, learning how timelines, budgets, and physical constraints actively shape curatorial decisions. Of course, I started with grandiose ideas, a dream team of a lineup, including furniture from an amazing artist in Brooklyn. Still, I had to accept some things just weren't logistically possible, and in the end, everything turned out just as it should.
I met my goal of a show featuring solely craft-based media, with amazing artists based in Atlanta and nationally. Navigating communication between artists in multiple locations and work of various sizes, the Bakery and I required clarity, flexibility, and trust. Experiencing the exhibition from this perspective deepened my respect for the invisible labor behind every show, from the arranging of the flow of the work on the wall to engaging all the visitors and ensuring everyone is educated on the show and the gallery space.
At the same time, the most rewarding and unexpected highlights came from witnessing how artists responded to the framework I set and how the work began to speak to one another once installed. It was affirming seeing visitors slow down and engage thoughtfully with the space. I even had some interesting conversations with some attendees in relation to the works and theme of the show. I’m walking away from this feeling the power of curation as a form of quiet orchestration.
Curating this exhibition expanded my practice by reinforcing my belief that curating is not separate from making but another way of shaping experience, dialogue, and collective meaning. The works I selected were chosen for their material intelligence, emotional restraint, and commitment to process. Because they were so uniquely created and were an unusual group, all pieces invited reflection rather than demanding attention. I was drawn to works that foreground care, labor, and persistence, and that resonated across personal and communal registers.
This experience has strengthened my curatorial voice within Atlanta’s art ecosystem and affirmed my desire to continue creating platforms that center craft and thoughtful engagement as vital contributions to contemporary art.