FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Melissa Sutherland Moss: A Softness In The Break
August 25 – December 13, 2025
Reception: Monday, October 20, 12:30–2 PM

Owings Mills, MD — Stevenson University’s School of Design, Arts, and Communication is proud to present A Softness In the Break, a compelling solo exhibition by contemporary interdisciplinary artist Melissa Sutherland Moss. Opening August 25 and running through December 13, the exhibition transforms the Lobby Gallery into a space where rupture, memory, and transformation are explored through the visual language of Moss’s practice.

A Softness In the Break examines how design, material, and embodied gestures become tools for navigating identity. Working across mixed media, photography, video, and performance, Moss engages processes of disruption and repair, asking: How do tenderness and resilience emerge from brokenness?

The exhibition comprises three interrelated series—Handle with Care, Rupture, and Crossing Point—which investigate repetition, fragmentation, and reassembly. Through acts of deconstructing and reconstructing form, Moss preserves personal and cultural memory while imagining pathways forward. Material processes such as thread, layering, tearing, and mending become metaphors for survival, emphasizing that softness is not weakness but a strategy for reshaping pain into new structures, meanings, and ways of being.

Melissa Sutherland Moss (b. Brooklyn, NY) is a Costa Rican American artist whose interdisciplinary practice explores landscapes, language, and the intertwined histories of the Caribbean and the United States. Her work views landscape as a cultural and historical artifact shaped by memory, identity, and time. Moss has exhibited at institutions including the Biggs Museum of American Art and the National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center, and has participated in residencies such as Art Crawl Harlem, the Chrysalis Institute for Emerging Artists, the Alliance of Artist Communities, and the Zea Mays Printmaking mentorship program. She will attend the Mass MoCA studio residency this November. Her artistic contributions have been featured in Black Enterprise, Forbes, Essence, Modern Luxury, and Refinery29. Moss recently completed her MFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art and splits her time between New York and Baltimore, MD.

A Softness In the Break will be on view in the Lobby Gallery at the School of Design, Arts, and Communication, Stevenson University, 11100 Ted Herget Way, Owings Mills North Campus. Gallery hours are Monday–Friday, 9 AM–5 PM, and Saturday, 11 AM–4 PM. A reception for the exhibition will take place on Monday, October 6, from 12:30–2 PM.

For more information about this exhibition contact Lori Rubeling, Faculty Director of Exhibitions, [email protected]. Additional information about Stevenson University’s Exhibition Program can be found at www.stevenson.edu/arts.