Artist-in-residence Zachary Fabri’s exhibition at Ogden Contemporary Arts creates a web of unexpected connections and invites viewers to consider our common bonds.
Pink Kool-Aid Menagerie
October 2, 2026–January 3, 2027
Ogden Contemporary Arts, Ogden, UT
Zachary Fabri presents a surreal, collage-like exhibition including painting, photography, video, sculpture, and performance. The Brooklyn-based artist draws from his immersive experiences during a two-month residency in Ogden, weaving together observations of the Great Salt Lake’s natural environment with encounters, conversations, and community engagement throughout the region.
Central to Pink Kool-Aid Menagerie are experimental works created at the Bonneville Salt Flats and Stansbury Island within the Great Salt Lake ecosystem. An important point of reference is Robert Smithson’s iconic earthwork Spiral Jetty (1970), located on the northeastern shore of the lake. Influenced by Smithson’s approach to site, landscape, and material, Fabri created photographs and videos along the lake’s striking pink shoreline.
The exhibition also draws playfully from a wide range of cultural and artistic references, including the work of Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, Pope.L, and David Hammons. Rather than following a single narrative, Fabri layers these influences with his own experiences, allowing seemingly different histories, images, and ideas to collide.
Pink emerges as a recurring visual and conceptual thread throughout the exhibition. It originates in the landscape, in the halophilic microorganisms that thrive in the Great Salt Lake’s hypersaline waters, but quickly shifts toward the artificial pink of Kool-Aid and the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid.” This association led Fabri to the history of Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple, whose followers at Jonestown were predominantly Black and whose deaths in 1978 have become embedded in American cultural memory. Through these associations, color becomes a vehicle for moving between ecology, popular culture, belief, collective identity, and historical memory.
Fabri’s experience as a Black American is an ever-present subtext within his practice. In several sculptures, videos, and performances in the exhibition, he engages with the history and contemporary presence of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His work considers what it means for a Black artist to encounter an institution that, until 1978, restricted Black men of African descent from priesthood ordination and Black women and men from participation in temple ordinances.
Rather than approaching this history from a distance, Fabri has used his residency as an opportunity for conversation and analysis. Throughout his time in Ogden, he has met regularly with local Latter-day Saint missionaries, seeking to better understand the Church, its beliefs, and the role it plays within the Ogden community. These exchanges became part of the exhibition’s larger exploration of faith, belonging, history, and the ways communities construct and sustain shared identities.
By bringing together seemingly disparate places, histories, materials, and ideas, Pink Kool-Aid Menagerie creates a web of unexpected connections. Through salt, color, landscape, faith, food, race, and memory, Fabri invites viewers to consider the bonds that connect us to one another and our shared responsibility to the environments and communities we inhabit.
Pink Kool-Aid Menagerie is on view from October 2, 2026, to January 3, 2027, at Ogden Contemporary Arts in Ogden, Utah.
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