October wild gallery: Exposure & Block by Block

Calder Lenhart and Sabrina Manygoats- Exposure

Sabrina Mathues Manygoats is a Diné (Navajo) interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the intersections of Indigenous identity and environmental justice. Raised between the beauty of her ancestral homeland and the rhythms of urban life, she remains grounded in both the land of her ancestors and the complexities of city living. Her artistic practice is deeply rooted in personal history and a sense of ancestral responsibility.

Sabrina’s great-grandmother lived in Middle Mesa, a region on the Navajo Nation deeply scarred by uranium extraction. Her grandmother was born in Coppermine, also on the reservation, where mining operations poisoned the surrounding land and water. As a child, Sabrina visited these places and observed the landscapes, feeling the weight of what had been done to the people and land. These early experiences left a lasting impression.

Her awareness of radioactive contamination deepened in her teenage years, during a family trip when a bold yellow billboard caught her eye “Radioactive Pollution Kills, It’s Time to Clean Up the Mines.” That moment sparked a car ride conversation with her grandmother, who began sharing stories and truths about uranium mining and its legacy, passed down through family memory but often absent from textbooks. Through mixed media, UV-reactive materials, and community centered storytelling, Sabrina reclaims these suppressed narratives. Her work incorporates uranium glass to confront the ongoing contamination in Diné Bikéyah, offering both education and a call to action. Her creative practice remains rooted in land, resilience, and the unfinished work of healing.

Calder Lenhart is a self-taught photographer from Youngstown, Ohio.  In Exposure, his debut two-person exhibition with Sabrina Manygoats, Calder presents work questioning the dichotomy between natural and manmade forms from three distinct yet interconnected perspectives: the detached observational style of the New Topographics, a more intimate engagement with the material conditions of Rust Belt cities and towns, and a deadpan documentation of the everyday ironies and anomalies that surface in these environments.

Working exclusively with natural light and digital cameras, Calder embraces the medium’s inherent digital artifacts, allowing them to underscore the tension between authenticity and mediation in contemporary image-making. Calder is also developing a project examining manifestations of class disparity in public spaces across the United States.

Calder received his B.S. in physics and astrophysics at Ohio State University in 2024. He currently lives in Columbus, OH and works at the Ohio State Department of Astronomy as a research scientist. His research on the physics and composition of exoplanetary atmospheres has been published in The Astronomical Journal.