Lisa Todd Wexley’s apartment in And Just Like That… is more than set design. With works from Carrie Mae Weems, Alma Thomas, Barkley Hendricks, and more, her home becomes a gallery of modern Black artistry.
Lisa Todd Wexley (Nicole Ari Parker) doesn’t just wear culture — she lives in it. Her home, an elegant Manhattan brownstone on HBO’s And Just Like That…, doesn’t simply serve as a backdrop for Upper East Side glamor. It tells a story, specifically, a story of Black excellence, visual history, and the aesthetic sensibility of a woman whose identity is expressed as much through canvas and pigment as through couture.
Season three sharpens that lens. While Carrie Bradshaw’s closets remain iconic and Charlotte York Goldenblatt’s gallery pedigree is intact, it’s Lisa’s walls that are quietly rewriting the show’s visual language. Behind her are works by Carrie Mae Weems, Deborah Roberts, Barkley Hendricks, Gordon Parks, Mickalene Thomas, Derrick Adams, and Alma Thomas. And, unlike the tokenized gestures to diversity often seen in mainstream television sets, this collection is intentional. It is lived-in, thoughtful, and deeply personal — curated by Racquel Chevremont, a real-life art consultant and gallerist whose hand is evident in every frame.
“I wanted to know, who are these characters?… Herbert collects photographs and LTW collects extraordinary artists depicting Black women,” Chevremont said in an interview about the design process. “And then that was off to the races; every day was like shopping for art I wasn’t paying for.”
What results is a domestic museum of sorts. Take the two images from Carrie Mae Weems’ seminal “Kitchen Table Series” that hang in Lisa’s apartment: these aren’t just photographs, they are narrative interventions. Weems’ exploration of intimacy, motherhood, and self-possession is mirrored in Lisa’s own character arc as a filmmaker, mother, and Black woman navigating spaces that weren’t built with her in mind.
Nearby hangs Deborah Roberts’ “Political Lamb in a Wolf’s World,” a work that balances childhood innocence with the weight of sociopolitical commentary. Roberts’ signature collage technique dissects the construction of identity, particularly in young Black girls, something Lisa is clearly aware of.
Then there is Barkley Hendricks’ “October’s Gone,” a portrait so quietly luminous it almost steals the scene. Hendricks, who passed in 2017, is best known for painting Black subjects with a precision and reverence that rejected white-centric art canons. The inclusion of his work situates Lisa in a lineage of Black modernism — a nod to cultural legacy as much as contemporary taste.
In one scene, the camera lingers just long enough on Gordon Parks’ iconic 1956 image “Department Store, Mobile, Alabama” to register its weight. A young Black woman, standing under a segregated sign for “Colored Entrance,” looks off-camera. Her posture is composed, but her presence haunts. Parks, who worked as the first Black staff photographer at Life magazine, chronicled racism and resilience with unflinching elegance. His work in Lisa’s home feels like more than just a reference to the past; it reminds us that history lives here.
Mickalene Thomas’s double entry into the Wexley collection — “Portrait of Mnoja” and “Racquel avec Les Trois Femmes Noires” — further explores Black femininity with glamor and audacity. Thomas’ rhinestone-studded, enamel-on-wood portraits draw from art history while fiercely rewriting it, asserting that Black beauty deserves the same mythic treatment once reserved for goddesses in oil.
In another corner, two works by Derrick Adams pulse with color and movement: “Style Variation 32” and “Family Portrait No. 9.” Adams’ language of leisure, lineage, and joyful resistance pops against the more muted modernism of the apartment. His work echoes the ethos of Lisa herself — brilliant, vibrant, anchored in the joy of showing up fully.
But it’s the addition of Alma Thomas’ “Snoopy — Early Sun Display on Earth” in season three that signals a deeper shift. Thomas, who became the first Black woman to have her work hung in the White House permanent collection, once described her late-career abstract expressionism as “an extension of life.” The circular, mosaic-like patterns of this piece radiate warmth and motion — a visual hymn to possibility. Her work is also among the most valuable by a Black woman in the global art market; in 2021, her painting “Alma’s Flower Garden” sold for over $2.8 million at auction.
Art on television often functions as an ornament or status symbol. But in Lisa Todd Wexley’s home, it is autobiography and pedagogy. It is protest, aspiration, and selfhood. Each wall becomes a syllabus, a curated celebration of what it means to see and be seen.
“When you have a platform this large, everyone is going to see it,” Chevremont said. “To have the representation of brown and Black bodies on the walls… When you get that opportunity, you have to go for it. So, I was going to make sure they were big paintings, beautiful, just glorious, celebrating our lives, and that you were going to really be able to see them when the camera was on, that there was going to be no denying what was on these walls.”
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