LONI JOHNSON

Commissioned to create a new work for the exhibition, Johnson developed a site-specific and immersive altarpiece and installation. The artist’s work will be accompanied by an onsite altar-making workshop. The space employs her signature pink, along with multiple gold and hand-crafted mirrored altar pieces that transform a small nook into a space for reflection, healing, prayer and connection to spirit.

Loni Johnson is a multi-disciplinary visual artist born and raised in Miami, FL. As an artist, educator, mother and activist, Ms. Johnson understands that as artists, there is a cyclical obligation to give back and nurture our communities with her creative gift and it must be utilized to better our world. Through movement and ritual, the artist creates healing spaces for Black women and explores how ancestral and historical memory informs how, when and where we enter and claim spaces. Ms. Johnson graduated in 2003 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from SUNY at Purchase College School of Art and Design.

CANNUPA HANSKA LUGER

The videos ‘River (The Water Serpent)’ and the ‘The Mirror Shield Project’ on view in the exhibition, were initiated in 2016 in support of the Water Protectors standing up against the Dakota Access Pipeline near Standing Rock, ND. Through a tutorial video that went viral on social media, Cannupa Hanska Luger invited people to create mirrored shields that would be used in onsite frontline actions. In only a few short weeks, over a thousand shields were received from across the nation and became central to the Protector’s visual language and the events that ensued. ‘The Mirror Shield Project’ has since been formatted and used in various resistance movements across the world. ‘The Mirror Shield Project’ was conceived for the protection of his homelands and the water and inspired by images of women holding mirrors up to riot police in the Ukraine, so that the police could see themselves. The intention is to create a reflective mirror not only for a shield of protection, so that an oppressor may cause less harm, but to also utilize the oppressors image to reflect their own oppressive violent force back to them, to remind them that we are all human, regardless of the side of the line we are on, to force the oppressor to see themselves and the harm they are causing. This project speaks about when a line has been drawn and a frontline is created; that it can be difficult to see the humanity that exists behind the uniform holding that line. But those police are human beings, the mirror shield is a point of human engagement and a remembering that we are all in this life experience on this planet together.

The mirror shields for the installation are created locally by members of the community in each city where the installation is exhibited, and all shields are donated to community and social action projects following the exhibition.

Through monumental installations, Luger interweaves performance and political action to communicate stories about 21st century Indigeneity. Inspired by images of women holding mirrors up to riot police in the Ukraine, Luger created a brief instructional video for ‘The Mirror Shield Project (2016)’, inviting the public to create and send mirrored shields to the Water Protectors along the Dakota Access Pipeline—trading hundreds of supporters’ ephemeral “likes” and “shares” on social media for tangible and transformative contributions. The artist used a similar instructional video in ‘The MMIWQT Bead Project (2018)’, prompting diverse communities across the U.S. and Canada to shape and send over 4,000 individual handmade clay beads, which he then assembled into the 15 by 15-foot sculptural installation Every One. With the cooperation of thousands, the project re-humanized the abstract data gathered by the Native Women’s Association of Canada, each bead standing in for one of the missing or murdered Indigenous women, girls, queer and trans community members.

NEREIDA PATRICIA VENUS CONSTRUCT

Venus Construct, a work that glitters with glass beads, adorned with skeletal angels about to take flight, is nonetheless weighted by its concrete foundations. Propped on two concrete blocks, the work which professes that Venus, the goddess of love was born from fantasy, sweating, also appears like a tombstone. The mythological scene oscillates between violence and a plush seduction, dark depths and elevation. The artist’s poem in high relief hovers over the weighty figures below, narrating the scene or perhaps foreshadowing what is to come. 

Nereida Patricia is a visual artist and poet based in Chicago who has recently moved to Brooklyn, NY. Patricia’s practice spans sculpture, painting, and performance, and explores themes of mythology, trans poetics, and identity. Her work draws from postcolonial and Black feminist theory, Peruvian and Caribbean symbolism, as well as autobiographical fragments, to explore trans femininity, violence, gender, race, and sexual politics. She has studied at The New School and holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute Chicago. Her work has been exhibited at venues such as DUPLEX, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; Eric Firestone Gallery, New York; Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago and more.

HIBA SCHAHBAZ

‘Mermaids (2022)’, on loan from Jeffrey Deitch gallery, depicts a double mermaid, sensuously intertwined emerging from the softly swirling waters, their fishtails curving up underneath their heads to support their rest. The mermaids are doubled, almost reflective, duplication of the artist perhaps but one is gazing out strongly at the viewer while the other curls in on herself instinctively. These hybrid mythological creatures are imagined versions of hyperfeminist that occur across all cultures and times. The artist use of this hybridity might in fact be one of transcendence—a symbol of the potential for her own body and her performance of femininity to extend beyond the traditionally imagined archetypes.

Hiba Schahbaz was born in Karachi, Pakistan and lives in Brooklyn, NY. She works with paper, black tea, and water-based pigments as well as oil on linen. She depicts women’s bodies often referencing self-portraiture, creating a space for herself and other women to tell their stories and reclaim their histories. Since migrating to the United States, her practice has expanded from miniature painting to human-scale works. Schahbaz trained in miniature painting at the National College of Arts, Lahore and received an MFA in painting from Pratt Institute. Schahbaz’s practice is one of reimagined self or perhaps community portrait. The figures in her works may be the artist herself or the other women in her family and her community. They are often nude, soft, and vulnerable yet fiercely strong, returning a strong gaze right out from the work. While the works employ tea and watercolors, they are bold, almost larger than life in the presence and fearlessness they exude.

RICARDO PARTIDA

For the exhibition, the artist has created a new work ‘Rest on the Flight Home (2022)’ that portrays two winged figures hanging out by a body of water at night. A third figure with what might be a fishtail, can be seen holding a flaming halo as one of the winged figures urinates through it, specifically references the historic works ‘Venus and Cupid (1530) by Lorenzo Lotto and ‘Rest on the flight into Egypt (1597)’ by Caravaggio. Repurposing imagery from the great masters, Partida updates the visual iconography to include hybrid mermaid figures, queer cherubic brown bodies, and angelic golden showers.

Ricardo Partida, born in Mexico City, Mexico, and raised in the borderlands of South Texas, is a painter and recent graduate from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago’s Master of Fine Arts in Studio program. His work largely critiques and illuminates depictions of gender and desire in within the Western Art Historical canon. By using the visual language of figura serpentinata (‘a serpentine figure’ used to describe a style of painting intended to make the figure seem more dynamic, wherein the central figure spirals around its own axis), his works create surrogacies of seduction that question conventional power structures. Using surface treatments and mark-making, his work explores carnal desires through the push and pull of menace and allure.

FRANTZ ZEPHRIN

Zephirin’s paintings show a reality that commemorates and remains at odds with itself. A deity becomes a giraffe, a zebra, and a fish. A war scene converges with a chorus in ecstasy, and an orgy emerges from two humanoid faces built by leaves. In Frantz Zephirin work’s, rhythm seems to indicate the undulation of meaning beyond the parameters of logic. Dreams and offerings merge, and a retelling of tradition and invention are told by the mind of a painter, that is also, a voodoo priest. His work often depicts ‘The Invisible Ones (The Loas)’ mutating into animals, plants, and humans. This decision signals a profound change in the re-presentation of voodoo deities. Unlike Andre Pierre and many of his followers, (who gave faces to the representation of voodoo deities with their specific syncretic actions and attributes), Zephirin’s figures transcend those attributes, and are seen in a state of becoming. We witness an expansion of the religious into the realm of art, moving beyond the space of illustration, venturing into the tension of the transformative and the reality of initiations.  

Frantz Zephirin b.1968, Cap-Haitien, Haiti. Zephirin was awarded the Gold Medal in the Third Biennial of Caribbean and Central American Painting sponsored by The Museum of Modern Art of the Dominican Republic. His work was included in the V Biennial in Cuenca, Ecuador; the El-Saieh Gallery in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, among other venues.  His paintings were included la Biennale di Venezia’s “The Milk of Dreams” curated by Cecilia Alemani; 2022. A solo presentation of his work opened in March 2022, at the Williams College Museum of Art, Massachusetts; curated by Tomm El-Saieh. 

*Excerpt from text by Tomm El-Saieh, Viktor El-Saieh, Hunter Osking, and Diego Singh

DAVID HAMMONS

Over the past forty years, David Hammons has produced sculptures, installations, prints, drawings, paintings, performances, and videos that, with a sense of the sacred and the humorous, investigate the intersection of art and daily life. Hammons' ‘Holy Bible: Old Testament’, on view from the Collection of Craig Robins, is a limited-edition artist's book that consists of a 1997 softcover edition of ‘The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp’, by Arturo Schwartz, that has been rebound to resemble a Bible. As the originator of the "readymade"—a work of art made from an unaltered found object placed in an art context—Marcel Duchamp, perhaps more than any other artist, influenced the course of artmaking over the past one hundred years. Hammons questions or highlights the artist’s work as sacred object, he reveals the tension between creating and channeling by binding a book of Duchamp’s works as if it were the Old Testament, leaving open the possibility that art practice might lead to revelations or spiritual enlightenment.

From landmark actions like his ‘Bliz-aard Ball Sale (1983)’, in which Hammons sold snowballs of different sizes on a New York City sidewalk, to his most recent paintings whose surfaces are obscured by tarpaulins, burlap, or old furniture, such as Untitled, his work has contributed to an ongoing discussion about the role of the artist and the value of art in a world beyond the pampered precincts of the museum or gallery.