Opening Reception: Friday, December 6th - 7 – 11 PM
December 6th – January 19th 2019
With work by: Alexandria Eregbu, Jacquelyn Carmen Guerrero, Jesus Hilario-Reyes, Luis Sahagun, Edra Soto, Rhonda Wheatley, and Santiago X
Curated by: Adia Sykes, Sabrina Greig, and Courtney Cintron
The Petty Biennial.2 is a multi-site project on view at three locations in Chicago from November 7th, 2019 - February 14th, 2020. Founded in 2016, The Petty Biennial is not a biennial itself, but a curatorial investigation towards queering the canon of traditional biennials. The Petty Biennial engages with pettiness as an act of seizing agency within the telling of one’s own story where one asserts themselves unapologetically and finds solidarity from a community of peers.
Further expanding on the first Petty Biennial, this iteration challenges the notion of diasporic communities as a dispersion of ethnicities across the globe— understanding diaspora as a network and community of people across races, geographies, and ethnicities who are impacted and connected through the legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and neoliberalism. This connective tissue of social systems represents the efforts on the part of people of color to find each other and ourselves, a constant struggle to free our mind, body, and soul from inherited violence and oppression.
Channeling a heightened social consciousness and spiritual awareness, artists at Heaven Gallery engage with artworks that elucidate the significance of radical imagination as a pathway to paradigm transformation, consciousness expansion, and healing for the diasporic experience. Through practices that span media, these artists explore themes of spirituality, ancestral histories, ritual, alternative realities and re-translate their experiences into manifestations and signifiers found in our current world.
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Programming: A Petty Weekend
Saturday, December 14th: A Petty Brunch: Join the curators and artists of the Petty Biennial.2 for an interactive discussion around the concepts and themes that inspired the second iteration of the multi-site exhibition project. Courtney Cintron, Sabrina Greig, and Adia Sykes invite creatives to share a meal to celebrate diaspora, race, spirituality, healing and more.
Sunday, December 15th: Rhonda Wheatley will lead a journaling and manifestation workshop as part of programming for the Petty Biennial .2, Wheatley is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and energy healer whose projects are grounded in the speculative and metaphysical. She connects with the public through her visual and written works, workshops, and interactive performances to promote healing, personal transformation, and consciousness expansion.