Krannert Art Museum Hosts First Solo Exhibition of Artist Jen Everett
Could you dim the lights? showcases how Everett remixes images of herself with found photographs to discuss Black life, kinship, and collective gathering. On view in Champaign, Illinois.
Artist and educator Jen Everett collects everyday photographs of Black life in the United States sourced from thrift stores and her Midwestern and Southern family. She uses digital and analog mediums to reconfigure and recombine images, aiming to create an effect of abundance while recognizing the intimate aspects of her vernacular photographs. Everett remixes images of herself in conversation with the materials she collects to talk about Black life, kinship, the transmission of knowledge, and collective gathering. In her new body of work, Queer Cosmologies, the artist revisits childhood photographs to ruminate on popular and queer media portrayals of lesbians from the 1980s to the present, seeking moments and venues where freedom and love are possible, if precarious.
Everett’s first solo museum exhibition, Could you dim the lights?, is on view at the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign through October 5.
Events
That Which We Are Still Learning to Name: A Reading with Jessica Lynne
June 22, 1–2pm
Writer, editor, and critic Jessica Lynne will read from her essay collection which blends art criticism and elements of memoir to tell a story about the many ways that love — in all its forms — has shaped her life as a Black Southerner.
Look for me too: Queer Archives and Bearing Witness. A Workshop with Jen Everett
June 22, 5–6:30pm
During this workshop, participants will explore queer archives as sites of possibility, knowledge production, and world-building.
Could you dim the lights? Gallery Conversation with Jen Everett, Briona Simone Jones, madison moore, and Blair Ebony Smith
September 19, 5:30–7pm
The conversation will embrace Black life in the United States and vernacular photography, seeking Black lesbian presence in archives, and sonic resonances including nightlife and club spaces in the Midwest.
For more information, visit kam.illinois.edu.
Supported by the James and Beth Armsey Fund and the Richard M. and Rosann Gelvin Noel Krannert Art Museum Fund.
