Deep Needle is a solo-exhibition in Co-Prosperity’s windows by Chicago-based artist, Angela Davis Fegan opening on Friday, March 3rd until April 21st. Join us at Co-Prosperity as we celebrate our first window exhibition of 2023 with an opening reception on Friday, March 3rd from 6-9PM!
Download Exhibition Guide here.
Documentation by COLECTIVO MULTIPOLAR
In her solo exhibition DEEP NEEDLE, Chicago artist Angela Davis Fegan presents mixed-media portraits and letterpress posters drenched with queer desire. The 18 paintings and 200 letterpress prints collected in this feature range from antifascist political slogans, intimate self-portraits with a lover, and abstract renderings of life at the intersection of political identities.
Taking advantage of the gallery’s window displays that span entire corner of the building, Fegan transforms materials from her letterpress studio — including handmade paper, scraps from artist books, and ephemera from her Lavender Menace poster project — into a site-specific commentary on intersectional identity and its representation in printed and figurative media.
Rooted in resistance, particularly toward being made invisible or ignored, the works included in DEEP NEEDLE also speak to the “racial fault line” that co-prosperity’s Bridgeport location sits above; given the neighborhood’s history as a white enclave within a starkly segregated South Side of Chicago. “As a biracial queer woman, I have stood on that fault line my whole life,” Fegan says. “It creates a sense of precariousness that my experience can be erased at any time. My work is made to ensure that it will not be.”
Deep Needle opens at Co-Prosperity on March 3rd and will run through April 23rd, with a special activation scheduled on March 21st.
Tuesday, March 21st, join Deep-Needle artist Angela Davis Fegan at Co-Prosperity for an equinox activation of her exhibition outside of Co-Prosperity! Participants are invited to a processional stroll to cast a spell against fascism, and excavate the influence of the Irish mafia on Chicago’s democratic machine.
Rain or shine! Spell materials will be provided, and weather appropriate gear is encouraged!
Angela Davis Fegan transcends well beyond the second-wave feminist slogan “the personal is political'' through her solo exhibition “Deep Needle”–an interdisciplinary display of mixed media portraiture and letterpress posters–that call and respond to the intimate political questions of our time. Whether it’s resistance against the attacks on bodily autonomy and public health, against the violence of the police state, or the interrogations we make within our own communities around race, gender and sexuality. While struggle is constant, Fegan allows us a window into the natural world, preserved in the materials she uses in her figurative work: handmade paper, dried flora and plant life, menstrual blood mixed into varnish and paint. These works are very much alive, and invite us to confront the barriers placed upon us–even those we place on ourselves–as a means of reaching further toward liberation.
- Aricka Foreman
About the Artist
Angela Davis Fegan is a native of Chicago’s South Side. A graduate of Chicago’s famed Whitney Young High School, she received her BFA in Fine Arts from New York’s Parsons School of Design and her MFA in Interdisciplinary Book and Paper Arts from Columbia College Chicago. Angela has mounted shows at Galerie F, Chicago Artists’ Coalition, the DePaul Art Museum, The Center for Book Arts (NY), the University of Chicago’s Arts Incubator and Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, the Hyde Park Art Center, SAIC’s Sullivan Galleries, Columbia’s Glass Curtain Gallery and SPACES (OH). Her work has been selected for book covers including The Truth About Dolls by Jamila Woods, Secondhand by Maya Marshall, and All Blue So Late by Laura Swearingen-Steadwell. Her MFA thesis and ongoing work: the lavender menace poster project, has been written up by The Offing (LA Review of Books), Hyperallergic, Chicago Magazine, the RedEye, Go Magazine, Pop Sugar, the Chicago Reader, and Newcity.
