Above: Resolve # 2 by Kathryn Cornelius, C-Print, 20"x30", 2005
I don't dream of labor
3.18.24 - 5.19.24
Artists and Healers
Ama BE
Ama Chandra
Kathryn Cornelius
Nancy Daly
Chiara Francesca
Michelle Dubreuil Macek
Maria Porges
Shirin Towfiq
Christine Wang
Statement
I don’t dream of labor is a collection of work by women artists and healing practitioners that undermines hustle culture through satire and provides space and resources to foster community around well-being.
If burnout is the symptom of exploitative labor practices, then this exhibit subverts the traditional serious undertones of both work and exhibitions to find a more supportive way through the challenges of balancing work, sustaining life, and reclaiming joy.
- Mallory Kimmel, Curator
A BmoreArt Pick of the Week Show
Hours
Monday: 3pm - 5:30pm
Tuesday: 11am - 8pm
Wednesday: 11am - 6pm
Thursday: 10am - 2pm, 6pm - 8pm
Friday: 11am - 2pm
Saturday: 10am - 4pm
Events
Morning Reception:
3.21.24, 10am - 12pm
Join us in celebrating this show with brunch food and an apothecary tea ceremony with Chiara Francesca.
Evening Reception:
3.21.24, 6pm - 8pm
Celebrate the exhibition with light refreshments and an apothecary tea ceramony.
The Workshop Day
4.20.24, 12pm - 4pm
A day of workshops and events inspired by the exhibition I don't dream of labor.
Gallery
Artist Talk with Chiara Francesca
Curator Mallory Kimmel hosted an artist talk with Chiara Francesca during the reception for I don't dream of labor on March 21, 2024. If you have trouble viewing the below video, please click here to open the video in a new window.
Podcast
Curator Mallory Kimmel sat down with Comedic Drag Superstar Zenobia Darling on the podcast #RockStarLife: CoffeeBreak to discuss the exhibition, dig into her inspiration, and delve into her past. Click the button below to start listening to this 2-episode talk, or visit the podcast page here.
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Live Community Archive
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Delve Deeper
Ama BE
Ama BE is a US-born Ghanaian, transdisciplinary artist who explores African relationships to land cultivation, labor, and migration. She works with botanical materials, many of which carry antithetical ties to hegemonic trade, violent labor migrations, spirituality, and holistic remedy. Her practice probes at porous spaces between time, materiality, sentience, and memory to propose nuance in the performance of African cosmologies and embodiment of Africanfuturity. Her current work engages botanics as primary source and material collaborator, as she unearths stories of African land stewardship, indigenous wisdom and visceral cultural memory. Her resulting plant-based sculptural pieces compose a body of work that exists as reconstructed archives of intimate labor of land cultivation. The works are documented translations of botanical language that narrate African-indigenous histories of agency, complicity and sentient conversations held through contact with the earth.
Listen to Ama BE's thoughts on the exhibit.
Ama Chandra
Baltimore-based Sanahara Ama Chandra (she/her) is a Reiki Master and Mystic, Sound healer, Energetic wellness practitioner, professional singer, griot, activist, holistic nurse care manager, and mama of two. She is a truth-seeking and speaking, storytelling, warrior woman who embodies Love Medicine wherever she goes. She is the Singing Bowl. Sanahara Ama Chandra has enjoyed a life-long relationship with sound. From her roots in Southern Gospel and 70’s Soul to her journeys through World music, Neo-Soul, and Jazz, her heart and soul have embodied the healing power of being moved by music. On her path of seeking, Ama has acquired many skills and experiences that infuse depth-filled emotions, musical melody, and inspired improvisation into her musical expressions. With international recordings, multiple projects and collaborations, and recognition from Maryland State Arts Council, she is one of Baltimore’s beloved treasures. Whether in her role as a Human-Centered leader with grassroots organizations of her own design, performing and creating musical experiences, offering energy and sound healing as a skill and service, working as a holistic nurse, or parenting her own children, she brings a depth of knowledge, experience, and radical presence to her work.
Kathryn Cornelius
Kathryn Cornelius is an artist, writer, business transformation leader & consultant, certified trauma-informed teacher & healer, and founder of two consultancies. She is passionately curious about the human experience at micro and macro levels, and is dedicated to evolving the paradigm of how we work, live, and contribute to the health and healing of humanity and the planet.
Nancy Daly
Nancy Daly is a Washington, D.C. based interdisciplinary artist. By creating interactive machines reminiscent of outdated technology, prints, replicas and sculptures, she address the contradictions present in various technology that are at once ephemeral and entirely permanent. Daly earned an MFA in Photographic and Electronic Media at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and holds a BFA in Studio Art with a concentration in Graphic Design from James Madison University. She is an alumni of the Hamiltonian Artists Fellowship Program in Washington, D.C. (2014-2016) and maintains an active studio practice at Stable Arts. Recent exhibitions include A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, Gallery 406 at Elon University, Elon, NC, New Image Gallery at James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA and Julio Fine Arts Gallery at Loyola University Maryland, Baltimore, MD. Daly is the co-founder of but, also, an artist-run space in Washington, D.C. dedicated to the sustaining of art practices, in a multitude of forms, through a series of short-term projects.
Chiara Francesca
Chiara is a queer disabled artist, writer, organizer, acupuncturist, former teen mother, first-generation college grad, and Italian immigrant to the occupied indigenous territory currently known as the United States. Chiara has been involved in movements for justice for over two decades, in particular in gender violence prevention, healing justice, and politicized art-making They have written and spoken on a wide variety of topics including disability violence, accessible healthcare, and using art as a cultural tool for stuctural change.
Michelle Dubreuil Macek
I am here on this planet to be of service, to learn love, to teach love and to help others find it in themselves by offering an evolution of the consciousness through my teaching gifts. We are currently experiencing an apocryphal moment in history that demands a personal and interpersonal spiritual work. There are three archetypes that I fully embody: Teacher: From an early age, the oldest of four, I learned to put my feminine powers to good use! I have spent more than three decades in the classroom, nationally and internationally, and have cultivated my teaching presence in the healing movement revolution, as well. As much as I teach, I always learn way more from my students. I can’t imagine my life without teaching! Dancer: Dance has nourished me from a young age starting with my childhood classes with my angel teacher, Miss Janet, and continuing to this very day. I make it a daily requirement to move my sacred vessel in some way be it in a walk, a dance, a yoga flow, some qigong...whatever lifts my spirit. The body is wise and can teach us so much. I adore opening spaces and places for others to feel all the feels of the body, mind, spirit. Mother: I was born to birth and create. Birth my 3 children. Birth thinkers, learners, doers in my students. Birth big projects. I am called to be in service to the Divine Feminine in the quotidian…be it at home with my DNA family or working within humanity at large. And I feel blessed to be able to share all of these small and large experiences with the world. Also, I was birthed on the feast day of Joan of Arc, a warrior of light who had a steel like faith in herself and in her mission. I feel her strength in me! I BELIEVE BIODANZA CAN HEAL THE WORLD! One of my students once gave me an end of the school year award stating that I would be most likely to save the world by teaching Biodanza. I think she was right! Biodanza is a system of radical love and acceptance learned on the dance floor in community with self, the other and the universe at large. The essence is to love and to be loved…beautiful affectivity…and to BE THE CHANGE…not only on the dance floor, but bringing it home and into the universe. This is why practicing Biodanza is a transformative act of love for oneself and the world.
Maria Porges
Since the late ‘80s, Maria Porges has pursued dual practices as both writer and artist. She currently teaches in both areas at California College of the Arts, in the Fine Arts MFA program, the Visual and Critical studies program and the college. A graduate of Yale University (BA) and the University of Chicago (MFA), Porges’s exhibition career of image/text sculpture and works on paper has spanned 30 years of solo and group shows, regionally and nationally, at galleries, museums and alternative spaces. Her reviews and critical writing have been published widely in Artforum, Sculpture, squarecylinder.com, Hyperallergic.com, and a host of other now-defunct art magazines. Porges has also authored essays for more than 120 exhibition catalogues as well as multiple book contributions. She lives in Oakland and raises succulents.
Listen to Maria Porges' thoughts on the exhibit.
Shirin Towfiq
Shirin Towfiq is an interdisciplinary artist working with an emphasis on installation, sculptural photography, textiles, and printmaking. Drawing from her positionality as a second-generation Iranian refugee, her artwork explores the complexities of belonging and placemaking through archival research and intergenerational communication with a diasporic lens. She focuses on everyday practices of belonging and visual culture, as produced by migrants, and reflecting on the traces of diaspora to investigate cultural memory, history, and temporality.
Christine Wang
Christine Tien Wang (b. 1985 Washington D.C) received her BFA from The Cooper Union and her MFA in painting from UCLA. Wang completed residencies at the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, VCUQatar, Chashama North, and Skowhegan. Wang's solo exhibition Coronavirus Memes was on view at Galerie Nagel Draxler in Cologne. Selected group exhibition venues include Frans Hals Museum, Rachel Uffner, Magenta Plains, and The Prince Street Gallery. Wang is in the collection of Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Groeninghe Art Collection in Belgium. Wang is represented by Ever Gold [Projects] in San Francisco, Night Gallery in Los Angeles and Galerie Nagel Draxler in Cologne and Berlin. Wang is currently Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at California College of Art and lives and works in San Francisco.