Angela Hennessy represented by pt.2 Gallery
pt. 2 Gallery is pleased to announce the representation of Oakland-based artist Angela Hennessy. Working in textiles, installation and sculpture, Hennessy joins the gallery following her solo exhibition Queenship, in September 2021. Hennessy works extensively outside of her studio practice; including writing, teaching and performance to examine mythologies of blackness embedded in linguistic metaphors of color and cloth.
In Queenship, titled for its layering of queer and black vernacular, Hennessy uses a black and gold color palette as reference to human and mineral extractions under colonial era traffiking. Drawing on her practice of crocheting sculptural installations out of hair and twist tie wire, many of these works use language from maritime ships, borrowing their pattern based lexicon as a means to convey distress at sea. At the same time, the intermingling of black and gold addresses the significance of hair and adornment in African American culture.
Hennessy’s sculptures provoke a unique foray into the realm of abstraction, offering a space of rest, calm and surrender while insisting on the presence of the body. Within the confines of Eurocentric aesthetics and notions of material purity in abstraction, black hair is a form of unruly resistance. Hennessy’s work challenges this hierarchy by asserting self-care and joy as strategies of liberation and survival specific to black women. As such, her meditations invite a reinterpretation of abstraction in dialogue with black culture.
Angela Hennessy is an Oakland based artist and Associate Professor at California College of the Arts where teaches courses on visual and cultural narratives of death and textile theory. Through writing, studio work, and performance, her practice questions assumptions about Death and the Dead themselves. She uses a spectrum of color and other phenomena of light to expose mythologies of identity. Ephemeral and celestial forms constructed with every day gestures of domestic labor—washing, wrapping, stitching, weaving, brushing, and braiding.
In 2015, she survived a gunshot wound while interrupting a violent assault on the street in front of her house. Alternating between poem, prayer, and call to action, her manifesto, The School of the Dead, was written in the following months of recovery.
Her work has been featured in Sculpture Magazine, The New Yorker, Nat Brut, Surface Design Journal, Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture and recently in exhibitions at The Museum of the African Diaspora, Pt. 2 Gallery, and Southern Exposure. She has upcoming exhibitions at the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles and the Oakland Museum of California. She is a San Francisco Artadia Award winner and recipient of the 2021 Joan Mitchell Fellowship.