CELESTIAL BODIES:
IMMERSED IN THE MATERIAL
A NYC JEWELRY WEEK Panel
NovEmber 17 at 2pm PST / 5pm EST
Two artists who have roots in the jewelry space, Angela Hennessy and Lauren Fensterstock, discuss how they transform museum and gallery spaces using an abundance of readily available materials. Their immersive environments feature celestial bodies like suns, moons, comets, black holes, and rainbows created by laborious repetition of common objects, distinctly of the earth.
Angela Hennessy’s installations reference grieving and mourning traditions that center around hair. To create them, she weaves, crochets and plaits synthetic hair with her own. She treats hair as a textile with luxurious texture and visceral tactility, perfectly coiffed and arranged in monumental forms, beautifully lit and set apart. Hennessy’s use of Black hair as material references a complex cultural history that includes ancestral trauma and cultural oppression as well as the pride, beauty, and joy of Blackness. Her work provides a place for reflection on the reality of loss and an invitation to grieve.
Lauren Fensterstock’s art practice brings arcane apocalyptic texts into three dimensions, interpreting esoteric end-of-world scenarios in modern terms of environmental devastation. Her work is beautifully rendered in glittering, monochromatic blacks and whites, sourced from natural materials like quartz, crystals, hematite, onyx, and seashells and arranged in mosaics that threaten and beguile the viewer. Fensterstock’s work reflects on the human tendency to look skyward for portents of doom and hope to quell our anxieties. Her installations are snapshots of imagined devastation, allowing the viewer to witness the contradictory beauty of eventual extinction.
Rebekah Frank, studio artist and former director of Art Jewelry Forum, engages in a conversation with both artists on topics that range from the power that accumulates with small acts, contrasting interpretations of color in art and culture across time, and the value of text, as reference and process, to the creative practice.
This live, virtual conversation welcomes your questions.
Angela Hennessy (she/her) is an Oakland-based artist and Associate Professor at California College of the Arts where she teaches courses on visual and cultural narratives of death and contemporary art. Through writing, studio work, and performance her practice examines mythologies of blackness embedded in linguistic metaphors of color and cloth. Last fall her work was featured in a solo exhibition When and where I enter at Southern Exposure and in the recent publication Fray: Textile Art and Politics by Julia Bryan-Wilson.
Her work has been exhibited at Patricia Sweetow Gallery, The Growlery, Bellevue Arts Museum, Exit Art, Southern Exposure, The Richmond Art Center, The Small Gallery, and The Oakland Museum of California. Hennessy’s work is in the permanent collection of the Cornell Fine Arts Museum and was featured in the Journal of Cloth and Culture and In The Make: Studio Visits with Artists.
Lauren Fensterstock (she/her) creates elaborate sculptures and installations that explore the evolving history of our relationship to nature. These intricate artworks are constructed in the material of ladies’ accomplishments, such as quilled paper and shellwork, emphasizing the capacity of traditional female crafts to reflect on the complexities of the world beyond the domestic sphere.
Fensterstock is a United States Artist Fellow whose work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at MOCA Jacksonville, The John Michael Kohler Art Center, and Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Other recent exhibitions include The Renwick Gallery of The Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Rijswijk Museum. Her work is represented by the Claire Oliver Gallery in New York.
Outside the studio, Lauren has taught, lectured, and critiqued around the country. She was the 2018-19 Lamar Dodd Professorial Chair at the University of Georgia and has held appointments at prestigious universities on the East Coast.
Rebekah Frank (she/her) received her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2012 and a BFA from Texas State University in 2010. In her work, she explores themes of protection, vulnerability, and boundaries. As a queer artist, Rebekah enjoys writing about other queer artists with a strong material focus. Rebekah’s studio practice is based in the Mission District of San Francisco, CA and she exhibits, lectures, and teaches workshops all over the world.