The Petty Biennial: Cultural Production for A Black, Brown, and Feminist Art Future

This presentation will look at a local project working to normalize an equitable art future through a Black feminist lens. The Petty Biennial, formed in 2016 by Chicago-based curators La Keisha Leek and Sadie Woods, intends to complicate dominant narratives of contemporary cultural, social, and political norms and is a response to classist views towards communities of color and marginalized art practices. At the intersection of race, gender and sexuality the project is a political act and curatorial investigation in conversation with the constraints, alienation, and censorship of traditional biennials. The investigation was birthed out of resistance to a limited imagination that believes that a black, brown, queer American narrative is limited, and at times monolithic. We consider what it means to build against traditional forms, to exist outside of a global perspective of Blackness, and to take up space and hand that space over to othered artists. In all these ways, we are reclaiming our power.

An extension of this project is scheduled to take place in Chicago in November 2019 and will be produced by three emerging curators of color at the invitation of Leek and Woods. This approach allows Leek and Woods to evaluate the project’s form and long-term potential, toward a sustained platform by which new and experimental ideas continue to find a voice through Black and brown femme cultural production.