Body Defiance, Amplify’s next Generator Grant exhibition, reveals gender in its knotty mix of cultural norms, historical formations, family influence, and psychic realities constantly made and remade.
Exhibition artists and organizers Ang Bennett and Sheree Le’Shawn, both assigned female at birth (AFAB), document their shared experiences as Black, AFAB people asserting bodily autonomy outside the binary. Their collaborative photo and video work traces the daily ritual of enacting gender, and its multiplicities, in the repressive and often hostile political landscape of the Midwest.
Itself a document of this time and this place, the exhibition deploys gender as a process of emergence that is crafted, cultivated, and reproduced over time. In doing so, Body Defiance avows the power of queer self-determination to challenge legislative assaults on the rights of LGBTQ2+ people and expose the democratically prescribed conditions of freedom, equality, and justice for some, not all.
Free and open to all. Face masks are not required but always welcome. Exhibition viewings after the opening are by appointment. Please register in Eventbrite or email peter@amplifyarts.org to schedule a time to visit outside of regular gallery appointment hours.
Exhibition Dates: July 14th - August 18th, 2023
Opening Reception: July 14th; 6pm - 9pm
Screening: August 11th; 7pm - 8pm
Regular Gallery Hours: Thursdays and Fridays; 1pm - 5pm by appointment
Generator Grant programming is presented with support from the Nebraska Arts Council and the Nebraska Cultural Endowment.
About the Artists:
Ang R. Bennett (they|them) is an interdisciplinary artist. Ang has won several awards for their contributions to the art community, including two Omaha Entertainment and Arts Awards. They were a 2020 Young, Black and Influential award recipient for Creativity. Ang's work examines Black and Queer identities from both an introspective and research-based lens. In addition to their only solo exhibition, colored Black., at Petshop Gallery in 2020, Ang's work has been displayed in Hot Shops Art Center, Split Gallery, Apollon Art Space, RBR G, and Michael Phipps Gallery. In June 2022, Ang's work was selected to go in the inaugural membership card for the Stonewall National Visitor's Center, set to open in New York in June 2024.
Sheree Le'Shawn (she/her) is an emerging, mixed media artist based in Omaha, NE. Sheree’s analog and digital photography-based work encapsulates her nuanced experiences as a Black woman in the heart of the Midwest, lost in the complexities of her intersectional identity. Marrying her favorite mediums, she uses a combination of photography, embroidery, and painting to capture figures that alter the viewer’s gaze to fit the essence of her own. With conceptual influences like Lorna Simpson and Carrie Mae Weems, Sheree addresses themes of trauma, vulnerability, resilience, and intimacy in her work, which has been exhibited at Petshop Gallery, Tugboat Gallery, Apollon Art Space, and Radial Arts Center. Sheree earned her BA in Studio Art in 2019 from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.