Krannert Art Museum hosts first solo exhibition of artist Jen Everett

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Krannert Art Museum is organizing the first solo exhibition for St. Louis-based artist Jen Everett, whose work includes photography, collage, video and sound installation. “Could you dim the lights?” opens Feb. 1 and will be on view through Oct. 5.

Everett’s artwork involves themes of Black life, family and responses to turmoil. Her identity as a queer Black woman also is a central theme in the exhibition, and her recent work has a more personal aspect, featuring her own image and voice.

Everett said her work represents “seeking a place to be safe, to be home, to feel held.”

“One of the big frameworks for my work is the idea of rupture and how we have to reorient ourselves after events that cause rupture in our lives, whether positive or negative, and whether personal or broad, like the pandemic,” she said. “The isolation of the pandemic really felt pronounced for me. Also, in the Midwest, there is a feeling of deep isolation in terms of the intersection of Blackness and queerness. Often, queer spaces are very segregated.”

Everett completed an artistic residency on Fire Island, N.Y., in 2022, and it led to a new direction in her work that KAM wanted to support, said Amy L. Powell, the co-curator of the exhibition and KAM’s curator for modern and contemporary art.

“Everett became much more aware of herself and the significance of her identity and experiences in her work,” Powell said.

Everett’s work was first shown at KAM in a 2020-21 exhibition, “Homemade: With Love,” by sound artist Blair Ebony Smith, the co-curator of Everett’s solo exhibition and a professor of art education and gender and women’s studies.

“We’re both really thinking about home, our girlhood, how things connect over time and using that in our artwork,” Smith said. “What I find particularly inspiring about Jen’s work is it has evolved to be more personal. This solo show is very vulnerable. Much of her work had a more distant view. This is about her own life and experiences as a queer Black woman.”

Much of Everett’s work is lens-based, and she is interested in archives, collections, arrangement and collage. Everett’s father documented his family life in photographs and videos. She uses those family archives in her work, as well as photos portraying Black life that she finds in thrift shops and in archives such as the Gerber/Hart Library and Archives in Chicago, which preserves the history of LGBTQ+ communities in the Midwest.

Powell said that Everett’s new work, “Queer Cosmologies,” uses images of Black lesbians as well as her childhood photos to “excavate queerness in her work and look for herself.” Everett often uses repeated photo images, which she said encourages viewers to linger and spend more time with them.

“I’m thinking about what our brain does when we see an image repeated or doubled side by side, and we’re trying to find a difference between them. Sometimes we regard images and each other with so much haste, especially when we’re on our devices, looking at screens, and this forces us to slow down,” she said.

Everett is influenced by the dance music her mother loved and listened to during Everett’s childhood. The title of the show comes from the song “Bad Times (I Can’t Stand It),” a 1980’s funk/disco song popular in Detroit, where Everett grew up.

“Detroit is very much a dance music city. I think of that kind of music, the feel-good quality of it, as a transcendent kind of music. You go to clubs when you want to dance and feel good. The nightclub can be a haven or sanctuary for queer Black folks,” Everett said.

The video in the exhibition features an interview with Everett’s mother talking about dance culture and going to clubs when house music was starting to become popular. Everett does the voiceover for the video.

“By using my own voice and speaking with my mother, it’s a way of centering my voice. It was kind of difficult and not something I naturally gravitate towards, but the work felt that was what it was demanding of me,” Everett said.

An audio work titled “Toughness” uses a sample quote from Black feminist writer and poet Audre Lorde about the necessity of creating your own places with the people you love.

The exhibition includes a reading and listening area with books Everett selected from the Ricker Library of Architecture and Art that align with her work, and a playlist that Everett and Smith compiled.

The opening night of the exhibition will include a conversation between Everett, Powell and Smith; a collage workshop with Siobhan McKissic, a visiting design and materials research librarian at Ricker Library; and a DJ set by Smith.

“I would like for people to dig into their stories, their histories, and be willing to share those things and to know that’s a beautiful thing to have a history and be part of a continuum,” Everett said.

Editor’s notes: To contact Amy L. Powell, email alpowell@illinois.edu. To contact Blair Ebony Smith, email besmith5@illinois.edu. For information about Krannert Art Museum, contact Julia Nucci Kelly at jkell@illinois.edu.