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Hair @ Loomis Exhibition

Hair @ Loomis employs a new model called the Artist Open Call to create an exhibition with collaborative input on hair as a source of inspiration. For this show, a self-selected group of eight women artists met weekly for two months to re-imagine how artists approach and exhibition and create art together. During this time, the artists discussed the relationship between hair and society, interrogated the notion of hair and identity, and supported each other during the creative process. The first iteration of the work was presented at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art in New Haven, Connecticut.

Participating Artists: Sherese Francis, Alana Ladson, Candace Leslie, Jennifer McCandless, Abigail Simon, Megan Shaughnessy, Yvonne Shortt, and Christine Lee Tyler.

The open call model is a framework first prototyped at A.I.R. Gallery within the research and development initiative. The initiative is artist-led and was launched in January 2021 by A.I.R. artists Daria Dorosh, a founding member, and Yvonne Shortt, the newest member. The program's goal is to discover, model, and introduce new frameworks for artists that disrupt the scarcity mindset and patriarchal systems commonly encountered in the art world.

Jennifer McCandless

In these works I am exploring our relationship to ourselves and the fact that we are animals. We seem to stop at nothing to deny this fact and the cutting, shaving and arrangement of our hair is a part of that. I wonder how it became a radical thing to live in one's own natural, unaltered body. I see hair also as a symbol of otherness, of wildness and the unknown, chaos.
Flasher
After the Humans: Fantastical Relic
After the Humans: Fantastical Furry Rainbow

Christine Lee Tyler

The repetitive process of creating Outgrown addresses the mundanity of domesticated work women were reduced to throughout millennia. I use hair buns, arsenic paint and vulvic patterns that are taken from the Victorian period (17th century). During this period, women were expected to tie up their long hair into buns. I view this restriction of “binding” as a metaphor for the reduction women had to endure throughout society.
Outgrown

Megan Shaughnessy

Megan Shaughnessy (she/her/hers) has been a visual artist for over 20 years, exhibiting in both the US and internationally. She received a BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York City and an MA in Photographic Studies from Norwich University of the Arts (NUCA) in the UK. Megan started working with hair after the birth of her first child. In 2018 she cut off all her hair and used it to create a series of self-portraits that opened up a dialogue around biased notions of hair, particularly concerning gender roles and identity within modern society.
Unshaven

Sherese Francis

These pieces, "Samson/SameSun/SamSung/SameSong (KwasMeTology Series)," "Ntutu Isi Nkemdiche (KwasMeTology Series)" and "Laws of Tignon (Met Tet)," explore how one can remember oneself after traumatic experiences through hair art, creativity, and ritual. The first two pieces were created using cut pieces of my dreadlocks/locs and inspired by mythologies and stories involving hair such as "Samson and Delilah" and "Nkemdiche: Why Don't We Grow Beards." The last and newest piece was inspired by the Tignon Laws that were used to oppress Black women and their bodies by demanding them to cover their heads and hair in public, which they used as opportunity to be inventive with head coverings.
Samson/SameSun/SamSung/SameSong (KwasMeTology Series)
Samson/SameSun/SamSung/SameSong (KwasMeTology Series)

Candace Leslie

Candace Leslie is a visual artist exploring the symbiotic relationships evident in motherhood, haircare and the manifold forms of blackness. As self-taught oil painter and collage artist born and raised in Columbus, GA, she cultivated a strong appreciation for plant life, natural elements and fable and folklore. Utilizing a hybrid practice combining gritty, gnarled texture and multi-layered brushstroke techniques with transformative chroma, Candace paints upon various surfaces, including wood panel, framed canvases and long, linen strips. Her current work highlights the nurturing aspects of haircare and rites of passing on cultural knowledge of this symbiotic nurturing transmitted across generations of women and children, showcased inside surreal, folkloric settings.
Beauty Salon (1 of 3)
Beauty Salon
Generations Series No. 2:Grace

Yvonne Shortt

Yvonne Shortt is a multidisciplinary artist with a question based practice. Ms.Shortt can be found growing flax on her farm, asking questions centered on the connection between materials and racism, installing large scale architecture pieces focused on labor and opportunity, or just welding her latest sculpture.
Material Racism

Alana Ladson

'Crown and Glory' by Alana Ladson is an acrylic on canvas painting that portrays the evolution of hair and how that journey can bring about different sides of a person. Hair is used here as a time marker and an expression of personality traits and the inner self in this piece.
Crown and Glory

Abigail Simon

ALL MY SISTERS WEEP FOR VENUS is a site-specific meditation on the elaborate, costly, painful amd dysmorphic nature of regimes of Beauty. Comprised of collaged labels, residue and implements manufactured to straighten and curl, thicken and pluck, bleach amd blacken, woman of all cultures and classes receive a single message: whoever you are, you are not enough, and only the products of Capitalism can rehabilitate you.
All My Sisters Weep for Venus
All My Sisters Weep for Venus
Gallery Display

Hair @ Loomis is currently on display in the Richmond Art Center at the Loomis Chaffee School.