Opening Reception: April 25th, 6-8pm
The Fire and it’s Keepers: Forging Resistance Opening Reception
Exhibition Dates: April 25 - May 21
Gallery Hours: Wednesday-Friday 12-5pm, Saturday 12-4pm
The Fire and Its Keepers personifies our tools for revolution in imagery inspired by censorship, divination, and Tarot through a series of large layered paintings made by Kaylee Bender and our ArtLab interns. This 3D mural celebrates and warns of the power of communication and its ability to disrupt, dismantle, and catalyze for or against the people. It calls for shifting power to our own hands, questioning whose reality frames the boundaries of “reason” in a landscape calling for radical change.
“I start with the recognition that we are at war… not simply a hot debate between the capitalist camp and the socialist camp… The war is also being fought over the truth. What is the truth about human nature, about the human potential? My responsibility… is to try to tell the truth. And that ain't easy.” – Toni Cade Bambara
Kaylee Bender is a life-long artist drawn to painting, poetry, music, education, and community organizing as vehicles of liberation for the greater community. With a focus on acrylic and spray paint, she explores connection through portraiture, figurative works, and surrealist play. Inspired by jazz and the blues, her practice celebrates art as motion, liberation, and disruption. Her community engagement is centered in art’s role in building a sense of identity in community and its role our emotional and physical well being. Her practice integrates the larger issues of loss of communal practices and freedom of expression and discusses contemporary methods of segregation based on socioeconomic status. Her intention is to make art a part of daily life for all community members: improving access to the arts on a grand scale is to permeate and dirsrupt the caste system, starting with the youth. Through her personal creations and community work, she hopes to foster challenging conversations regarding creation, identity, and intersectionality.