Pearls, Pills, and Protests
Jerelyn Hanrahan Graduated Pearls, 2023 Powder coated spun aluminum.
May 27th - June 25th, 2023
Jerelyn Hanrahan, Kelly Chuning, Lulu Varona, and Michele Pred
Onna House is pleased to present Pearls, Pills & Protests, the first exhibition in their 2023 summer season. This group show features work by Jerelyn Hanrahan, Kelly Tapìa-Chuning, Lulu Varona, and Michele Pred, artists who promote feminist ideas through their creative medium. In 2022, Roe vs. Wade—the landmark case affirming a constitutional right to abortion in the United States—was overturned by the Supreme Court. In this precious moment for reproductive rights, Pearls, Pills & Protests is a timely celebration of progressive artwork that advocates for women’s health and safety.
Though every artist is unique in her approach, each work in this exhibition challenges historic symbols of feminine gentility and conservatism, repurposing those symbols as inspiration and material for expressing modern ideas. Kelly Tapìa-Chuning transcribes problematic “truisms”—repeated to generations of women to define societal expectations and norms—into soft pink text that is needle-felted by hand. On the floor of the gallery, visitors will encounter Kelly’s pink American flag entitled What is Respect, an interactive piece encouraging people to walk across the flag in solidarity with women who are directly affected by the overturning of Roe v. Wade—wearing down the flag with every step. Lulu Varona revives her grandmother’s embroidery techniques to ornament fabric with progressive phrases written in Spanish like “Women should live in peace, happiness, and without fear.”
Michele Pred has created a large sculpture entitled Abortion is Healthcare featuring the Mifepristone and Misoprostol abortion pills. This piece is meant to draw attention to abortion rights in the United States. The exhibition will also showcase three handbags from Michele's renowned "Power of the Purse" series. These purses are adorned with phrases in neon light such as "Equality," "My Body My Choice," and "Vote" and are intended to serve as small-scale political billboards. Michele's artwork Sexual Revolution is a quilt from the 1960s that features a kaleidoscopic pattern adorned with 140 packs of birth control pills (totaling 3,920 pills). Jerelyn Hanrahan reclaims the pearl necklace from the nape of the 1950’s housewife, stringing colossal and lustrous orbs of spun aluminum to create a modern power symbol. Through tapestry, embroidery, quilting, and beading, each of these women weaves their personal experiences, history, and ancestry into artworks of conceptual force.
Extending her fight for women’s rights into the art and design worlds, Lisa Perry, founder of Onna House, has purchased work from each artist in the exhibition, committed to financially investing in the careers of women artists. Through Pearls, Pills & Protests, Onna House strives to offer time and space to further a dialogue around women’s rights that is simultaneously personal and political.
Jerelyn Hanrahan’s artistic career began when she received a Bachelor of Arts with a minor in painting from the University of Maryland and a Masters in Fine Art from the School of Visual Arts. Traditionally trained as a painter, she embraces material diversity, working in painting, drawing and sculpture as well as conceptual, multimedia and interactive public art works. Her drawings have been exhibited at the Aargauer Kunsthaus, Switzerland, The Venice Pavilion, Italy, and Beijing, China, as well as Galerie Rohmer Apotheke, Zurich and a solo exhibition at Art Magazin, Rolf Muller, Zurich. Notations On a Trek is a publication reproducing ninety seven drawings the artist has made in places she has lived: New York, Kusnacht and Rome. The drawings were published by Ricco Bilger, Andreas Zust, Zurich.
Kelly Tapìa-Chuning (b. 1997) is an interdisciplinary Chicana artist from southern Utah currently based in Detroit, MI. She received a BFA in Studio Arts from Southern Utah University. Tapìa-Chuning utilizes research, textile deconstruction, and needle-felting to examine the power dynamics attached to racial identity/culture, gender, and language. Her work has been included in numerous exhibitions, most notably with the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art (forthcoming), GAVLAK (LA), The Border Project Space (NY), and solo exhibitions at Red Arrow Gallery (TN) and Harsh Collective (NY). Her work has been featured in The Nashvillian, create! Magazine, All SHE Makes, Artsin Square, and Friend of The Artist. She was an artist-in-residence at Stove Works in Chattanooga, TN and her work is in collections at Onna House in East Hampton, NY and the Southern Utah Museum of Art. Tapìa-Chuning is currently pursuing her MFA in the Fiber Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art, where she was awarded a Gilbert Fellowship.
Born in 1993 and raised in Puerto Rico, Lulu Varona began her studies in theater before transferring to visual arts at the University of Puerto Rico. Varona is passionate about textiles in general, having first embroidered at the age of ten with the guidance of her grandmother, and started exhibiting formally in 2014. She has participated in several art residencies, including the ISCP, Brooklyn, Flux Factory, Queens, ACRE, rural Wisconsin, Teton Artlab, Wyoming, New Wave Art Residency, West Palm Beach, and Clemente Soto Velez, Manhattan. She will exhibit her work at Art Omi in upstate New York during the summer of 2023. She is currently exhibiting at the Whitney Museum and working for her next show at the NADA Art Fair in New York in May 2023.
Michele Pred is a Swedish-American conceptual artist whose practice includes sculpture, assemblage, and performance. Her work uncovers the cultural and political meaning behind everyday objects, with a concentration on feminist themes such as equal pay, reproductive rights, and personal security. Pred has been represented by the Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York since 2004. Pred received a Pro-Choice Leadership Award from Personal PAC, Chicago, and has shown at Jack Shainman Gallery as an original member of For Freedoms. Pred has exhibited both nationally and internationally at the V&A Museum in London, The Berkeley Art Museum (BAMPFA) in Berkeley, CA; Neuberger Museum, White Plains, NY; Bild Museet and Kulturhuset in Sweden; University of Westminster, London; University of Technology, Sydney, Australia; Omi International Art Center, Ghent, NY; ASU Museum, Tempe, AZ; the Honolulu Museum of Art, HI amongst others.
