Session artist Marcela Torres will guide curator Sheridan Tucker Anderson down the flowery
solar road of the exhibition Petición; for Exorcism.

Based on an indigenous belief of a solar afterlife termed flower mountain, Petición references a liminal spirit-world where the living and dead can exist together. According to ancient Mayan, Aztec and Hopi tradition, this floral world contains a paradise that serves as both a sacred space for gods and ancestors, as well as a space of ascension into the divine realm of the sun. In this contemporary moment, rife with suffering imposed by a global pandemic, social unrest, climate change and an economic crisis, Black and Brown communities are disproportionately affected. Although seemingly contradicting in nature, the abundance of flower mountain and the toil of our current experience are closely aligned, allowing for metaphoric forms of transcendence.

Watch online via Zoom:

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIuf-ygqDsjHtMzXmC-waEkXIfh042GaUoe?mc_cid=954766c3bb&mc_eid=fbb84f7d7d

Sheridan Tucker Anderson is a Chicago based, independent curator, art historian, and arts advocate. Anderson has been awarded several fellowships and residencies including the inaugural Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellowship at the Art Institute of Chicago, the inaugural Curatorial Fellowship at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the University of Chicago Masters of Art African Studies Fellowship, the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Curatorial Fellowship, and the Chicago Artists Coalition HATCH Projects Curatorial Residency. Recent publications include: The Diasporic as a Site of Memory: Self Identity and Commemoration in the Work of Zohra Opoku (2019), The Ancient and the Recent: Kudzanai Chiurai's We Live In Silence (2018), Bordering the Imaginary: Ralph Arnold, Napoleon Bonaparte, and “The Hawaii Days” Series (2018) and Of Memories and Forgetfulness (2017). Recent exhibitions include If You Go, selected works by Mev Luna (2019), The Poetics of Relation (2019), In Their Own Form: Contemporary Photography + Afrofuturism (2018 and 2020). She holds a BA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an MA in Art History from the University of Chicago. Anderson has recently been appointed Northwestern University’s Assistant Director of the Black Arts Consortium.