Can’t Wait: Participate
An exhibition by Angela Davis Fegan
February 2018

Thursday, February 22 | 12:30–2:00pm
Print workshop and demonstration

Can’t Wait: Participate will feature Angela Davis Fegan’s hand-printed wood type letterpress posters exploring the theme of participation as demonstrated care, as part of the CSGS’s series Care@Chicago in February 2018. This exhibition is an extension of an ongoing series of posters that Fegan has produced over the last four years, the lavender menace poster project, which is a public messaging and infiltration project produced through handmade paper production, letterpress printing and laser cut text. The paper production process involves incorporating organic and recycled/repurposed materials for symbolic/emblematic and grotesque results. Letterpress printing is used as subversion of the traditional means of mass commercial communication, and the current quaint production of wedding invitations. The goal of the work is to produce multifaceted alluring/repulsive handmade objects that stand out from the slick media saturated environment and announce resistance from the status quo. The project stems from a desire to voice institutional critique and run interference on mainstream leftist organizations that market tolerance as freedom and rights as consumer choices. Fegan’s interest, in these specific mediums, stems from her committed desire to craft handmade objects in the time of the supremacy of ephemeral digital experience. It is these types of handmade objects that lend themselves to the tactile viewing experience and to distribution through a network beyond that of a single location. It is meant for viewing in public space, such as bar bathrooms, community health centers, alleys, and hair salons.

Angela Davis Fegan is a native of Chicago’s South Side. A graduate of Chicago’s famed Whitney Young High School, she received her BFA in Fine Arts from New York’s Parsons School of Design and her MFA in Interdisciplinary Book and Paper Arts from Columbia College Chicago. She has mounted shows at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Montgomery Ward Gallery, Galerie F, Chicago Artists’ Coalition, the DePaul Art Museum, The Center for Book Arts (NY) and the Hyde Park Art Center. Her work has been selected for book covers including How to Seduce a White Boy in Ten Easy Steps by Laura Yes Yes, The Truth About Dolls by Jamila Woods, Secondhand by Maya Marshall, Where Brooklyn At by Roger Bonair-Agard and All Blue So Late by Laura Swearingen-Steadwell. Her work has been written about in The Offing (LA Review of Books), Hyperallergic, Chicago Magazine, the RedEye and the Chicago Reader.

Both events are free and open to the public.

Part of the Care@Chicago series, co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture.

Event photo by Jasmine Clark

Official Website

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Tags: Angela Davis Fegan, Can’t Wait: Participate, Chicago, Illinois, Print workshop and demonstration, The Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, The University of Chicago, Washington Park