Press Release - Griefkeepers by Angela Hennessy
Angela Hennessy - Mourning Weave #1
Synthetic hair. 26.5 x 22.5 inches Framed. 2024.
pt.2:
Griefkeepers
a solo exhibition by
Angela Hennessy
Opening - Saturday April 13, 2024 at 6 pm
Through - Saturday, May 25, 2024
1525 Webster St.
Oakland, CA 94612
To receive a preview of the exhibition contact
info@part2gallery.com
pt.2 Gallery is proud to present Griefkeepers, our second solo exhibition with Oakland-based artist Angela Hennessy. In this new body of work, Hennessy continues her exploration of grief practices within the Black diaspora using hair as a material legacy of representation and abstraction. Braided and woven sculptural works highlight dimensionality—questioning the stability of binary systems from vertical to horizontal, day to night, life to death. Alternating between alignment and disruption, these intersections become unruly spaces of grief, reminding us of what fades, what remains, and what bends or continues to bloom.
Through both process and form, Hennessy offers meditations on the alchemical practice of collective remembrance. A single strand of hair is too delicate to bear weight, but gathers strength with many braided together. The work serves as both artifact and homage to the unnamed and innumerable, making legible the passage of time and the enduring practice of gathering ourselves together. Griefkeepers is less memento mori—a reminder of death, and more post-mortem—after death.
Angela Hennessy - Mourning Weave #2
Synthetic hair. 26.5 x 22.5 inches Framed. 2024.
Hennessy constructs sculptures and installations with everyday domestic labor—washing, wrapping, stitching, knotting, brushing, and braiding. For many years she served as a hospice volunteer and death doula working with families on home funerals, death vigils, and grief rituals. She has received awards from San Francisco Artadia, Joan Mitchell Foundation, and the Fleishhacker Foundation. Hennessy is on the advisory board of Recompose in Seattle and lectures nationally on aesthetic and social practices of death in contemporary art.
Her work has been included in exhibitions at McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, Museum of the African Diaspora, Oakland Museum of California, and is in the collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Crocker Art Museum. Her audio guides, meditations, and poems have been featured at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, de Young Museum, and SOMArts Gallery.