Opening Reception for Three Solo Shows

ARC Gallery

Opening reception for the three Athena Fund awardees: Alexa Wheeler, Anat Wegier, and Xinchen Li.

Join Chicago's first woman artist-run gallery and cooperative in celebrating the opening of three new solo exhibitions.ARC Gallery is pleased to present three solo exhibitions by the Athena Fund awardees Alexa Wheeler, Anat Wegier, and Xinchen Li.

Alexa Wheeler: kept +<a href="" title="" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer"> </a>carried"kept +<a href="" title="" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer"> </a>carried" examines how care is inherited, performed, and remembered through the ordinary objects and rituals of domestic life. Drawing from family photographs, German folk traditions, household vessels, and stories gathered through community participation, the work considers the labor historically assigned to women: preserving, nourishing, mending, witnessing, and carrying memory forward. Layered textiles, translucent surfaces, printmaking, embroidery, sewing, and found materials function as an evolving archive where personal histories intersect with collective experience. Architectural forms, fences, jars, utensils, and suspended threads become metaphors for protection, containment, connection, and resilience. Audio recordings gathered through witness extend the work beyond the gallery, inviting visitors to contribute their own stories. Together, these works ask how acts of care become records of belonging that endure across generations.

Anat Wegier: THE ROOMS THAT MADE METhere are rooms we leave, and rooms that never quite leave us.The Rooms That Made Me enters a feminine world of dollhouses, sewing tables, bedrooms, fabric, painted faces, seams, and small rituals of making and care. It is a world that can feel intimate, delicate, almost enchanted — shaped by objects and gestures that have accompanied women and girls across generations.At the center of the exhibition is women’s work: sewing, mending, arranging, caring, decorating, concealing, holding things together. These gestures may appear ordinary, even invisible, yet they carry histories within them. Passed from mother to daughter, generation after generation, they become structures through which women learn how to inhabit the world — and themselves.Within these structures, something else is passed on too: an inherited feminine wound. Not necessarily through words, and not always consciously, but through repeated roles, expectations, gestures, silences, and ways of being. The rooms change, but certain patterns remain.A dollhouse can be a place of imagination and also a structure of order. A seam can hold something together while hiding where it was torn. The act of caring can protect, but it can also teach a woman to disappear inside the needs of others.And yet, the exhibition does not remain inside the wound.The very gestures through which something has been inherited begin to offer another possibility. Sewing, joining, mending, holding, and remaking become a language of repair. What has been passed down does not have to be passed on unchanged. The same hands that learned to hold things together can also take them apart, rearrange them, and make something new.The Rooms That Made Me does not try to resolve these inherited structures. It asks us to notice them — to look again at the gestures, objects, roles, and spaces that feel so familiar we often stop seeing them at all.This is an intimate, quiet exhibition, one that gently shifts the familiar, inviting us to look again at what has become so deeply embedded in the home that it can seem almost invisible.

Xinchen Li: The Shape of What WasThe Shape of What Was transforms the gallery into a domestic interior made from life size furniture and household objects built with 3D printing pens and black Polylactic Acid (PLA) filament. Based on objects from places I have lived and left behind, the exhibition explores domestic objects as memory holders and reflects on migration, belonging, and the impermanence of home. For me, the act of remaking is empowering. It allows lost or distant objects to gain a new form and presence. Although the work begins from my personal experience, it invites viewers to reflect on what they have held onto, what they have left behind, and how they define home.Xinchen Li’s practice moves between contemporary jewelry, sculpture, and installation, using material storytelling to explore memory, migration, displacement, and the impermanence of home. Working with 3D printing pens and Polylactic Acid (PLA) filament, she recreates furniture and domestic objects from places she has lived and left behind. These hand built forms function as drawings in space, holding traces of personal history, routine, attachment, and loss.Her installation work is shaped by frequent relocation and the emotional weight of objects that cannot always be carried forward. Through the act of remaking, Li gives these lost or distant objects a new presence. Her work invites viewers to reflect on their own relationships to home, memory, and belonging, transforming private experience into a shared space of recognition.

Opening Reception for Three Solo Shows

More events from ARC Gallery

Discover more events from ARC Gallery, from Arts to other experiences you might love.

Still looking for the right event?

Explore all events in Chicago and filter by date, category, and more to find the perfect fit.

Opening Reception for Three Solo Shows

More events from ARC Gallery

Discover more events from ARC Gallery, from Arts to other experiences you might love.

You might also like...

Browse more events with different dates, prices, and formats to find your next great experience.

Still looking for the right event?

Explore all events in Chicago and filter by date, category, and more to find the perfect fit.