Jen Everett, Sukanya Mani, Kiki Salem, and Coco Liao. This exhibition was curated by Eileen Cheong
The Sun is Still There Even Behind the Clouds
February 7 – April 19, 2025
Hours: Saturdays from 12-4 pm
“The Sun is Still There Even Behind the Clouds” is part of our 2024-2025 series of juried exhibitions. Exhibition hours at The Kranzberg Gallery are 12-4p each Saturday of the exhibition’s run.
We are two sides of the same coin. At any point, your fate can be flipped. Each edge, a vantage point of light fading or light coming.
The centuries-old wisdom of grandmothers patiently threading the secrets of our survival within beauteous relics forms a vision of what can be created over and over from the Earth. Reclaiming the land in our image as guardian keepers if it chooses to keep us. In response, these artists hail from lineages of the many corners of our blue planet, places that go by the names of Wuhan, Michigan, Palestine, India, and Africa. These four artists speak from their visual language in tapestry, earthenware, and papercutting to installation, photography, and archival ephemera to offer us a translation about the magic embedded in our DNA strands, the untold stories of voices who long cried out against injustice and for the liberation of peoples resisting extinction. To invite these voices to inhabit the center of this looking glass in the vicinity of one of the oldest known burial sites in the Americas is to elicit from those who engage with this artwork to consider how slowness and meticulous crafting may play a part in rebuilding after pandemics, genocides, and near annihilation.
What is the bibliography of one’s cultural landscape and how can exploring the creative expression of historically erased women of color teach us what it means to thwart erasure in a world where institutions collapse and the old ways are needed? How can the architecture of modern society be reshaped when we include everyone at the table in the interest of life-affirming sovereignty while providing space to grieve what and whom has been lost? No matter what humans decide, Turtle Island shall remain and only our stories will be left.
-Eileen ‘Remedy’ Cheong
Curator “The Sun is Still There Even Behind the Clouds”
“The Sun is Still There Even Behind the Clouds” Exhibition Opening Reception
Event Date: 2/7
Event Time: 5pm-8pm
Location: Gallery at The Kranzberg
Join us on Friday, February 7, from 5:00 to 8:00 PM at The Kranzberg Gallery for the opening reception of The Sun is Still There Even Behind the Clouds, a group exhibition featuring artists Jen Everett, Sukanya Mani, Kiki Salem, and Coco Liao.
The evening will include a spoken word performance by Joss Barton, beginning at 6:00 PM.
ARTIST BIOS
Jen Everett is an artist and educator from Detroit, Michigan, based in Saint Louis, Missouri. Her practice moves between lens- and time-based media, installation, and writing. Jen received an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, where she was a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow. She earned a Bachelor of Architecture from Tuskegee University. Recent solo exhibitions include Could You Dim the Lights? (Krannert Art Museum—Champaign, IL ) and Come Through (Rivalry Projects—Buffalo, NY).
Jen has presented her work during lectures and workshops at the Saint Louis Art Museum, Black Portraitures—Harvard University, and the Luminary. She has also been an artist in residence at the Fire Island Artist Residency, Vermont Studio Center, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and ACRE.
Sukanya Mani is an interdisciplinary artist with a passion for science, anthropology, and philosophy. She transforms complex ideas from these fields into visual art, weaving intellectual concepts into compelling stories for her audience.
Mani’s creative process blends intent, thoughtful exploration, and contextual depth. Her studio practice focuses on the art of cutting and sculpting paper, which she describes as a meditative experience.
She has worked as a teaching artist and arts administrator with organizations such as the St. Louis Art Museum, COCA, the Contemporary Art Museum, and the Missouri History Museum. Her work is included in collections held by the cities of Poplar Bluff, Ballwin, and Chesterfield, Missouri. Mani has also received multiple grants from the Regional Arts Commission.
Born in India, Sukanya Mani now lives and works in St. Louis.
Coco Liao is a 0.5-generation Chinese immigrant who grew up in Wuhan, Houston, and Honolulu, and now lives, creates, and works as a carpenter in St. Louis, Missouri.
Their multidisciplinary practice includes painting, printmaking, installations, textiles, ceramics, and illustration. Liao’s work reflects on inherited histories and diasporic futures, exploring themes of displacement, belonging, and the joy of communal play—monstrous and carefree.
Kiki Salem (b. 1995, Al-Bireh, Palestine) is a St. Louis-based interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the emotional and cultural complexities of assimilation. She examines the contradictions inherent in being the “versus” in the often reductive framing of “East vs. West.”
Salem’s practice spans various mediums, blending traditional “old-world” techniques like floor loom weaving and ancient embroidery with contemporary digital media. Her installations merge contrasting textures and mediums, reinterpreting traditional Palestinian motifs through the lens of current events, autobiography, and history. Through her art, Salem engages in social justice activism, educates audiences, and seeks therapeutic relief from binary ways of thinking.
Her work has been exhibited at venues such as the Contemporary Art Museum, the Kranzberg Art Center, and Flood Plain Gallery in St. Louis; the Sullivan Galleries in Chicago; and SOO Visual Arts Center in Minneapolis.
Since returning to St. Louis, Salem has developed a teaching practice centered on Palestinian Feminist History and traditional embroidery, Tatreez, in connection with global liberation movements. She has delivered lectures, led workshops, and participated in panels at institutions including SAIC, UCLA, the University of Chicago, and the University of Minnesota.
Curator Bio:
Eileen Cheong is an artist, advocate, and healing agent. She is the Founder of Elemental Integrated Healing Arts Designs, a project devoted to offering transformative experiences centered on people of the global majority where they can envision, empower, and excel in their dreams.
Ms. Cheong is a 200-hour foundation-trained yoga Instructor with a focus in Hatha, Yin, and Qi-gong, a nationally Registered Art Therapist and Licensed Professional Counselor. Their specialties include: mindfulness techniques including guided visualizations and social dreaming. Using Relational-Cultural and person-centered approaches with a focus on transformative justice; youth empowerment, intergenerational programs, LGBTQ identity development, wellness for social justice and health care professionals and mental health awareness. Her artistic concentration is in printmaking, photojournalism, book arts, fiber sculpture, and mixed-media painting.
