Kia LaBeija: prepare my heart
24 February – 8 May 2022
Fotografiska New York
281 Park Avenue South
CLICK HERE TO VIEW PRESS RELEASE
CLICK HERE TO ACCESS DROPBOX FOLDER OF IMAGE FILES
Fotografiska New York is pleased to present the first museum solo show from the interdisciplinary artist Kia LaBeija (who prefers the mononym “Kia”), born 1990 in New York. An autobiographical exhibition about “love, loss, and growing up HIV-positive in New York City,” prepare my heart is titled for the emotional complexity surrounding Kia’s mother’s devotion to “preparing me for her inevitable death from AIDS.”
While Kia has presented work in group shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and more, prepare my heart offers the most complex view of the artist’s life and practice to date, including but extending far beyond her important creative work in the HIV activism space.
The objects in the exhibition, presented in an interwoven manner, are of two distinct categories: Kia’s contemporary artwork, and personal archival material that offers visceral, artifact-driven context to the exhibition. Offering an intimate window into the artist’s life and upbringing, Kia describes the show’s key themes as “grief, love, beauty, stigma, identity, being a queer woman of color, and balancing distinct cultural legacies of being a Black woman and an Asian woman.”
More information is in the above-linked press release, and a preview of works on view is below. See the Dropbox folder linked above to download high-resolution image files. Artwork information is in each image’s file title. Image reuse must be with credit to the artist and Fotografiska.
