Drawing its title from the 1976 Roy Ayers song and album of the same name, Everybody Loves the Sunshine, this solo exhibition of the work of artist Angela Hennessy utilizes hair and tactility as a way to mark the relationship between the living and the dead, joy and melancholy, the material and the immaterial.

Hennessy provides an offering of floral objects and arrangements made from intricately hand-woven, crocheted, and braided hair, including a multi-toned and multi-textured hair “sunset.” These offerings call upon both African and European grief and mourning practices, as well as the significance of hair in racial identity and beauty politics.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY:
Angela Hennessy is an Oakland-based interdisciplinary artist and Associate Professor at California College of the Arts where she teaches courses on visual and cultural narratives of death. Through writing, studio work, and performance, she examines mythologies of blackness embedded in linguistic metaphors of color and cloth. She leads workshops and lectures nationally on aesthetic and social practices that mediate the boundary between the living and the dead.

This exhibition was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services.