Chicago Artists Coalition presents Sacred Containers: Capsules, Conduits, and Other Stories, a three-person exhibition by 2024-26 Artist Residents Cecilia Beaven, FÁTIMA, and bex ya yolk, curated by 2024-26 Curatorial Resident Christina Nafziger.

A pouch, a womb, a pod, a shell—each is a vessel that begets transformation. Like a seed that carries the gift of growth, each contains the possibility of being a site for becoming. In Sacred Containers: Capsules, Conduits, and Other Stories, artists bex ya yolk, Cecilia Beaven, and FÁTIMA reimagine what a container could be, and consider its significance as a bearer of knowledge, cultural memory, and creation. Through sculpture, bookmaking, animation, painting, and metalwork, the artists reckon with what can happen when we do (or don't) value the containers of this knowledge as a vehicle essential for passing it on. Looking at the body as a vessel, what stories can it hold, tell, and remember? What kind of container can bodies form when gathered together? How do we care for these sacred vessels and who are their guardians? In the words of science-fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin, the carrier bag is no passive object. It is a mode of intelligence that is an environment in and of itself, a site that nurtures and holds room for continuous creation, an ongoing process whose unlimited potential is necessary for our own preservation.

bex ya yolk approaches queer fertility and ‘the maternal’ as an applied theology through speculative works. In Sacred Containers, yolk focuses on the container body, recognizing the womb as a complex vessel of intelligence and world-making. With a generative research practice rooted in reproductive histories, rights, and design, they consider the intersections of science fiction and human gestation in this exhibition. As cultural landscapes evolve in regards to what is acceptable, legal, and safe for AFAB and queer people, yolk muses what could come of our collective futurity. yolk makes visible violence, dismissal, and neglect assigned to ‘the maternal’ through sculptural practices, independent publishing, and the book as an art object.

Storytelling and myth-making becomes a site of creation in Cecilia Beaven’s vibrant, mythological characters, each one thrumming with life. Originally from Mexico City, Beaven is influenced by her home city’s traditions in mythology. Through painting, drawing, sculpture, and animation, her characters form their own speculative mythology, one that fuses past, present, and future lives… including her own. These narratives are a mode of world-building, of storymaking, of holding firm your identity and preserving it in its wholeness as it is created, reshaped, and retold, again and again. For Beaven, our bodies are the container for these stories as they hold the cultural knowledge embedded within their details. These stories are alive in our bodies, making us conduits for passing down knowledge, creating meaning, and playfully imagining new myths.

For FÁTIMA, sacred containers are the roots of our origin, the original keepers and carriers of life, spirit, and knowledge. Through metalworking, the artist draws our attention to our bodies and the elements as vessels. The viewer is invited to affirm the body as vessel by declaring the power in BEING. The elements are venerated as the essential conduits of becoming: earth as a site of cultivation, fire as container for transmutation. These basic elements are the seeds in which everything grows, they are the vessels in which all life is birthed. FÁTIMA (urges) us to consider the care required to preserve and protect these containers as she turns her eye to their guardians. Who will protect the vessels that create, hold, and carry on? Is it the eyes that look back at us, unwavering, from around the space? Or are they looking to us, tasking us to care for these containers?

As each artist positions the body, the myth, and the natural elements as containers of intelligence ripe for creating, this exhibition, too, becomes a sacred container. Each artwork is the center in which we gather around as our collective knowledge, our memories, our energies form a new container, a sacred site that will never happen again. Truth is a giant clay pot—it only works when it is held by everyone.

The opening reception will be on August 22 from 5-8pm.