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.

EXHIBITING ARTISTS

Cecilia Beaven is a visual artist and art professor from Mexico City, based in Chicago. Cecilia holds an MFA in Studio from SAIC which she pursued as a Fulbright scholar and a BFA with honors from ENPEG La Esmeralda (Mexico City). Cecilia’s multidisciplinary artwork has been shown in solo shows in Mexico City, Houston, and Chicago, as well as in group exhibitions in Mexico, the US, Colombia, Sweden, Italy, and Japan. She has painted murals in several cities such as Hiketa, Paris, Houston, Chicago, Mexico City, Oaxaca, Pachuca, Tepoztlan, and Tijuana, where she was commissioned to paint a segment of the border wall between Mexico and the US.

Through her work, which includes painting, drawing, animation, film, and sculpture, Cecilia develops a speculative mythology with unique visual narratives. Cecilia questions who gets to tell stories and establish the official cultural narratives. The artist affirms her creative agency by modifying existing tales and mythology and seamlessly adding fiction and personal anecdotes. Through this analytical and ludic experimentation, Cecilia brings a unique perspective on Mexican identity that goes beyond folklore and mainstream ideas of Mexico.

Cecilia has also been the recipient of distinctions like the Chicago Artists Coalition Residency (2024-2026), the 3Arts Award (2024), the Visiting Artist Residency at Northeastern Illinois University (2024), the Radicle Studio Residency at Hyde Park Art Center (2021), the Leroy Neiman Foundation Fellowship at Ox-Bow School of Art (2019), and the Fulbright program (2017). In 2022 she was considered one of the “100 Most Creative Mexicans in the World” by Forbes Mexico, and in 2023 she was included in the “Art 50 – Chicago’s Artists Artists” list by NewCity magazine.

bex ya yolk (they/them) is a transdisciplinary visual artist, book maker, researcher, and adjunct professor based in Chicago, IL. yolk earned a BFA in Graphic Design from Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts and an MFA in Visual Communication Design with a concentration in Book Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as a full merit scholar. yolk has received grant endowment and recognition from the Atlanta Contemporary, Codex International Biennial Artists' Book Fair and Symposium, the College Book Art Association, VCUarts Adjunct Faculty Research, and the Judith Alexander Foundation. yolk has been invited as an artist-in-residence at the Chicago Artists Coalition, Ox-Bow School of Art in Saugatuck, MI, ACRE in Steuben, WI, Real Time and Space in Oakland, CA, and Aviário Studio in Ferreira do Zêzere, Portugal.

yolk’s practice primarily posits itself as an artists’ book bindery + publishing initiative—THUNGRY, which focuses on disrupting what we’ve come to understand qualifies a Book, complicating traditional ways of book building + semantics through experimentation and queering praxis. THUNGRY explores historical research, sociology, and speculative theory into 'the Maternal Complex' made up of subgenres like care work, reproductive design, rematriation, container technologies, abortion access activism, reproductive justice and health care disparity in the U.S, matrescence, and the gestational state especially in queer folx exploring the intersectionalities between the Book + this kind of body.

FÁTIMA (b. Earth, 0000) is a Mexican artist working in the fire arts: blacksmithing, lightworking, metal casting and fabrication. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with a focus in Sculpture and Printmaking from Loyola University in New Orleans and pursued her Master of Fine Arts degree in Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

In her art practice, FÁTIMA delves deep into the roots of radical ancestry, seamlessly weaving ancient techniques into her contemporary creations. Each piece becomes a vessel through which she communicates with the past, present, and future. Objects and spaces transcend their physical forms, becoming conduits for ritualistic expression with the intention of forging narratives of connection.

CURATOR

Christina Nafziger is a Chicago-based writer, editor, curator, and critic interested in research-based artistic practices, labor and power, the impact archiving has on memory and identity, and the ways in which location affects identity and art making, particularly in the Midwest. Christina holds an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths University of London and a BA. in Art History from Herron School of Art & Design. She is currently the Managing Editor at the arts publication and archiving initiative Sixty Inches From Center. She is also the Associate Editor at the contemporary art publication Create! Magazine.

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