The 27-foot box truck containing the “Body Freedom for Every(body)” exhibition outside the 21c Museum Hotel Kansas City, Sept. 21, 2024. (courtesy of Project for Empty Space)
In our world today, political attacks and power grabs are being lobbed at alarming rates toward the bodies of women, trans and nonbinary individuals. In response, artists are using their voices to share their experiences of joy and resilience across the country in the traveling exhibit “Body Freedom for Every(body).” The exhibit is “a cross-country exhibition tour inside of a 27-foot Box Truck celebrating Reproductive Justice, Queer Liberation, and Trans Joy!” according to the press release. Co-founders and curators Jasmine Wahi and Rebecca Pauline Jampol brought the exhibition to 21c Museum Hotel Kansas City Sept. 21 for a daylong event sharing numerous artists’ works centered around the theme of bodily autonomy.
The concept for “Body Freedom” was inspired by Wahi and Jampol’s 2019 “Abortion is Normal” exhibition in New York. In a talk with 21c chief curator Alice Gray Stites, Wahi explained that while the initial show was “undergirded with anxiety” and primarily focused on reproductive justice, the current truck tour casts a wider net to different bodies and centers around joyful artistic expression. Notably, the exhibition was in Kansas City before the election, but it continued touring through December.
“None of us are going to poof and vanish if things don’t happen the way we want them to with the election,” Wahi said. “There will still be the same types of violences. Elections happen every four years, but we all live our lives in continuity. It’s about reaffirming who we are and really celebrating our truth and power.”
The pieces exhibited in “Body Freedom for Every(body)” rotate from city to city on its 15-city tour, allowing for more than 100 artists to be featured. Entering the truck in Kansas City, visitors were met with an abortion ribbon activity, in which different colors were assigned different meanings, like, “I have had an abortion,” “I support birth control,” and even, “I am anti-abortion,” allowing for gallerygoers to express their own experiences.
Along the walls were a diverse range of artworks and mediums, including political ribbons, custom wallpaper, photography, painting and ceramics. Aimee Koran’s “Chrome Series” features everyday items symbolizing motherhood — a nose sucker, a pregnancy test and a breast pump plated in chrome. These items that are typically discarded or brushed aside as a child grows out of them are now memorialized in shining valor by Koran. Ron Norworthy’s “Toile du vogue” is a wallpaper installation highlighting queer joy as various people strike voguing poses alongside natural landscapes.
The variety of works and artist backgrounds coincided with 21c’s fall exhibition, “The Future is Female.” Both exhibitions highlighted the experiences of women, including trans and other expressions of womanhood. Hannah McBroom’s collection of painted self-portraits chronicles her gender transition. Of the piece, Stites notes, “Art can take away some of the fear people have about people who are different from them.”
“Body Freedom for Every(body)” came to Kansas City amid political division on a warm September afternoon and spread a message of autonomy and openness. The “feminist truck show,” as Stites heard it referred to, made its way across the country with the message that art is consequential, impactful and able to shape our lives. Wahi expounded, “I still … really believe to my core that artwork and cultural production, cultural work is what shapes the world. It is how we document histories… It’s how we chronicle the present. And it’s really, whether or not people realize it, how we shape the future.”
Follow “Body Freedom for Every(body)” at www.bodyfreedomforeverybody.org
