Little Birds and Our Daily Prayers
INSTALLATION VIEW: Little Birds and Our Daily Prayers Group Exhibition 2026, Photo Courtesy of Locker Room, NYC
Little Birds and Our Daily Prayers is a beautiful group exhibition that just opened in Tribeca through June 28 at The Locker Room (253 Church St). Bringing together 13 impressive artists of various backgrounds (ages 24-65) who engage, grapple with, and dispute how Queerness transforms the everyday, the show is co-curated by Cameron Barker,an artist & educator whose drawing & printmaking centers around visibility of queer intimacy—as a queer Jew, Barker is interested in destabilizing cultural systems that force communities to engage in closeting to avoid persecution (he's also taught at Yale & otheruniversities).
Chris Minard, A Moment of Pageant Ennui (The Only Gay Bar For 200 Miles), 2025, Oil on Linen, 60 x 36 inches
Faygeleh in Yiddish means “little bird” and has historically been used as a slur for “girly” boys. This exhibition imagines a reclamation of the term—birds, after all, possess an extraordinary ability to find their flock even in dire conditions. The featured works move beyond Queerness as identity and toward Queerness as essence—a divine energy that animates mundane life. It is an essence that outs us: irrepressible, embodied, in the soul—swishing our hips and lisping our lips. Girly boys, boyly girls, and all our siblings who do not fit—we sing a similar song and we listen. We answer one another’s prayers. Our existence become reliquary.
INSTALLATION VIEW: Little Birds and Our Daily Prayers Group Exhibition 2026, Photo Courtesy of Locker Room, NYC
Rites, traditions, and rituals are associated with organized religion, but queerness is a language so ancient that religion can only attempt to mimic its cadence: rites counted in bumps in the road beneath motorbikes, in sweat sacraments made on dark dance floors, and in daily rituals enacted through the wettest application of lip gloss imaginable. These rites appear throughout the exhibition, particularly in Anthony Viti’s works made of moving blankets, Chris Minard’s meticulous depiction of “the only gay bar in 200 miles", and Robert Martin’s reverential portrait of a boy in his underwear standing in a marsh with the solemnity of a saint awaiting canonization. Instead of the typical rainbow of colors associated with commercial queerness, the 22 works in this exhibition are largely moody monochromes or limited color palettes, signifying a celebratory muddying that occurs with perseverance. Examples include Abbey Gilbert’s cyanotypes on newspaper; graphite, charcoal, and ink drawings by Brett Park, Cameron Barker, and Creighton Baxter; and Khari Johnson-Ricks’ welded steel works.
Courtesy of Artists and Locker Room
From NYC and the Northeast (MA, CT, PA, NJ), plus West Virginia, Wisconsin, New Orleans, the group includes Anthony Viti (a Pollock-Krasner grant recipient with works in museum collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art) and Creighton Baxter whose live performances of swallowing images have been done at MoMA and MOCA LA(both artists work with found surfaces—blankets, discarded papers—engaging technical rituals of accumulation & removal, they archive acts of queer being, and evidence of the body itself); painter Chris Minard (also an art director/set designer currently working on new Gremlins movie/has worked on TV shows like Russian Doll, The Americans); photographer Abbey Gilbert whose work is driven by desire & longing with particular emphasis on relationships with past & present lovers; sculptors Khari Johnson-Ricks (whose works are in library collections of The Met, Whitney, MoMA) and Earthen Clay who both transform obstacles into sites of self-reflection & growth, where strength emerges through connection (Clay forms relics of bodies shaped by oppressive conditions, Johnson-Ricks welds steel through tension, rhythm, and heat, mending material through intensity); Brett Parkwho explores the dialectics of queerness through (w)holes—using a vernacular of breeze blocks, cutouts, and silhouettes, he questions the material & psychic architectures that subsume bodies; and show co-curator Cameron Barker.
Rounding out the group are West Virginia-based Anthony Peyton Young (a 2024 Fire Island Artist Residency participant whose work is in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston); Marla McLeod (currently a studio resident at the Boston Center for the Arts), Mia Fabrizio (an artist-in-residence at The Studios at MASS MoCA), Wisconsin-based Robert Martin (awarded New American Paintings Emerging Artist Grant in 2021 and a featured artist at the Denver Art Museum in 2022); and Ryan Leitner (a 2024 resident artist at the Joan Mitchell Foundation).
Here's a link to short bios for each artist. For more information about this exhibition and others at the Locker Room, please visit the Locker Room's site here. The gallery can also be found on Instagram here.
