January 14, 2020

January 14 - March 15 2020

Opening Performance January 16 6:30pm – 7:30pm

Weekly Performances Fridays from 11am – 12pm: January 17 – February 21

Movement Workshop February 28 1pm – 3pm

AJ Picture Gallery 

3rd Floor Main Building

Drexel University

"Brendan Fernandes: We Want a We" Lecture February 28 5pm – 6pm

URBN Annex Screening Room

3401 Filbert St, Philadelphia, PA 19104

Artist's Reception February 28 6:00pm – 9:00pm [Performances 6:30pm – 8:30pm]

Open Tuesday - Sunday 11am-6pm

Brendan Fernandes' solo exhibition – We Want a We – showcases a diverse blend of performative, sculptural, and photographic works from the past five years, marking the artist's first retrospective in Philadelphia. For We Want a We, Brendan Fernandes will work with Drexel's Dance Department to re-vision previous improvisational dance structures and to create new site-specific works that respond to the architecture of the Leonard Pearlstein Gallery. The artist says of his new work: "Choreography, as I understand it, is a tool for coding and decoding the language of movement. I look at movement through queer and laboring bodies as they relate to the construction of gender roles and physicality." Throughout the run of the exhibition, dancers will engage with the space each Friday. 

Brendan Fernandes (b. 1979, Nairobi, Kenya) is an internationally recognized Canadian artist working at the intersection of dance and visual arts. Currently based out of Chicago, Brendan's projects address issues of race, queer culture, migration, protest and other forms of collective movement. Always looking to create new spaces and new forms of agency, Brendan's projects take on hybrid forms: part Ballet, part queer dance hall, part political protest...always rooted in collaboration and fostering solidarity. Brendan is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program (2007) and a recipient of a Robert Rauschenberg Fellowship (2014). In 2010, he was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award, and is currently the recipient of a 2017 Canada Council New Chapters grant. His projects have shown at the 2019 Whitney Biennial (New York); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York); the Museum of Modern Art (New York); The Getty Museum (Los Angeles); the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa); MAC (Montreal); among a great many others. He is currently artist-in-residency and faculty at Northwestern University and represented by Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago. Current projects include performances and solo presentations at the Noguchi Museum (New York); Zilkha Galleries, Wesleyan University (Middletown, Connecticut) and Monique Meloche Gallery (Chicago).