09/19/2025 in Chicago

Scherben invites you to Two Roses and a Briar Pipe, with the artists John Neff, Morag Keil, Connor Crawford, Adrian Piper and Jasia Rabiej. Two Roses and a Briar Pipe is curated by Scherben in cooperation with Leah Gallant, hosted by Co-Prosperity in Chicago and supported by the Goethe Institute Chicago.  Two Roses and a Briar Pipe will open on September 19 2025, and be on view until October 24 2025. Please join us for the opening on September 19 at 7pm in Chicago.

Scherben invites you to Lesbian Legacies # 2 – Archive Affections a duo exhibition of Tiona Nekkia McClodden and Millie Wilson. Archive Affections is the second exhibition of the three-part exhibition project Lesbian Legacies which is curated by Scherben and Birgit Bosold. Archive Affections will open on September 10 2025, and be on view until October 19 2025. Please join us for the opening on September 10 at 7pm as part of the Art Week Featured program. 
  
The exhibition Archive Affections presents, for the first time in Germany, works by Tiona Nekkia McClodden (1981, Arkansas) and Millie Wilson (1948, Arkansas), which bring repressed queer history to the forefront. Archives and Museums are not neutral repositories but powerful instruments that de-termine what is preserved and celebrated, and what is forgotten and dismissed as worthless. 
  
Both artists create alternative counter-archives and build their own “museum.” With Sleight of Figure (for Gladys), McClodden focuses on the musician and performer Gladys Bentley (1907–1960), who described herself as a “Black lesbian masculine woman.” Bentley was a queer icon of the Harlem Renaissance before being forced to deny her identity during the homophobic McCarthy era. McClodden places her at the center of a “Black queer genealogy” in cultural consciousness. 
  
Millie Wilson has been developing her ongoing meta-project Museum of Lesbian Dreams since 1989, which tells “the secret history of modernism” (Millie Wilson). Her works The Language of Dreams (1991) and Errors of Nature (1992) examine how psycho-analysis and sexology pathologized queer desire. With Twisted Love (1990), Wilson explores the subversive appropriation of lesbian pulp novels from the postwar period — texts written by men for a male audience, which queer women reinterpreted with pleasure. 
  
Archive Affections invites us to reclaim repressed histories and reopen historical voids as spaces for critical imagination. 
  
The exhibition is part of the three-part series Lesbian Legacies, which sketches, in bold outlines, the cultural heritage of lesbian  positions from the classical modernism of the early 20th century to the present. The project is funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds and is conceived and curated by Tarik Kentouche and Lorenz Liebig of Scherben, along with Birgit Bosold.