Please join us for the closing reception of Prayer Closet: The Body, Black Congregation, and Fugitivity by artist Lionel Frazier White III. The closing reception, Prayer Closet Activation, will include a Church Service, video, prayer, benediction, DJ, and commentator.

About Prayer Closet:

Audre Lorde says the erotic is firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. The closet is a place of meditation and suppression. The queer closet considers the things we can not openly express. The prayer closet is the physical or metaphorical private space where we go to pray and seek God. Prayer Closet: The Body, Black Congregation, and Fugitivity considers how these two closets fold into one another. Prayer Closet thinks about the Black sanctified church as the intersections of race, sexuality, pleasure, and constraint.

About the artist:

Lionel Frazier White III (b. Washington, D.C.; lives and works in Washington, D.C.) is a Washington D.C native, arts educator and interdisciplinary conceptual artist who works in painting, drawing, wood sculpture, installation, and mixed media collage. White’s work explores themes of forced and coerced labor and its effect on family pathology, erasure, displacement, reassertion, and gentrification. White holds a Bachelors in Fine Arts from The George Washington University Corcoran school of Art and Design (2018) and is a graduate of The Duke Ellington School of the Arts High School in Washington, D.C. His work has been exhibited at the D.C Commission on Arts and Humanities, Prince George’s African American Art Museum and Cultural Center, Torpedo Factory |Connect The Dots, Rush Arts Galleries, and Area 405. White was a 2019 Halcyon Arts Lab Cohort 3 Fellow in Residence in Washington DC.

This is a black only event. If you are non-black and want to support, please contribute to a fundraiser listed in our “Offering (Mutual Aid Opportunities)” document or send a Virg to a black person in your own life (unprompted and without conversation).

COVID Precautions: COVID’s still out here, girl. regardless of what little miss cdc say! Attendees will be required to wear masks for the entirety of their attendance. Performers will be COVID rapid tested and will undergo a COVID symptom self-assessment the day prior and the day of the event.