VENUS REINCARNATED
VENUS REINCARNATED
2025 PF STUDIOS ANNUAL EXHIBITION
CURATED BY MARGARITA LILA ROSA
November 1 - December 6
Venus has long been a figure shaped by fantasy, desire, control. In this exhibition, Venus isn’t a singular body—she is a series of portals, guardians, and re-embodied presences. Venus Reincarnated traces her shifting meanings across centuries, from Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus in the 1480s to the 19th-century lithographs of Sarah Baartman—called the “Venus Hottentot”—whose body was displayed and dissected across colonial spaces.Through the various representations in this exhibition, Venus moves from being an objectified, colonized figure to a self-fashioned maker of new, fabulatory worlds.
Presented at Public Functionary, this exhibition offers a timely meditation on how Venus lives on in contemporary culture. Minneapolis, a city with deep histories of resistance, migration, and cultural regeneration, becomes the perfect site for Venus’ reincarnation. In the fictional world of Venus Reincarnated, Venus is goddess and galaxy, symbol and vessel, archive and oracle. In this exhibition, artists engage with Venus not as a fixed ideal but as a living, breathing framework through which to explore materiality, memory, fantasy, and power.
Across the show, Minneapolis-based artists make visible how artists are reshaping Venus for our time. If Venus once stood as the paradigmatic object of the gaze, here she stares back, refracted through technology, interactivity, and mediation. These artists question not only how bodies are seen, but who controls the frame—turning Venus into a critical site where power, vulnerability, and visibility collide.
- Margarita Lila Rosa, Curator
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 1
Artist Talk: Thursday, November 6, 7pm
Open Gallery Hours through Dec 6:
Thursday: 1pm - 5pm
Fridays: 1pm - 5pm
Saturdays: 2pm - 6pm
FEATURING:
Mohamed Abdalla, Alexandra Beaumont, Katelyn Clemons, Raye Cordes, Philipo Dyauli, Jelani Ellis, Essence Enwere, Grover Hogan, Leeya Rose Jackson, Ashley Koudou, Elyse Lodermeier, Nafyar, Thea Lauren Pineda, Asha Rowland, Godfree (Free) Spain, Whitney Terrill, Genie Hien Tran, Luca Trujillo, Margaret Vergara, Ivonne Yanez.
ABOUT THE CURATOR:
Margarita Lila Rosa is a public historian, curator, and writer specializing in Black Atlantic history and contemporary art. Her curatorial work has been featured in Ebony and Hyperallergic. She received her Ph. D from Princeton University. From 2021-2023, Rosa was a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University. She has written for The Brooklyn Rail, Forgotten Lands, MoMA Magazine, Caribbean Quaterly and Journal of African American History. In 2024, Rosa won the Letitia Woods Article of the Year Award from the Association of Black Women Historians, for her article in the Journal of African American History. That same year, Rosa was a recipient of the inaugural Studio Museum in Harlem Arts Leadership Praxis Fellowship.
Public Functionary’s 2025 Fall Exhibition Program is sponsored by BLNCD Naturals.