Main Gallery

Sacred in All Forms

Artists Reclaim the Divine Feminine Across Bodies, Lands, and Worlds

Artists: Sandeep Johal, Xiaojing Yan, Kourtney Jackson, Aaron McIntosh

May 7 – August 8, 2026
Opening reception Saturday, May 9th

This exhibition brings together artists whose practices engage the sacred as a living, relational force rather than a fixed identity. Moving beyond narrow or essentialized definitions of “the feminine,” the works assembled here trace lineages of creation, care, embodiment, and cosmology that both precede and exceed patriarchal frameworks of gender and divinity.
Across cultures and geographies, the sacred has long been understood as plural—emerging through bodies, lands, and worlds, and shaped through relationships between them. Many of these understandings have been suppressed, erased, or transformed through colonial systems and the dominance of singular, masculinized god-figures. The artists in Sacred in All Forms reclaim and reimagine these expansive cosmologies through culturally specific and embodied practices: Xiaojing Yan engages the divine through a Daoist lens grounded in material transformation and energetic flow; Sandeep Johal centers the fierceness and complexity of motherhood through an Indo-folk feminine aesthetic that holds both suffering and resilience; Kourtney Jackson employs hybridized and experimental forms of storytelling that permeate the interiorities of Black queer womanhood; and Aaron McIntosh mines the intersections of material culture, family tradition, sexual desire, and identity politics through his quilted works.
Across these practices, the sacred emerges through entanglement—between human and more-than-human worlds, between inherited traditions and lived experience, and between resistance and care. Queer and gender-expansive bodies are not positioned at the margins but understood as generative sites of knowledge, where identity is continually negotiated and reimagined. By unsettling normative definitions of femininity, the works resist containment and open space for forms of being that are fluid, relational, and self-defined.
The works gathered here do not seek to define the divine feminine. Instead, they ask what becomes possible when the sacred is understood as plural, embodied, and already within, around, and in relation to us—and what it might mean to live in accountability to those relations.