An Artist Who Turned Her Bedroom Closet Into a Safe Haven

The show’s title, “Orgasms Happened Here,” is pulled from a note that Stingily and her older brother found in his bedroom closet when their family moved to the suburb of Romeoville, Ill., from Chicago’s West Side.

At 52 Walker, Stingily has built a set of closets into the gallery’s walls, filling each one with found materials, such as newspaper cutouts and baseball bats, that explore “shame, sexiness, desire [and] yearning,” she says.

One installation, “Orgasms Happened Here (Hot Girl),” was inspired by the closet in Stingily’s own teenage bedroom. Back then, the artist was frustrated by her mother’s and grandmother’s strictness, she says, and her closet was a sanctuary where she could read or retreat, “a space within a space to get away.”

The prim white shirts in “Hot Girl” partially obstruct magazine images of bikini-clad women posing on cars and motorcycles. “It’s interesting to me how cars and women go hand in hand, how cars are given female names and [that’s] very objectifying,” the artist says.

While building this work, she was thinking about how such pictures shaped her sense of self as a girl and how “a lot of Black women don’t have agency over their bodies.”

Throughout the gallery, Stingily has installed stained glass windows and segments of iron fences that nod to the architectural details of Chicago and New York, her current home.

“I wanted to make a show about a lot of things, but mainly a show with duality,” Stingily says.

Stingily is inspired by the writer bell hooks. “I’ve been reading [her memoir] ‘Bone Black’ (1996), and she talks about her childhood [without] romanticizing it,” the artist says. “She goes within herself to reach the masses … and explores not only [her] personal life but the collective.”

Stingily aims to similarly translate her own memories in her work. Looking back now at her life in Romeoville, she says, “I probably wouldn’t be an artist if it wasn’t for that house. Because I just wanted to do a 180 [from] what I had to do at home.”