LITTLE BIRDS & Our Daily Prayers
May 7-June 28 2026
The Locker Room is pleased to present Little Birds and Our Daily Prayers, a group show co-curated with Cameron Barker, opening in May and running through Pride Month, accompanied by a series of public programs. Faygeleh, in Yiddish, means "little bird," and has historically been used as a slur for "girly" boys. This exhibition imagines a reclamation of the term—birds, after all, possess an extraordinary ability to find their flock even in dire conditions. Girly boys, boyly girls, and all our siblings who do not fit—we sing a similar song and we listen. We answer one another's prayers.
Bringing together thirteen artists of various backgrounds and ages, the exhibition moves beyond queerness as identity and toward queerness as essence—a divine energy that animates mundane life, irrepressible and embodied, swishing our hips and lisping our lips. The twenty-two works on view are largely moody monochromes or limited color palettes, signifying a celebratory muddying that occurs with perseverance. Rites, traditions, and rituals are often associated with organized religion, but queerness is a language so ancient that religion can only attempt to mimic its cadence. Our rites are counted in bumps in the road beneath motorbikes, in sweat sacraments made on dark dance floors, in daily shacharit enacted through the wettest application of lip gloss imaginable.
