Drawing from the Caribbean’s history of slavery, colonialism, and its more contemporary struggles with climate change and the tourism industry, Andrea Chung creates visually rich objects that entice the viewer at first glance, revealing complex subject matter upon further engagement. In her largest solo museum survey to date, the artist explores materials that are transient and shift form, such as sugar, and reconfigures archival images through vibrant collage.

Taking its title from literary scholar and cultural historian Saidiya Hartman’s text “Venus in Two Acts,” Between Too Late and Too Early ruminates on time and history, seeking to reframe how we place ourselves within the context of past trauma and what can be learned from it.  

The exhibition features a wide range of Chung’s practice, including early videos and works on paper that explore the impact of tourism on the Caribbean. It also includes a large-scale installation rooted in Black speculative fiction and several series that explore the representation of Black women’s labor, including the rich and layered history of midwifery.  Through these works, the exhibition uses history to reflect on the challenges of our current time. In two new commissions—one that opens the show and one at its center—Chung presents intricate, labor-intensive objects that disrupt traditional perspectives on race, gender, bodily autonomy, and historical archives.

When considered as a whole, the exhibition reimagines the past to propose alternative histories, giving agency and dignity to figures who were denied it. It serves as a mirror and offers insights on how we might navigate the present and plan for the future.

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About the artist

Andrea Chung (b. 1978, Newark, NJ) lives and works in San Diego, California. She received a BFA from Parsons School of Design, New York, and a MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore. Her work has been exhibited in biennales such as Prospect 4, New Orleans, and the Jamaican Biennale, Kingston, Jamaica as well as the subject of museum solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the Manetti Shrem Museum, and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada. Her work has been included domestically and internationally at venues recently such as the Nasher Museum at Duke University, Minneapolis Institute of Art,  Frist Art Museum, Ford Foundation Art Galleries, Guangdong Times Museum, and the J. Paul Getty Center. She has participated in national and international residencies including the Vermont Studio Center, McColl Center for Visual Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work has been written about in the Artfile Magazine, New Orleans Times, Picayune, Artnet, The Los Angeles Times, and International Review of African-American Art among others. Her work is included in collections such as the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Rhode Island School of Design Museum, NoVo Foundation, Cleveland Clinic Art & Medicine Institute, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Davis Museum at Wesley College, the Addison Museum of American Art, and the J. Paul Getty Museum.

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Artist photo: Courtesy of the artist

Installation photos: Zachary Balber

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Andrea Chung’s Petty Library – Statement from the artist

The Petty Library™ is a project that I started with my family and friends to fight power with lots of books and a refusal to accept [redacted] apologies.

Our family had to deal with a school principal who responded to our request to address the racism on campus by telling us that we might as well complain about cursing, fighting, or cheating at foursquare. When pushed, she finally put a pun-filled note in the school newsletter saying that students should be kind; it never mentioned, or even alluded to, the n**** jokes going around the elementary school she ran.

Later, when our child cursed at a kid—known to school staff for bullying and racism—after he called our child’s best friend a n**** and a chocolate donut, and had been picking on our kid relentlessly, the principal gave both children the same punishment. She told our kid that what he’d done was just as bad as what the other kid had done, but that she was sure that his parents (us) would disagree.

We were livid. We tried to engage the district and to work through the structure afforded parents with grievances, but ultimately, she refused to apologize to our child for equating racism with bad words or to us for failing to protect him and the other children of color at school. She threw us a crumb of a conditional apology, saying that she was sorry IF we were offended, but she did not take responsibility for anything she’d said or done.

We hated the lessons our child was learning about power and accountability and having to fight for the power to be the authorities of our own experiences. But we were proud of the power that he found within himself and the ways that he stood up for other Black students on campus, whether he was standing up to students or his principal.

I made the decision to be petty. I was unsatisfied by the district’s process—her bosses acknowledged and affirmed everything that we’d said but their response was to enact reforms that would take effect after our child had already aged out of that school—and I refused to accept her conditional apology.

I reached out to my network and asked for books that I would then donate to the school library in my child’s name. I wanted an overwhelming number of diverse books and ended up with two wagons full of books about kids from different cultures, immigration statuses, genders, disabilities, and socioeconomic backgrounds.  As a family, we hand-delivered those hundreds of books and put her in a position to have to either accept the gift of diverse experiences and points of view that we were giving to the students at that school, or to reject our gift and prove our point.

I see The Petty Library™ as a response to our era of bullying and book bans. In this iteration, we forced a California school to acknowledge that it isn’t living up to its stated values and we brought diverse points of view directly to children who need to read them. Other families in other places have the same kinds of concerns. In states with harsher book bans in public and school libraries, we would subvert them. I am working to develop resources and models to help communities-in-need collect their power to create Petty Library branches of their own.

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