Tiger Strikes Asteroid: It feels like the first time is the first-ever, largest, and most comprehensive survey show that brings together the exhibition’s namesake network of artist-run spaces in Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Greenville, SC. Curated by Teresa Silva and Holly Cahill, two of the cooperative’s own members in Chicago, the exhibition includes nearly 50 of their peers with works inside Mana Contemporary’s main gallery.

Since its founding in 2009, Tiger Strikes Asteroid has been dedicated to creating a true network of artists, expanding connections and building community through artist-initiated exhibitions, projects, and curatorial opportunities. The cooperative programs through a model of horizontal, rather than vertical growth, as well as a dynamic exchange of ideas and resources between cities. An ever-evolving experimental and intentional community, at once independent and interdependent, and nonhierarchical in uplifting underrepresented work and voices, Tiger Strikes Asteroid offers new contexts for the work of emerging, mid-career and established artists.

It feels like the first time is a watershed moment; it’s the first and most inclusive exhibition showcasing works by Tiger Strikes Asteroid members together, a constellation of conversations that delve into one’s sensorial experiences. Both sprawling and specific, the show’s framework slips into preoccupations with material memory and collections, the uncanny, touch and personal space, meditative gestures, existing power structures and belief systems. This framework of ideas is unsettled and shifting like the world itself.

ARTISTS
Carl Baratta, matthew anthony batty, Megan Biddle, Samantha Box, Johanna Braun, Mark Brosseau, Holly Cahill, Cecile Chong, Vanessa Chow, Vincent Como, April Dauscha, Rachel de Cuba, Suzanne Dittenber, Yael Eban, Cait Finley, Rachael Gorchov, Alexis Granwell, Mary Henderson, Jackie Hoving, Olivia Jia, Daniel Johnson, Debra Kayes, Lucas Kelly, Amy Lee Ketchum, Zehra Khan, Nichola Kinch, Julia Klein, Susan Klein, Adam Lovitz, Hirona Matsuda, Nicole Mauser, Samantha Mitchell, Kara Mshinda, Michael Niemetz, Liz Nurenberg, Alex Paik, Norm Paris, Andrew Prayzner, Kari Reardon, Terri Saulin, Fred Schmidt-Arenales, Kelsey Sheaffer, Pacifico Silano, Christopher Ulivo, Luke Whitlatch, Sun You