Ella Anjali Kirlew

POWER PLAY explores the nuances of women’s sport and athletics through an engagement with playfulness, progress, exploitation, and failure, in both content and process. The exhibition unsettles narratives about women’s sports, including the notion of advancement in professional athletics even as sports organizations fail to protect women, particularly Black women, from gendered and racialized harm. Using etching, collagraph, screenprint, and fabric-based processes, POWER PLAY examines the beauty and the commodification of athletic bodies and probes the complexities of this world through pattern, texture, clothing, and objects as the work connects material experimentation to the physical act of playing.

on view Tjaden Hall Experimental Gallery, September 28th – October 8th 2026. All photos by Anson Wigner/Cornell AAP