3RD: HER/STORY — All Street Gallery

NEW YORK, NY 一 All Street Gallery is proud to present HER/STORY, a solo exhibition of work by mixed-media artist LaThoriel Badenhausen, curated by Kat Ryals. On view during Women’s History Month from March 5 through March 29, 2026, at the gallery’s Lower East Side location (77 East 3rd Street, New York, NY 10003), the exhibition marks the 85-year-old artist’s debut solo presentation in New York City. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, March 5, from 6–9 pm.

Featuring works created over the past decade, HER/STORY includes small and medium oil paintings, miniature sculptural assemblages, and medium to large mixed-media textile works that examine personal memory alongside broader social histories.

Born in rural Minnesota in 1941, Badenhausen held numerous occupations before dedicating herself fully to her visual art practice. Her work revisits her own lived experience while engaging collective American narratives shaped by gender, labor, class, and belief systems. Drawing from the customs and products that defined her upbringing in mid-century rural America, she interrogates inherited notions of femininity, morality, and worthiness.

Working from domestic and gendered perspectives, Badenhausen combines textiles, thread, hair nets, feminine hygiene products, bullet cartridges, beads, salt, paint, and fragments of vernacular text—admonitions, religious tenets, wellness advice, and humor.

Using play as a means of creation, her bricolage poses visual problems not meant to be resolved, but to be poked, mocked, and interrogated. She does this by using low-tech traditional art practices, such as sewing, painting, drawing, and cutting/pasting. Materials often dismissed as kitsch, sentimental, or disposable are reclaimed and repositioned beyond fixed hierarchies of meaning and value.

While inherently playful, the works offer incisive critique of consumer culture, environmental degradation, and entrenched class and gender hierarchies. Central to Badenhausen’s practice is the understanding that objects are not passive commodities but carriers of social biography. Made by human hands or machines, they move between private, commercial, and public spheres, accumulating meaning as they shift roles. Their value is not determined by the market alone but shaped by touch, memory, labor, use, and, as proven by Badenhausen, imagination.

Acting as a visual poet, Badenhausen intertwines disparate objects and their accumulated biographies, foregrounding the layered histories embedded in everyday materials. These tactile, kaleidoscopic works invite viewers to consider not only the arc of the self-taught 85 year old artist’s life, but the evolving lives of the objects she reclaims. In a moment marked by overproduction, environmental precarity, and renewed struggles around women’s autonomy, visibility, and labor, HER/STORY reminds us that value is never fixed. It can be dismantled, reimagined, and made anew. Hope emerges through transformation: when an object’s assigned function is stripped away, it gains the possibility of another life—and another story to tell.

About the Artist:
LaThoriel Badenhausen was born on Dakota and Lakota land in a very small town in rural Minnesota in 1941. She attended Bethel College and earned a BA from the University of Minnesota. After years of working numerous manual labor jobs, she retired as a vocational rehabilitation counselor with the New York State Education Department. She has been a practicing visual artist ever since. In 2018, she moved to St. Charles, Illinois, where her apartment functions as her painting, conceptual, and textile studio—“a joyful mess,” as she calls it.

LaThoriel makes art because she loves “to play.” Her “toys” are most often discarded, common domestic products - objects that quietly carry social, political, gendered, and class-based bias. Her work ultimately examines what it means to be a contemporary woman artist whose shadow is packed with tales, customs, and products, alongside misogynist beliefs and behaviors internalized while growing up in rural America during the 1940s and 50s.

She pokes, mocks, interrogates, and repurposes these materials with needle/thread, paint/paste, plaster/rhinestones, fabric/collage, and endless combinations in between. Her materials are often feminine and domestic in association: textiles, threads, and fabric; feminine hygiene products, plaster, hair nets, bullet cartridges, beads, salt, paint; and text in the form of admonitions, religious tenets, wellness advice, and vernacular humor.

Ultimately, it is her intuition working through the cultural and historical tensions embedded in everyday objects. The resulting playful, humorous, and humble assemblages are built from once-oppositional life views, now brought into dialogue.

About the Curator:
Kat Ryals (b. 1988 in Jonesboro, AR) is a Brooklyn-based artist, curator, and photographer. Ryals received a BFA in Photography from Savannah College of Art and Design and an MFA & Adv. Certiﬁcate in Museum Education from Brooklyn College. Over the last 10 years, she has organized more than 25 in person and online exhibitions both independently and through her co-founded arts organization PARADICE PALASE, including exhibitions & art fair booths with SPRING/BREAK Art Show (2019, 2022, & 2024), All Street Gallery (2023, 2025, 2026), ChaShaMa, Gloria’s Project Space, School of Visual Arts, The Other Art Fair, NADA, Future Fair, Satellite Art Show, and Clavo Art Fair. From 2021-22, she served as Curator of Art for famed nightlife and culture venues House of X at PUBLIC and House of Yes.

About All Street Gallery:
Founded in 2018, All Street Gallery is a gallery and platform for emerging and underrepresented artists whose work focuses on social engagement and community empowerment. Initially created as an artist collective and grassroots protest organization, All Street is driven by its roots in the city’s creative community. The gallery’s mission is to use art as a means of protest, resistance, and social change, highlighting voices that challenge the status quo. After opening its first location on East Third Street in the East Village, All Street expanded in 2023 with a second space at 119 Hester Street. Both locations continue to provide a platform for artists whose work addresses important social and political issues.

For press and sales inquiries, please contact:
gallery@allstnyc.com
+1 (646) 335-3717

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