Recent acquisitions

Wayne White

Ew

2015

(b. 1957 — Chattanooga, Tennessee) Wayne White worked on Pee-wee's Playhouse (where his set and puppet designs won three Emmy awards) and art-directed seminal music videos, such as Peter Gabriel's “Big Time” and Smashing Pumpkins "Tonight, Tonight." He is also a painter. Like his work on the screen, his paintings rescue and recontextualize the mass-market aesthetics of the past, often to humorous and thoughtful effect.

He is best known for his word paintings, where he augments cheap art reproductions that he finds in thrift stores with amusing words and phrases. He explains, "The paintings I use are all from what was basically an ‘over-the-sofa’ genre from the ‘60s and ‘70s … I leave the artists' signatures on there because I feel like I'm collaborating with them; I'm not defacing their paintings, I'm lovingly putting my additions in there, copying their light source, their color palette and whatnot ... They've been looked at and used up, and when I find them they're like one step away from the garbage can. So it's sort of an act of resurrection, or recycling. They're empty, and I fill them back up again."

Elijah Burgher

BotD (Emerald Tablet)

2015

(b. 1978 — Kingston, New York) Elijah Burgher creates sigils (symbols meant to have magical power) and portraits for an imaginary cult called the Bachelors of the Dawn (BotD). In this work, he imagines an alternative, queer community with a set of emancipatory, occult rituals. These rituals are meant to help participants escape the deadening effects of social norms (i.e., who we should be and what we should want). This escape is embodied in the subversive figure of the bachelor. Burgher explains, "The figure of the bachelor is crucial, embodying a refusal to marry and repeat the structures of the nuclear family and the patterns of personhood it perpetuates."

Burgher believes the ceremonial process of sigilization (making sigils) is one possible way to facilitate this escape from social norms. While ancient, the process of sigilization was popularized by the early 20th-century British artist Austin Osman Spare. During the process, Burgher concentrates deeply on a desire he has. Then, ceremonially, he writes out the desire—improvising one letter on top of the other—to create an abstract symbol. By doing so, the desire can no longer be understood through social norms, because it cannot be thought or spoken in words. Social norms and judgments are generally transmitted through language. Instead, the desire can now be uncritically experienced outside social norms through the sigil—a visual symbol imbued with the immediacy and suspense of the desire itself.

Jeroen Jongeleen

Shape #04 / In Search of the Perfect Square

2013

(b. 1967 — Apeldoorn, Netherlands) Jeroen Jongeleen's work takes place in and is focused on the public spaces of our cities. Like street art, he leaves traces in public that he documents through photography and film. One way he leaves these traces is through endurance running. Jongeleen and his partners run geometric patterns (referencing the community-focused art of Soviet constructivism) into fields, parks, and playgrounds. Through this work, Jongeleen draws attention to how we define, use, and regulate public space. He promotes a people-first use of public space and criticizes the way advertising, real estate development, and regulations are encroaching on people’s rights to this space.

While he believes that art should engage the public and serve a progressive function, the humble and temporary nature of his interventions also question the nature, value, and transformative potential of art. The meditative act of running and the simple patterns that are left behind seem quiet when compared to the ubiquitous marketing that surrounds us. Even if the work does have an impact, the grass will grow back without continued effort. Like the situationalism of Guy Debord, there is a challenge to reawaken our individual aspirations, but also a resignation at the struggle that this reawakening requires.

Samantha Fields

Triptych with 206,700 beads

2011

(b. 1972 — Cleveland, Ohio) Fields rescues afghan blankets from thrift stores and homes. She then transforms these blankets by partially unraveling them and using the loose yarn to weave in additional fiber and beads. The results are dazzling, transforming tatty, well-loved afghans into shimmering tapestries.

Her choice of materials and mode of working is influenced partly by growing up south of Boston and her experience of class and gender inequities in that community. By rescuing and transforming these humble blankets, she is intending to invoke and celebrate the memory of the makers and their quiet, overlooked labor. In this remembrance, there is a deliberate insistence on the absence of language. Instead of words, she works with her hands, further honoring these individuals by adopting their unheeded mode of expression.

Samantha Bittman

Untitled

2017

(b. 1982 — Chicago, Illinois, U.S.) Samantha Bittman weaves simple patterned textiles, which she then uses as a canvas to paint additional thick acrylic paint. Reminiscent of midcentury optical art and the dazzle camouflage used on WWI naval vessels, her painting obscures the original woven pattern while introducing new patterns. The effect is both visually arresting and disorienting.

Through simple patterns and a palette of black, white, and primary colors, Bittman’s paintings highlight how basic means can be used to evade easy identification, requiring more time and engagement for actual understanding. Her work requires us to slow down. These paintings can inspire us to think about our own patterns and habits, how they make things predictable, and how they can be shaped to frame more meaningful experiences.

Lauren DiCioccio

Still Life (National Geographics)

2017

(b. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) Using hand-sewing and embroidery, Lauren DiCioccio explores the life of everyday objects, our relationship to them, and what these objects tell us about our own existence. She explains, "Objects like the newspaper are very tactile and also dependable and loyal in their daily renewal. Because of the comfort found in ritual and routine we build around the newspaper, the relationship we make to it is not dissimilar to a relationship we would make with another person. By assigning human attributes to the inanimate object, it opens us up to having emotional responses to it."

DiCioccio renders these disposable, overlooked objects through time-intensive labor, conjuring feelings of dearness and pathos. She continues, "We have a similarly strong emotional response to the material of cloth and to the recognition of time, labor, and care found in a hand-sewn object. Cloth is one of the only textures our body touches and feels so intimately 24 hours a day. Its specific tactility and ability to provoke an emotional response is extraordinary." In these sculptures, there is a memento mori acknowledgement of both the precious connections we create and their ultimate fragility.

Nilbar Güres

Wilde Belästigung

2014

(b. 1977 — Istanbul, Turkey) Güreş' collages and drawings are often saturated in one color. Be it red, white, or black, the color serves as a type of movie screen or stage to present a scene. What exactly is being performed by the figures that she produces with paper, paint, and fabric is uncertain. In "Wilde Belästigung" (which translates from German to "Wild Harassment"), the figures emerge from the field of black, asking you to discover and piece together what the story could possibly be (Who are the figures? What is happening between them? What will happen next?).

Güreş' work explores gender norms and how these norms, too, are stories that we piece together and perform from collaged details. Borrowing from philosophers like Judith Butler, her work critically argues that gender norms are something culturally constructed through performance. Understanding these norms as “natural” is inaccurate, restrictive, and alienating to those that don’t fit within them. Her work aims to estrange the practice of norm-making in order to disrupt its naturalizing tendencies and offer the possibility for positive, emancipatory alternatives.

Wendy White

We Go High

2016

(b. 1971 — Deep River, Connecticut) White began this series of portraits of iconic women (including Serena Williams, Dolly Parton, Hillary Clinton, and Michelle Obama) after the 2016 presidential election. The tempestuousness of that time provoked White to return to studying how depictions of women (whether in popular media or art) often fail to capture their strength and complexity. She explains, "Traditionally, women depicted in paintings are naked, objectified, idealized, victimized, or under some sort of duress. I wanted to fill in the biographical gaps with this series. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Dolly Parton, who is a strong feminist, endorsed Hillary Clinton but had to backpedal when she got flak from her fan base. There’s a personal and public persona to each of these women that fascinates me." The results pull from the tradition of Warhol's celebrated portraits, while working to champion a more rich depiction of her subjects that capture both their public persona and the messiness of real life.

Nicole Cherubini

Earth Pot #10, Little Pearl

2017

(b. 1970 — Boston, Massachusetts) Cherubini is part of a generation of artists who wish to overturn stereotypical class and gender presumptions that believe ceramics is merely a decorative craft and not the stuff of "high art." Her sculptures often appear pieced together, a conglomeration of materials and techniques from the past and present. “Earth Pot #10” looks like several ancient pots have been cut into slices and reassembled into a new Frankenstein pot. The new pot has then been unceremoniously pedestaled on a five-gallon bucket and embellished with wedding cake frills and no-nonsense handles.

Cherubini’s work highlights relationships and how every element (whether in a sculpture or in our lives) are interdependent. Even seemingly antagonistic opposites (male/female, past/present, art/craft, work/play, practical/decorative) gain meaning only when supported by one another. The hierarchy between these opposites (because of their mutual dependence) is artificial. Every element is needed and of equal importance to make the whole thing work.

Gladys Nilsson

A Little Squeeze Play

1984

credit artist as: © Gladys Nilsson

(b. 1940 — Chicago, Illinois) Gladys Nilsson paints watercolor works that pull from both everyday experiences and cartoon imagery. The vibrant paintings most often portray groups of expressive people, varying in size and interacting in both familiar and fantastical ways.

Inspired by such pop cultural classics as Popeye cartoon figures—with their rubbery limbs and vibrating movements—Nilsson’s subjects defy standard anatomy and use scale to imply varying power systems. In much of the work, giant, imposing women tower over miniaturized male figures, seemingly ambivalent, or totally unaware of their presence. Subjects act uninhibited—scratching itches, adjusting garments, and staring shamelessly—pointing to the most animal and mundane of our impulses, a society failing to maintain our sanitized standards.

Once described by an art critic as having the most feminine work in a group show, Nilsson responded saying, "That shocked me, thinking feminine? My work is feminine? Because I don’t think of work as being masculine or feminine."

Ayana Jackson

How Sweet the Song

2017

(b. 1977 — Livingston, New Jersey) The correlation between the rise of photography and insidious stereotypes of Africa, poverty, and the African American experience, is at the center of Ayana V. Jackson’s work. Using this medium, that, through such institutions as early missionary movements and National Geographic publications, stripped people of color of depth, and cemented the view of the colonizer as the only perspective, Jackson uses portraiture to capture something else: fragility, softness, leisure, and strength. Through her lens, Jackson portrays these bodies not laboring, in poverty, or subject to overwhelming imbalances of power, but instead at rest, peace, and strong defiance. This particular body of work was created following the 2015 Black Lives Matter protests. Jackson explains, "Between that particular instance of me wanting to see and feel weightlessness and movement in the face of injustice and reading Shatema’s book ("Intimate Justice" by Shatema Threadcraft], which is about the Black female body politic, where she is listing injustices against the black woman’s body—I felt this need to address that further, and that is how the exhibition came about. I needed, in myself, to find space, and air, and lightness."

Alex Jackson

Chromanid

2017

(b. 1993) Alex Jackson creates portraiture work that presents the black male body in ways that have historically been excluded within the art community. He explains "I have always been very attracted to Western styles of portrait painting and history painting, a style and period in which the black body has ultimately been excluded." Within his work, Jackson uses African American history and Indian mythology, as well as his personal experience in relation to these two arenas to address ideas around race and identity. With so many influences present within his work, Jackson's figures do not conform to any one genre or trope, instead they break out into what he describes as a "quasi-fictional world," where (as in this painting) one can examine their own self and the public “masks” available to them, through the veneer of a museum quality glass case.

Mohau Modisakeng

Passage

2017

(b. 1986 — Soweto, South Africa) Mohau Modisakeng is an interdisciplinary artist working in photography, film, installation and performance art. The artist frequently uses his own body as the subject of his films and photographs, and uses the human form as a metaphor for collective memory and trauma. Using his individual experience of a collective social trauma that persists in current post-colonial, post-apartheid South Africa, Modisakeng creates subtle, visually striking images that draw in the audience with their unusual beauty. In the video from which this work was derived, Modisakeng poses as three distinct characters, each alternating between struggle and resignation as the boat they lie in slowly sinks. Their movements are morbidly beautiful, aligning elegance with deep trauma without making light of suffering. The work is a poetic exploration of South Africa’s violent, racially charged history. Created for the 57th Venice Biennale, "Passage" draws colonial and indigenous histories together to speak to contemporary black South African experiences.

Modisakeng earned his undergraduate degree at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape Town, and currently lives and works in Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa. He has shown internationally, including at VOLTA NY, New York; the Saatchi Gallery, London; and Dak’Art Biennale, Dakar, and his work is included in numerous public and private collections.

Caroline Wells Chandler

Queer Sex Demystified for My Sister

2018

(b. 1985 — Norfolk, Virginia) The bright colors and animated poses of Caroline Wells Chandler's crocheted figures exude joy. The beings jump, bounce, embrace, and play all the while eschewing binary gender stereotypes and categorization. Of his work and inspiration for creating, Chandler states, "Choosing joy is radical because joy is idiosyncratic pleasure and that destabilizes power as it currently exists."

In this work two headless figures are aligned in a scramble of legs and bodies. The uncanny pairing of figures likely does not in fact do as the title says and "demystify queer sex," but rather plays on the absurdity of feeling like it is one's job to do so. The work is critical yet whimsical, with the bright colors, outlined edges, and anatomically comical figures.

Sheida Soleimani

GDP, Iran (Opium, Soccer)

2017

(b. 1990 — Indianapolis, Indiana) Iranian American artist Sheida Soleimani grew up the daughter of political refugees and uses the histories of her family and narratives surrounding current day Iran to create politically charged sculptures and photographs. By sourcing materials from U.S. media outlets, the dark web, and family and friends in Iran, Soleimani collages tableau-like environments to be photographed. In this series of artworks, Soleimani juxtaposes Iran’s national sports with some of the country’s most valued domestic products. Soleimani explains, "I aim to highlight how nationalism and sport are often intertwined; as sports provide a venue for symbolic competition between nations and these competitions often reflect national conflict." Laid over the top of the agricultural exports and sport paraphernalia are drips and splashes of oil, the largest percentage of Iran’s gross domestic product (GDP).

The bright colors and disjointed imagery of the work draw the viewer in, appearing at first as flashy constructions and revealing only upon a closer look the violence and disjointed imagery of the piece. In this manner, Soleimani uses her art as mechanism to provoke conversation and thought, merging art and politics. Of this experience, Soleimani explains, "The other day, a man told me he liked the image until he realized the trophy was covered in oil, and then told me that 'sports and politics' should never mix. This for me is a constant reminder that visual work can serve as an opportunity to get people to reconsider their positions. I don't aim to or expect to change anyone’s minds, but I get really excited when they feel challenged by the work."

Mark Newport

Redress 3

2017

(b. 1964 — Amsterdam, New York) While standard means of mending typically require skill at concealment and camouflage, Mark Newport's work embraces the wear on clothing as an important part of the owner’s history. He accentuates the clothes' visible markings, drawing a connection between clothing, and our own bodies and lived experiences. He explains, "As I fold my son’s laundered clothes, the holes in the knees of his pants remind me of my childhood exploits, the falls that punctuated each adventure and the scars I carry from those accidents. My body and most often the knees of my pants would be repaired the same way: wash then patch (an iron-on patch for the pants and a Band-Aid for me). When things were more serious, stitches might be required for the body and the clothes would be discarded. Even then, darning and suturing leave a mark, a scar. Each pierces the substrate it is repairing, performing a modest violence upon what is to be mended, and reminding each of us of our sensitivity, vulnerability, and mortality."

Edie Fake

Waterworks

2018

(b. 1980 — Chicago, Illinois) With a vibrant color palette and meticulous geometry, Edie Fake depicts the construction of LGBTQ* spaces. In a literal sense, he celebrates the clubs, bars, bathhouses, parks, stages, parades, and other places where LGBTQ individuals have congregated and found community. Obviously, these are not realistic depictions. Instead, they are like optimistic diagrams. Fake reimagines past places as he wishes they were and envisions future places as he hopes they will be.

In the metaphoric sense, Fake is also portraying the struggle LGBTQ individuals have in constructing a positive mental space. As a transgender person, Fake is interested in how the literal act of finding a place is related to the process an LGBTQ individual takes in finding personal meaning and acceptance. The spaces he illustrates are shown from unusual perspectives, distorting dimensions and making it hard for the viewer to orient. They seem to be in motion, emblematic of the experience of many LGBTQ individuals (especially those in gender transition) who are looking for identity and validation in a society with few clear, affirmative models.

*LGBTQ stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (and/or questioning).

Paolo Arao

Othered Sides (No. 1)

2018

(b. 1975 — Brooklyn, New York) Paolo Arao's move from photorealistic charcoal drawings to geometric abstraction and textile "paintings" occurred following a need to expand the vocabulary used when depicting queer spaces and experience. He explains this shift stating, "I felt like my work was getting pigeonholed into a corner. I thought: how can I deal with the content but not be so obvious or rely on the depiction of bodies?" Using the grid, a system inherently thought of as "straight," as inspiration Arao questions the rigidity of geometric abstraction and its relation to our perceptions of gender and other cultural norms. The textiles used quite literally soften the pieces and the mailability of the textiles is likewise intentional. When stretched, they move from perfectly straight and linear to inevitably crooked and warped—undermining the rigidity of the geometric space.

Arao describes his unstretched works as "flags" that are "representative of people, cultures and movements but they're also abstractions. They carry a political symbolism …" This intersection of abstraction and cultural criticism is Arao’s sweet spot—potently beautiful and immersed in both symbolism and history.