![](\"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1762735452/hb9g4rpr92ghhpk3ylwd.png\")
moniquemeloche was founded in October 2000, with its debut exhibition ‘Homewrecker’ at Meloche’s home, and officially opened to the public in May 2001. Diverse and inclusive since its inception, the gallery promotes politically minded contemporary art, aiming to be a bellwether for artistic talents early or under-recognized in their careers. Working with an international group of emerging and established artists in all media, the gallery presents conceptually challenging installations in Chicago and at art fairs internationally, with an emphasis on curatorial and institutional outreach.
Represented artists include: Luke Agada, Candida Alvarez, Sanford Biggers, Antonius Tín-Bui, David Antonio Cruz, Brendan Fernandes, Dan Gunn, Sheree Hovsepian, Rashid Johnson, Lavar Munroe, Ben Murray, Maia Cruz Palileo, Ebony G. Patterson, Cheryl Pope, Karen Reimer, Joel Ross, Arocha-Schraenen, David Shrobe, Arvie Smith, Jake Troyli, Nate Young
Image: Installation of Luke Agada, To Translate is to Move Across.
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Brendan Fernandes is an internationally recognized, multidisciplinary artist who examines issues of cultural displacement, migration, labor, and queer subjectivity through installation, video, sculpture, and dance. He is invested in confronting the complexities of transitional and transnational identities, with a particular interest in incorporating elements of cultural performance into contemporary art, arising from his unique cultural background as a Queer, Kenyan Indian Canadian. Fernandes’ projects address issues of race, queer culture, migration, protest, and other forms of collective movement. Always looking to create new spaces and new forms of agency, his projects take on hybrid forms: part Ballet, part queer dance party, part political protest... always rooted in collaboration and fostering solidarity.
Fernandes (b.1979, Nairobi, Kenya) attended York University for his Bachelors (hons.) and is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program (2010). He is currently an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL. Selected solo presentations include the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Denver, CO (2024); Susan Inglett Gallery, New York, NY (2023); The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, PA (2023); Lurie Garden at Millennium Park, Chicago, IL (2022); The Richmond Art Gallery, Richmond, BC (2022); The Art Gallery in Ontario, Toronto, ON (2021); Chrysler Art Museum, Norfolk, VA (2020); moniquemeloche (2019); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL (2019); The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC (2019); The Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; and DePaul University Art Museum, Chicago, IL (2018). His projects have been featured in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, New York, NY; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, ON; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, ON; Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA; and The Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Kalamazoo, MI, among many others. Recent projects include performances and solo presentations at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, MO; Prospect.6, New Orleans, LA; Remai Modern, Saskatoon, CA; Munch Museum, Oslo, Norway; a collaboration with Danish National Radio, Copenhagen, Denmark, a group show at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, and a two person show at Mass MoCA, North Adams, MA. In 2024, Fernandes debuted Build of the House for ART on THE MART, which traveled to Times Square Arts’ Midnight Moments.
Public collections include the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian, DC; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Remai Modern, Saskatoon, CA; The Museu de Arte de São Paulo, BR; Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, MO; DePaul University Art Museum, Chicago, IL; Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, IL; The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, CA; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, QC; Crysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA; The Joyner/Giuffrida Collection of Abstract Art, San Francisco, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA; and the Wedge Collection, Toronto, ON. Fernandes is a recipient of a Robert Rauschenberg Fellowship. In 2010, he was shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award, and is the recipient of a prestigious Canada Council New Chapters grant (2017), the Artadia Award (2019), a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant (2019), and a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2020).
Fernandes currently lives and works in Chicago, IL.
Installation View, Photo by Bob.
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For more than two decades, Arocha-Schraenen have developed a practice that challenges perception through sculpture, installation, photography, painting, and drawing. Their work, held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Walker Art Center; and numerous international institutions, investigates how reflection, architecture, and illusion shape our understanding of space and reality. Rather than filling the gallery with discrete objects, Gaining Perspective treats the gallery itself as the primary material. Developed specifically for Monique Meloche Gallery, the exhibition subtly dismantles viewers' assumptions about the familiar architecture through a series of precise interventions that destabilize depth, orientation, and perspective. Temporary walls become sculptural devices, wallpaper expands into optical fields, and sculptural forms appear to oscillate between painting, relief, and architecture. Throughout the exhibition, visitors are asked to continually renegotiate what is physically present and what exists only as reflection, projection, or perceptual illusion. As the artists describe it, the goal is to \"minimally intervene the gallery architecture for maximum effect,\" encouraging viewers to question what they believe they are seeing before arriving at certainty. Central to the exhibition are two newly conceived bodies of work. Axis z(2026) transforms the gallery walls into a series of sculptural interventions visible differently depending on one's position in space, while Axis y(2026) employs custom wallpaper derived from Carla Arocha's 2003 painting Untitled (Brown Burst), a work originally exhibited by Monique Meloche Gallery more than two decades ago, to create an immersive environment where scale, pattern, and architectural surface become inseparable. The exhibition also carries particular significance for Chicago. Carla Arocha, a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (BFA, 1991), has maintained a decades-long relationship with the city and has exhibited with Monique Meloche Gallery since its inception. Her ongoing dialogue with Chicago's artistic community culminates here in an exhibition that revisits earlier works while presenting a new chapter in the collaborative practice she has developed with Stéphane Schraenen. Gaining Perspective arrives at a pivotal moment for the artists. Last year, their expansive practice was the subject of the landmark 600-page publication Carla Arocha and Stéphane Schraenen: Monograph as Project, co-published by Mercatorfonds and Yale University Press, with its Chicago launch celebrated at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. This exhibition extends the scholarly reassessment represented by that publication into a fully realized spatial experience. At a moment when immersive installation has become ubiquitous, Arocha-Schraenen offer something fundamentally different. Rather than overwhelming viewers with spectacle, they employ subtle formal shifts that reward sustained looking, transforming ordinary architectural space into an unstable field where certainty dissolves into observation. Gaining Perspective invites audiences to reconsider not only how we experience art, but how perception itself is constructed.
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To this end, Patterson’s new body of large-scale tapestries and hand-cut paper works reflects her recent investigation of gardens:
“For almost five years, I have been exploring the idea of gardens, both real and imagined, and their relationship to postcolonial spaces. I am interested in how gardens – natural but cultivated settings – operate with social demarcations. I investigate their relationship to beauty, dress, class, race, the body, land, and death. These new works create an immersive installation – a nocturnal garden that acknowledges bodies and sites, that uses pageantry and beauty to create presence in ‘gardens’ gone awry. We come to pause, to bear witness, and to acknowledge…”
These new works – exquisitely and ornately embellished with myriad materials such as glitter, stickers, and varied textiles, among other things – is an unmistakable call to action and testimonial. The titular wordplay – …for those who bear/bare witness… – implicates not only the viewer, who must acknowledge the content of Patterson’s presentation, but also the anonymous victims memorialized by the works, whose bodies are disappeared, or laid bare.
Indeed, Patterson has been slowly taking apart her figures, calling attention to their invisibility on the larger world’s stage precisely by disappearing them in her own works. The new works depict a jumbled jungle of lush flora and fauna, through whose coiled vines and fertile floral sprays ghostly corporeal forms are just barely visible. A closer look and limbless, headless torsos, cloaked in jewel-toned finery, become apparent. Confidently posed, they flaunt a melancholy greatness. Elsewhere, unattached limbs mingle with the verdant density, and animals such as owls, bears, or roosters keep watch. Presented on a newly artist-designed fabric wallpaper, which depicts an uneasily peaceful image of a garden at night, these works put forth an environment of uncanny, ominous beauty and decay. These are gardens where life and death co-mingle, where bodies are buried, historical traumas are revealed, and souls are set free.
Ebony G. Patterson (b. 1981 in Kingston, Jamaica; lives and works in Kingston and Lexington, KY) received her BFA from Edna Manley College, Kingston, Jamaica (2004) and MFA from Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Washington University, St. Louis, MO (2006). Patterson has had solo exhibitions and projects at many US institutions including Pérez Art Museum Miami (through May 5, 2019); Baltimore Museum of Art, MD (through April 7, 2019); The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY (2016); Atlanta Center for Contemporary Art, GA (2016); and SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2016). Dead Treez, Patterson’s first large-scale institutional solo show, originated at the Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI (2015) and traveled to Museum of Art and Design, NY (2015); Boston University Art Galleries, MA (2016); and UB Art Galleries, University at Buffalo, NY (2017). Her work was included in Open Spaces Kansas City (2018), the 32nd São Paulo Bienal: Live Uncertainty (2016); the 12th Havana Biennial: Between the Idea and the Experience, Cuba (2015); Prospect.3: Notes for Now, New Orleans (2014), and the Jamaica Biennial 2014, National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston. She was an Artist-in-Residence at the Rauschenberg Foundation, Captiva Island, FL (2017) and served on the Artistic Director’s Council for Prospect.4, New Orleans (2017). Patterson has received numerous awards, including the Stone and DeGuire Art Award, Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Washington University, St. Louis (2018); United States Artist Award (2018); Tiffany Foundation Grant (2017); Joan Mitchell Foundation Art Grant (2015); and the Andy Warhol Foundation Grant, in conjunction with Small Axe Project (2012). Patterson’s work is included in a number of public collections, including The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Museum of Arts and Design, NY; Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, NC; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; 21c Museum Hotels; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; and the National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston. Patterson is represented by Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago.
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her exhibition at 5:30 PM the night of the opening, February 2, 2019
moniquemeloche is pleased to present All The While I Thought You Had Received This, an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Maia Cruz Palileo. This is her first solo show with the gallery and the first in her native Chicago. Informed by her family’s Filipino heritage, Palileo investigates larger questions pertaining to identity, history, migration, and belonging. The artist’s strategy for unraveling these long and tangled threads is itself born from from an intricately woven patchwork of sources and mediums; Palileo translates these materials into a novel formal language to describe a new world of her own making.
In 2017, through the Jerome Foundation’s Travel and Study Program Grant, Palileo conducted research at Chicago’s Newberry Library, which has one of the largest collections of Philippiniana in the world (comprised of the collections of Edward E. Ayer, an American who assembled a vast trove of Philippine 17th and 18th century manuscripts upon US victory over the Spanish at Manila Bay in 1898; and the photographic archive of Dean C. Worcester, an influential and controversial figure in the early years of American presence in the Philippines). These varied documents, spanning centuries and cultures, offered a kaleidoscopic vision of the Philippines as seen through numerous eyes, and recalled by multiple “natives” and “others.” Struck in particular by the exploitative gaze of Worcester’s ethnographic photographs, Palileo sought to resuscitate the figures he captured so problematically, and looked to Damián Domingo for inspiration. Considered the father of Philippine painting, Domingo set up the first Philippine art academy in 1821, an institution which implemented non-discriminatory practices, affirming the right to equality and respect for all who wished to study there. Domingo’s watercolors from the era confer humanity onto an array of different types and characters in and around Manila Bay, a sensibility which informed Palileo’s re-assessment of Worcester’s images:
“I began to draw figures, plants, landscapes, and other elements from the archive. Then, I cut out each drawing, creating a new library of cutouts: figures, plants, animals, interiors, boats, moons and mountains. The pieces were then placed in various arrangements and recorded via graphite rubbings. This process allowed for the cutouts to be combined into potentially infinite visual narratives.” The exhibition will feature a site-specific installation of these materials.
The resultant paintings present a potent amalgamation of Palileo’s research, bridging Spanish colonialism, the Filipino-American War, and the artist’s own understanding of a fractured and complex past. Hovering between fact and fiction, her expressive, gestural paintings are dream-like reveries rendered in dusky jewel-tones. Further inspired by Philippine folkloric motifs found in revolutionary Isabelo De Los Reyes’ book El Folk-lore Filipino (1889), as well as Nick Joaquín’s short stories, they present an uncanny realm; a magical realist landscape where histories comingle, ghosts are confronted, and alternative paths are forged. Through Palileo’s keen alchemy, a rich new historical record takes shape, one informed by a fluid and unfixed collective memory.
Maia Cruz Palileo (b. 1979, Chicago) received an MFA in sculpture from Brooklyn College, City University of New York and a BA in Studio Art at Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts. Palileo has participated in residencies at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York (2017), Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine (2015), Lower East Side Print Shop, New York (2015), Millay Colony, New York (2015) and the Joan Mitchell Center, New Orleans (2015). She has received a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (2018), Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Program Grant (2017), Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2014), NYFA Painting Fellowship (2015), Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Award (2008), and the Astraea Visual Arts Fund Award (2009). Recent exhibitions include The Way Back, Taymour Grahne, London; and Meandering Curves of a Creek, Pioneer Works, Brooklyn. She will have a solo exhibition at Katzen Museum, American University, Washington, D.C. in summer 2019. Palileo teaches at Parsons School of Design and LaGuardia Community College, both in New York. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn.
Image: Maia Cruz Palileo, How Long Have You Been Away? II, 2018, oil on panel, 10\" x 8\" (25.4 x 20.3 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago
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moniquemeloche is thrilled to present Black White and Red All Over, Genevieve Gaignard’s first solo show with the gallery, and her first in Chicago. The exhibition will focus on the artist’s new body of mixed media works on panel and will include a new site-specific installation. Arising out of her well-known photographic and installation-based series, these new works convey a declaratively political angle through novel formal means.
Gaignard explores issues of race, class, and femininity using an uncanny humor befitting these concepts’ duality as both weighty markers of identity and unfixed values traded fluidly in popular culture. As a biracial woman in America, Gaignard investigates the aesthetic and cultural divide between black and white, a chasm as palpable as it is “invisible.” As an artist interested in the varying incremental shades that exist between, and inadequately define, these markers, Gaignard’s practice hinges on composites: of identities, experiences, appearances, materials. Her staged photographs present a spectrum of imagined and wholly recognizable “selves,” demonstrative of the kaleidoscopic means by which our outward existences are forged and fashioned, and pointing to the imperfect relationship between our inner worlds and public lives. Her installations, composed of myriad materials and found objects dutifully collected by the artist from various sources, convey a similar multiplicity. Representing something more, and different, than the sum of their parts, these domestic tableaux meld the real and the imagined; they are a patchwork of cultural associations, evocatively familiar yet pleasurably strange.
Genevieve’s newest body of work is, then, an amalgamation of these photo- and installation-based arms of her practice. Images culled from vintage issues of Ebony, Jet, and Life magazines (which her mother regularly collected when the artist was growing up) mix and mingle with found fabrics, vintage wallpaper, and the odd knick-knack. With a free hand and mind, the artist plays with these disparate elements until a narrative appears. This process facilitates unexpected, profound juxtapositions, and provides a liberated platform for her continued formal investigations. The resultant scenes – in turns whimsical, ironic, beautiful, nostalgic, and critical – serve to bolster and amplify the artist’s resounding political voice.
Genevieve Gaignard (b. 1981, Orange, MA) received her BFA in Photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston (2007), and her MFA in Photography from Yale University, New Haven (2014). She has had several solo exhibitions including Counterfeit Currency, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2018); Hidden Fences, Praz-Delavallade, Paris, France (2018); Prospect 4: The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp, curated by Trevor Schoonmaker, New Orleans (2017); In Passing, Houston Center for Photography, Houston (2017); The Powder Room, Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles (2017); Smell the Roses, California African American Museum, Los Angeles (2016), among others. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including Personal Space, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AK (2018); the Daegu Biennial, curated by Ami Barak, Daegu, South Korea (2018); Talisman in the Age of Difference, curated by Yinka Shonibare MBE; Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, UK (2018); and Fictions, The Studio Museum in Harlem (2017), among others. Select public collections include The Art Institute of Chicago; The Studio Museum in Harlem; California African American Museum, Los Angeles; Pérez Art Museum Miami; The Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC; The FLAG Art Foundation, New York; and the San Jose Museum of Art, CA. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles.
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Jake Troyli & Brittney Leeanne Williams: Show Me Yours","starts_at":"2019-06-06 16:00:00","ends_at":"2019-08-17 17:00:00","body":"moniquemeloche is excited to present Show Me Yours, an exhibition featuring the work of emerging artists Brittney Leeanne Williams, Jake Troyli, and Bianca Nemelc. Presented in tandem with BASKING NEVER HURT NO ONE – a solo exhibition of Cheryl Pope’s new body of work exploring the leisured nude figure – Show Me Yours expands upon Pope’s novel approach to the nude form as a site for examining systematic social concerns. Like Pope, the artists of Show Me Yours offer up their own contemporary interpretations to the classic motif, galvanizing the nude form as a starting point to contemplate prevalent issues such as identity, trauma, and gender.
Brittney Leeanne Williams explores the potential of the female body to both encapsulate and express a variety of psychological states. Rendering skin tone in a surprising spectrum of reds in an effort to subvert expectations, Williams depicts the figures as both faceless and contorted into a near circular embrace of their own bodies, or that of another. Ensconced in these intricate moments partially inaccessible to the viewer, the bodies expand out of surreal fractured backdrops, sourced from the artist’s own personal history. Acting as an amalgamation of both the artist’s identity, as well as that of her female family members, these bodies serve as communal symbols of hope and love, pain and loss.
Jake Troyli utilizes the absurd as an entry point into larger considerations of identity and masculinity. Depicting humorous scenes grounded in the language of classical painting, Troyli inserts his own body as an elastic avatar, able to move through various surfaces and vignettes. Referencing the common social practice of code switching – the practice of alternating between varieties of language – Troyli examines the intricacies of his own identity as a biracial man whilst inhabiting different spaces.
Bianca Nemelc embraces the fragmented female form, placing it against an earthly backdrop of greens and yellows. Although beginning as self-portraits, her monumental headless female forms seek to stand in for all women of color through their renderings in multiple shades of brown. Influenced by the art in her grandmother’s home – such as Fernando Botero and Tarsila do Amaral – Nemelc depicts her figures with playful looping lines, the contours of their bodies matching the delicate curves of water streams and plant branches surrounding them. Motivated by her own identity as a multiracial woman, Nemelc creates large-scale immersive works to provide a meditative space on culture and heritage.
Brittney Leeanne Williams (b. 1990, lives in Chicago) attended the School of the Art Institute, Chicago, IL (2008-2009) and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, ME (2017). Solo exhibitions include Neither Free/Nor, Dittmar Gallery, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL (2017) and It Can See You, HUME Gallery, Chicago, IL (2016). Williams was a 2018 Joan Mitchell Foundation grant recipient and has had residencies at the University of Chicago Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, IL (2017-2018), Chicago Artists Coalition, IL (2016-2017), and Hyde Park Art Center, IL (2017-2018). Select group exhibitions include The Poetics of Relation, The Gaylord and Donnelley Foundation, Chicago, IL (2019); The Annual, Chicago Artists Coalition, IL (2018); Home/Lands, The Object Press, Venice Architecture Biennale, Italy (2018); and Here + Now, Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids, MI (2017). She is currently A Tale of Today Emerging Artist Fellow at the Richard H. Driehaus Museum, Chicago.
Jake Troyli (b. 1990, lives in Tampa) received his BFA from Lincoln Memorial University, Harrogate, TN (2013) and his MFA from the University of South Florida, Tampa (2019). He will attend the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, ME in the summer of 2019. His solo exhibitions include Awkward Handshake,Tempus Projects, Tampa, FL(2018) and Always leave them wanting more!, ArtsXchange, Saint Petersburg, FL (2018). Troyli has been awarded a Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship for the 2019-2020 season, was an ACRE resident in Steuben, WI (2018), and received a Creative Pinellas Emerging Artist Grant, Largo, FL (2017). His work has been in numerous group exhibitions, including Extra Butter,Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, FL (2019); XL Catlin Art Prize,San Francisco Art Institute, CA (2018); and Secret Garden,Henao Contemporary Center, Orlando, FL (2018). He has an upcoming group show, Malmö Sessions, at Carl Kostyál Gallery, Malmö, SE (2019).
Bianca Nemelc (b. 1991, lives in New York City) received her Associate Degree in Communications at the Borough of Manhattan Community College in 2009. She is a self-taught artist who began her painting practice four years ago. She recently exhibited an interactive installation constructed of painting and video at the Ross+Kramer Gallery booth at Spring/Break Art Show, New York, NY, for which she was recognized as one of the best in show by Artnet, Artsy, and ARTnews. She was featured in the group exhibition Bloom Service, Galeria Del Barrio, New York, NY (2019), and has an upcoming solo show at Gallery Valentine in East Hampton, NY in summer 2019.
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moniquemeloche is thrilled to present BASKING NEVER HURT NO ONE, Cheryl Pope’s fourth solo show with the gallery. Born and raised in Chicago, Pope maintains a deep-rooted practice of challenging the widespread racism that has historically defined the city. Although seemingly a departure from the performative, often sports-related projects for which she is known, this new body of work continues the artist’s examination of systematic social concerns, unexpected material interventions, and simultaneously introduces a novel formal language. While she previously positioned herself as a conduit for the voices of the youth impacted by socio-political turmoil, here Pope puts forth a personal intimacy as yet unseen in the artist’s oeuvre. Made of wool roving on cashmere – unspun wool needle-punched into a cashmere support – these “paintings” are textural explorations of the complicated sensuality evoked by a semi-anonymous biracial couple.
Pope’s new works draw upon the motif of the leisured nude figure, a classic image woven throughout the fabric of the art historical canon. Upending the trite narrative of the male artist, who, in projecting his own ideas of the female form, creates a partisan image, Pope presents both the female and male form in sensual, insightful entanglement. In part, the work depicts the simple delights of nudity, portraying two figures as they lounge, unabashedly exposed to the viewer, at times intimately intertwined. Composed of tactile, sensual lines, their bodies sprawl across an imagined natural setting consisting of floral colors and tropical plants, evoking both an Edenic tranquility and carnality. However, a paradisiacal simplicity becomes complicated by longstanding historical and political association: what are the implications of a black and a white body lying together?
While Pope evokes her own personal reality in these works, she notably renders the bodies faceless. As in her previous works, then, she transcends specificity to address larger concepts. On both a personal and more complexly political level, these works appeal to the universal human need for intimacy, trust, and love – all-encompassing desires that bind us all.
Cheryl Pope (American, b. 1980, lives and works in Chicago and New York)received her BFA and MA in Design from the School of the Art Institute, Chicago, where she is now an Adjunct Professor. Solo exhibitions include Rockford Art Museum, IL (2019); Galleria Bianconi, Milan, Italy (2018); Andres Guerrero Gallery, San Francisco, CA (2018); Fort Gansevoort, New York, NY (2017); moniquemeloche (2016); Ontario College of Art, Toronto, Canada (2016); Gund Gallery, Kenyon College, Gambier, OH (2016); and Poetry Foundation, Chicago, IL (2015). Her work has also been included in several group exhibitions, including Messengers: Artist as Witnesses, Museum of Art, University of New Hampshire, Durham (2019); waiting for a sign, Lubeznik Center for the Arts, Michigan City, IN (2018); 50 States, 50 Billboards, For Freedoms, Chicago, IL (2018); Ready? OK!, Naughton Gallery, Queen’s University, Belfast, Ireland (2018); and Declaration, the inaugural exhibition at the Institute for Contemporary Art, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA (2018). In 2015, Pope presented her ongoing performance projects, TRUTH as EVIDENCEand JUST YELL, at The White House, Washington, D.C. Recent and current residencies include the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France (2019), as well as at Queenspace in New York, NY (since 2018).She has been the recipient of several awards and fellowships, including the Public Artist Award, Franklin Works, Minneapolis, MN (2017); Selected Artist, Year of Public Art, Chicago Cultural Center, IL (2017); Mellon Fellowship, Kenyon College, Gambier, OH (2016); and 3Arts Award, Chicago, IL (2015). Pope’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Joan Flasche Artists Book Collection, Chicago; Seattle Art Museum, WA; Honolulu Museum of Art, HI; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; Poetry Foundation, Chicago, IL; DePaul University Art Museum, Chicago, IL; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA; and United States Embassy, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Pope will participate in a number of upcoming projects in 2019, including group exhibitions Stance & Fall, Marta Herford Museum, DE; and Small Talk, Crystal Bridges, Bentonville, AR.
Image: Cheryl Pope, Woman and Man reclining on striped mat, 2018, needle punched wool roving in cashmere, from artist's website
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Join us at moniquemeloche for a discussion between artists Cheryl Pope and Brittney Leeanne Williams
Saturday, July 27 at 1pm
This event is free and open to the public
Seating is limited
In their current bodies of work, both artists investigate the classic and ubiquitous motif of the nude human form, updating this timeless theme by different means and to varying ends. Pope’s solo exhibition, BASKING NEVER HURT NO ONE, is currently on view and Williams is part of the concurrent and complementary group exhibition Show Me Yours. Both shows continue through August 17. Together, Pope and Williams will discuss the sources and influences of their explorations, arriving at new insights and avenues of reflection.
Cheryl Pope (b. 1980, lives and works in Chicago and New York) received her BFA and MA in Design from the School of the Art Institute, Chicago, where she is now an Adjunct Professor. BASKING NEVER HURT NO ONE is Pope’s fourth solo show with Monique Meloche. Although seemingly a departure from the performative, often sports-related projects for which she is known, this new body of work continues the artist’s examination of systematic social concerns, unexpected material interventions, and simultaneously introduces a novel formal language. Pope puts forth a personal intimacy as yet unseen in the artist’s oeuvre. Made of wool roving on cashmere – unspun wool needle-punched into a cashmere support – these “paintings” are textural explorations of the complicated sensuality evoked by a semi-anonymous biracial couple.
Brittney Leeanne Williams (b. 1990, lives in Chicago) attended the School of the Art Institute, Chicago, IL (2008-2009) and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, ME (2017). She is currently an Emerging Artist Fellow at the Richard H. Driehaus Museum, Chicago. Williams explores the potential of the female body to both encapsulate and express a variety of psychological states. Acting as an amalgamation of both the artist’s identity, as well as that of her female family members, the bodies she depicts serve as communal symbols of hope and love, pain and loss.
moniquemeloche is thrilled to present One Day I’ll Turn the Corner and I’ll Be Ready For It, an exhibition of new paintings by David Antonio Cruz. This is Cruz’s first exhibition with the gallery and his first in Chicago.
David Antonio Cruz explores the intersectionality of queerness and race through painting, sculpture, and performance. Focusing on queer, trans, and genderfluid communities of color, Cruz examines the violence perpetrated against their members, conveying his subjects both as specific individuals and as monumental signifiers for large and urgent systemic concerns.
Using a vast trove of images mined from the internet, including the personal social media accounts of his subjects, Cruz brings these individuals out of the shadows and into the light. He inserts these individuals’ likenesses into lush, sensuous compositions directly inspired by the aspirational aesthetic of luxury and fashion, creating a dissonance that critically elevates his black and brown subjects while also emphasizing the extreme injustice of their plights.
To further enrich these portraits with depths of meaning, Cruz employs a unique and coded visual vocabulary. Baroque background patterns reveal real plant types, whose native regions relate to locales where these victims lived or were found. Certain colors hold certain meanings (green relates to immigration, for example), a formal code that evokes the charged relationship between skin tone and identity. Organic, anthropomorphic forms peer out from behind figures, witnesses that break the fourth wall, inviting us in to these newly-transparent worlds. In this way, Cruz illustrates his subjects’ stories through portraiture, positioning them firmly within an art historical canon from which they have been largely excluded. In doing so, he further saves their narratives from the white noise of media coverage whose disregard bars such truths from entering our collective consciousness. Cruz humanely retrieves his subjects from this imposed invisibility.
The new paintings on view present a timely development in Cruz’s examination and memorialization of this all-too-regular brutality: they extend the reach of his political discourse to include issues related to immigration and displacement at the US-Mexico border. His subjects’ stories convey specific ways in which queer and trans folks have suffered in this contested space. Roxana died while incarcerated after ICE denied her medication. Carlos’ deportation has separated him from his husband and son. While these injustices may be unique to this particular conflict, the collateral human suffering they yield is universal. Cruz’s deeply empathetic gaze enlightens the viewer to those overlooked but urgently salient experiences, facilitating a communion of humanity between seer and seen.
David Antonio Cruz (b. 1974, Philadelphia) received his BFA in Painting from Pratt Institute and his MFA from Yale University. He also attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and completed the AIM Program at the Bronx Museum, New York. Recent residencies and fellowships include the LMCC Workspace Residency, New York (2015); Gateway Project Spaces, Newark, NJ (2016); BRIC Workspace Residency, Brooklyn (2018); Neubauer Faculty Fellowship, Tufts University, Boston (2018); and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Award (2018). Cruz’s work has been included in notable exhibitions at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C (2014); El Museo del Barrio, New York (2016); the Ford Foundation, New York (2019); the Brooklyn Museum (2019); and the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio (2019). Cruz also presented performances at Performa 13, New York (2013); and the High Line, New York (2015). Cruz lives and works between Brooklyn and Boston, where he is a Professor of the Practice in Painting and Drawing at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University.
Image: David Antonio Cruz, onedayi’llturnthecornerandi’llbereadyforit, portrait of the texas girls, 2019, Oil and latex on wood, 48 x 48 inches
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Open for Art After Hours, a citywide open gallery night inviting EXPO CHICAGO visitors and the Chicago community to experience the city's vibrant art scene during extended hours.
For details and participating galleries and art spaces, click here.
6:00–9:00pm | Citywide Locations
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Inspired by his recent performance at the Guggenheim in New York City, Ballet Kink (2019), Fernandes continues to explore the role and status of the body within the contemporary art apparatus through Restrain. This unique series of cast bronze sculptures presents as bound rope, characteristic of the patterns found within Shibari bondage, a form of BDSM that skillfully utilizes ropes, knots, braids, and harnesses to bind and adorn the body, creating patterns that contrast and complement the natural form. The sculptures are suspended within custom-built armatures designed to emphasize the position each bind would have had on the absent body, confronting viewers with a truly still evocation of the body’s removal, creating monuments to the absences.
The practice of removing the body from forms recalls the artist’s early explorations of the absent bodies of African communities removed from cultural objects by western museological practice, bodies violently halted from carrying out actions of agency and resistance.
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Brendan Fernandes and Chicago-based Curator Maite Borjabad López-Pastor, exploring the themes and subjects that comprise the works in Fernandes' second exhibition at moniquemeloche, Restrain (open through December 21).
This event is FREE and open to the public.
Image: Installation view, Brendan Fernandes: Restrain, 2019
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Opening reception: Saturday, February 1, 4 to 7pm
moniquemeloche is thrilled to present Estoy Bien, an exhibition of new Air Paintings by Candida Alvarez. This is Alvarez’s first exhibition with Monique Meloche and her first solo gallery exhibition in Chicago.
The work of Candida Alvarez is imbued with both personal and formal aspects which evolve through her relationship to color, light, and architectural elements. These unique paintings, on view for the first time in Chicago, originated as proofs intended for an installation as part of the inaugural Chicago Riverwalk Year of Public Art program (2017). The images took on a new resolve after a series of critical events, including the passing of the artist’s father, followed shortly by Hurricane Maria, and her mother’s decision to relocate from Puerto Rico to the United States. Amidst this period of transformation, Alvarez found herself drawn to the comforts of her studio, exploring the shifting panorama of Puerto Rico. Drawing inspiration from a specific phrase widely spoken by the hurricane’s survivors, Estoy Bien (I’m Fine) and the solastalgia of the island as her muse, her proofs took on new life as a series of paintings, serving as a palimpsest of growth and fortitude.
Drawing from the narrative of place, Alvarez pulls from materials in her immediate world and her travels to build dreamlike narratives existing somewhere between fact and fiction. Patterns on the floor, memories from childhood, and photographs function as ways of infusing her world into each painting. This new series of work suspends carefully within an aluminum frame, allowing the image to grow beyond conventional restrictions, presenting as a dual-sided painting. Light plays a crucial role; the use of a paper thin pvc mesh as a canvas allows for light to permeate each image, creating the sensation of color and form existing without boundary, as if each painting can live unrestricted, floating within space.
When creating each image on view, Alvarez engaged what she calls an active search, exploring the world around her with unremitting curiosity, investing thoughtful attention into that which is often deemed ordinary. This process offers Alvarez a unique way of seeing, incorporating material from her immediate world and everyday experience, arranging it in a way that is organic and surprising.
“My work stumbles through what I think of as chatty abstract spaces to reboot both light and space so that they can conjure shape shifting and dream catching. These investigations allow for my paintings and drawings to build abstract narrative structures that mix and remix themselves, interweaving the narrative with the pictorial. My aim is to expand the hybrid space of painting all the while maintaining a crucial connection to daily life.”
– Candida Alvarez
Coinciding with the opening of Estoy Bien is the release of Alvarez’s much anticipated and comprehensive monograph, “Candida Alvarez: Here. A Visual Reader”, published by Green Lantern Press. The monograph follows her first major institutional exhibition, “Here”, which was on view at the Chicago Cultural Center in 2017, and will celebrate the artist’s creative career, spanning over four decades. Contributors include Terry R. Myers (Curator of “Candida Alvarez: Here”), Dr. Kellie Jones (Columbia University, New York), and Elizabeth Alexander (President of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation).
Candida Alvarez (b. 1955 in Brooklyn, NY) received her MFA from the Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT 1997. Alvarez was commissioned by the City of Chicago to create four large paintings, installed along lower Wacker Drive on the Riverwalk in downtown Chicago, as part of the inaugural Year of Public Art, an ongoing city-wide public art initiative. Alvarez was also tapped by Rei Kawakubo, founder of international fashion house Comme des Garçons, who transformed six of her paintings into prints featured in their Fall 2017 menswear collection.
Alvarez was honored with a solo retrospective at the Chicago Cultural Center, Candida Alvarez: Here (2017), curated by Terry R. Myers. The exhibition marked the first major institutional exhibition, reflecting forty years of her painting. Other solo exhibitions include the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL (2012-13); Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco, CA (2003); New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT (1996); The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY (1992); The Queens Museum, Flushing, NY (1991); and Galerie Schneiderei, Cologne, Germany (1990). Her work has appeared in group exhibitions at the DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, IL (2018); the Kemper Museum, Kansas City, MO (2017); CAM, Houston, TX (2003); The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA (1990); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY (1985); and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY (1980). Her work is included in the collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and El Museo del Barrio, New York City. Reviews of her work have appeared in various publications, including ArtForum, Art in America, Artnews, and The New York Times. Alvarez is a recipient of the 2019 Joan Mitchell Foundation, Painters & Sculptors Grant.
She currently lives and works in Chicago, IL where she holds the F.H. Sellers Professorship in Painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Image: Estoy Bien, from Air Paintings (2017-2019), 2017, latex ink, acrylic, and enamel on PVC mesh with aluminum, 77 x 135 x 26 in.
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Join us on Saturday, February 29 at 4pm for an exhibition walkthrough with
Candida Alvarez and independent curator Melissa Messina, as they explore
the personal and formal aspects of Alvarez' first exhibition at moniquemeloche,
Estoy Bien (through March 21)
This event is FREE and open to the public. RSVP here
Before our tour, visit the MCA Chicago on Feb 29 at 2pm for a discussion with Madeleine Grynsztejn, Naomi Beckwith, and Duro Olowu, whose exhibition Seeing Chicago is on view Feb 29 - May 8, and also includes work by Candida Alvarez.
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Candida Alvarez solo presentation at Independent, New York
March 5-8, 2020
View the virtual exhibition here
moniquemeloche presents The Transcendence of Time, the gallery’s fourth solo exhibition with conceptual artist Nate Young. Through this new body of work, Young mines his own family archives to explore and question the nature of identity, history, and the significance of ritual as a means to instill authority.
The Transcendence of Time allows for a deeper investigation into excavated bones thought to be from the horse that once carried the artist’s great-grandfather from the South to the North during the Great Migration, a personal narrative illuminated by the larger history of US race relations and the movement of black bodies. In this continuum of work, Young now considers the impetus of the bones through the lens of science and philosophy, exploring their ability to offer clues and insights to his family’s unique journey to identity, while also connecting to a more universal narrative.
The exhibition presents two unique bodies of sculptural works, each rooted in this fascination with quantum entanglement, where the present actualizes and discovers artifacts of the past. Inspired by rituals’ ability to frame, define, and empower, Young presents reliquaries that loosely mimics ornate altars and vitrines found in a house of worship, thereby elevating the horse bones to a sacred position of authority and cultural relevance. Excerpts of text appear within each altar, recounting the harrowing stories of his great-grandfather’s battle with depression. The bones built into each work themselves reveal secretly coded messages within.
Riveted by the illusion of time, Young also evokes the theoretical proposition of a causal loop – the concept of objects and information as self-existing, through a cyclical relationship between cause-and-effect that functions to preserve a fixed outcome. While the works are visually rooted in narratives of family history, there is a subtle reference to time as existing beyond perceived limits.
“The past, present, and future exist within the work, challenging and transcending linear boundaries by examining the complicated relationship between the bones and their origins, suggesting their continued existence across multiple planes of time. There is a metaphysical proof of informational loops that suggests the potential to unlock and actualize the past and the future, through the assured knowledge of the bone’s existence within the here and now.”
- Nate Young
More simply put, Young considers the idea of an object bringing about its own existence, a concept popularized in mainstream media through films such as “Back to the Future” and “Interstellar”, as well as the recent Netflix series “Dark.”
What we arrive at is an expansion of the ongoing critical investigation of the myriad ways in which meaning is constructed, and how it's informed not only by empirical evidence, but also by ritual and philosophical belief.
Nate Young (American b. 1981, lives Chicago) received his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2009 and a BA from Northwestern College in Minnesota in 2004. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2009. Young’s recent solo exhibitions include (re)collection), The De Pree Art Center at Hope College, Holland, MI (2020; ...WELL!, Julius Caesar, Chicago (2019); Cleromancy, moniquemeloche, Chicago (2017); re:collection, VisArts, Richmond, VA (2017), Stations, Luce Gallery, Turin, Italy (2016), The Unseen Evidence of Things Substantiated, Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA(2015), and But not yet: in the spirit of linguistics, moniquemeloche, Chicago (2015). His work has been included in many group exhibitions, including FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial of Contemporary Art 2018); Four Saints in Three Acts, DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, (2017); Chicago Invites Chicago, Galerie Lelong, New York (2016); Retreat, curated by Theaster Gates, Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago (2014); Tony Lewis and Nate Young, Room East, New York (2014); the Soap Factory’s Minnesota Biennial (2013); Fore, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2012); and Go Tell It on the Mountain, California African American Museum, Los Angeles (2012). Young was a 2015 Artist-in-Residence at The Fabric Workshop and Museum, and he is the recipient of the Knight Arts Challenge Fellowship from the Knight Foundation (2014); the Jerome Fellowship for Emerging Artists (2014); and the Bush Fellowship for Visual Artists (2010). His work is in notable collections, including the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C.; Mott Warsh Collection, Flint, MI; and the Fabric Workshop Museum, Philadelphia. Young was recently commissioned by the Driehaus Museum (Chicago, IL) to create new works and site- specific installations which respond directly to the complex history of the museum’s 1883 building and its architecture. The exhibition will be on view in the Summer of 2020. Young is cofounder and director of the artist-run exhibition space The Bindery Projects, in Minneapolis. He is Assistant Professor of Studio Arts at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
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Negatives","starts_at":"2020-06-30 12:00:00","ends_at":"2020-07-31 12:00:00","body":"
In the ongoing body of work Double Negatives (2020), Carrie Schneider plays up the tension between the camera’s exactitude and its capacity for abstraction, using techniques that invite discord into the otherwise rational photographic process.
\"Using an idiosyncratic technique I developed over the course of a year and hundreds of tests, I am shooting chromogenic “paper negatives” in a large format 11x14 Deardorff camera. The analog process renders a reversed subject, and overlaying multiple exposures builds up and obliterates recognizable forms and textures over time. There is an element of chance that determines the final composition, and this spirit of improvisation guides the process.\"
Visit the viewing room here
Image: Carrie Schneider, Double Negative (Blue Streak), 2020
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For the remaining duration of the exhibition, please contact the gallery to schedule an appointment.
moniquemeloche gallery is thrilled to announce tandem solo presentation of new works from artists Chase Hall and February James. Faced with navigating the new challenges introduced by the global pandemic, both Hall and James were offered a new entry point for intimate self-reflection, memorialized in these new bodies of work.
February James is a self-taught artist whose work is rooted deeply in autobiographical narrative, exploring the factors that influence identity formation and the human condition to expose the hidden emotions that exist between what we see and what we experience. Compelled by what she describes as the broken places, James meditates less on the physicality of her figures, instead aiming to capture their true psychological essence. Devoid of formal construct, each smeared, distorted, and seemingly hollow portrait is equipped with a confronting gaze that brings viewers to the nexus between the authentic self and the conflicted self. We Laugh Loud So The Spirits Can Hear represents an intuitive shift through which James developed soft portraits, evocative of family members and familiar figures whose memory offers a sense of sanctuary and comfort. Segmented lines serve as linguistic tools that offer space for a deeper exploration of fragmentation within the human psyche, while a daring color palette of deep maroons conjures the sensation of life, blood pulsing through the veins. Each portrait feels like a memory charged with the oral histories and lessons their subjects passed along, while considering how truth is conditioned by the frameworks through which it is received. More specifically how our family legacies influence our everyday life, vulnerabilities, expectations, and experiences, and how we can achieve a sense of harmony with these inherited pathologies.
While varied in their methodologies, each artist’s propensity for exploring the figure enriches the recent dialogues around identity, family history, and the human condition. It is through this deeper understanding of the inheritances of our past and their resonance that we arrive at new insights and avenues of reflection.
February James (lives and works in Los Angeles) is an auto didactic artist from Washington, D.C. She works primarily in oil pastels with a penchant for watercolor and graphite powder. Recent exhibitions include Luce Gallery, Turin, Italy (2020); Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, CA (2019); LatchKey Gallery, New York, NY (2019); Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2019); Band of Vices, Los Angeles, CA (2018); Gregorio Escalante Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2017); and Papillion Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2015). Her work has appeared in various television broadcasts and print publications and has been acquired by institutions and private collections across the U.S. and abroad.
Image: February James, Pray That What You Lack Does Not Distract, 2020
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No appointment necessary. Limited capacity, masks required.
For the remaining duration of the exhibition, please contact the gallery to schedule an appointment.
moniquemeloche gallery is thrilled to announce tandem solo presentation of new works from artists Chase Hall and February James. Faced with navigating the new challenges introduced by the global pandemic, both Hall and James were offered a new entry point for intimate self-reflection, memorialized in these new bodies of work.
With his vigorous portraits, Chase Hall aims to explore the absolute of biracial identity, redefining the duality of a mixed-race experience in terms that are both personal and cultural. A self-taught multi-disciplinary artist, Hall considers the internal dialogue of existing in between fixed identities, Black and white, reclaiming past histories and residual traumas in order to consider how the dynamics of race are foundational to America. Through his new series Half Note, Hall considers the longstanding erasure of Black achievement and the resilient lineage of Black Americans examined through jazz culture. The landscapes are evocative of sultry jazz clubs, a site through which Black identity, community, humanity, and expression flourished despite oppressions imposed upon them. Each painting is deliberate; raw cotton canvas remains exposed, a form of protest against white paint as a necessary ingredient to activate surfaces. Instead, Hall allows robust strokes of color to confront the vacuous nature of historically white spaces, rendering the scenes almost incomplete, conceptually and visually considering the conflict of biraciality. The use of coffee creates vivid hues evocative of black nuance, as tonal washes liberate each figure from the regulated and exclusionary canon of American portraiture. Hall engages history as vehicle to better understand the painful inheritances of the past, while reclaiming his legacy and creating space for increased cultural cognizance and reparation.
Chase Hall (b. 1993, St Paul, Minnesota, lives and works in New York and Los Angeles) was raised across Minnesota, Chicago, Las Vegas, Colorado, Dubai, Los Angeles and New York. Hall has been included in exhibitions at Kuntsthalle Basel in Switzerland, Museo Tamayo in Mexico, Various Small Fires in Los Angeles, The Mass in Tokyo, Cob Gallery in London and Museo Nacional de San Carlos in Mexico, among others. Chase has been an artist in residence at The Skowhegan school of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, The Atlantic Center for The Arts under Catherine Opie in Florida, The Mountain School of arts in Los Angeles, the Macedonia Institute in Hudson Valley and The Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. Hall was recently nominated Forbes 30 under 30. Hall’s artwork has been featured in Vice, Vogue, ID, Dazed, Purple, Art Papers, Garage, The New York Times and T Magazine.
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Opening reception note: Masks required and no appointment necessary. To maintain social distancing, we will be limiting the number of visitors in gallery. Appointments encouraged after opening day.
moniquemeloche is thrilled to present Don’t Forget to Pack a Lunch!, Jake Troyli’s first solo show with the gallery since joining the roster, and his first in Chicago.
Jake Troyli (b. 1990) investigates the construction of otherness and the commodification of the black/brown body, confronting and exploring labor capitalism and sweat equity as a demonstration of value, challenging the erroneous notion that it is only through arduous performances of labor that value and importance are earned.
Troyli presents a new series of energetic paintings, referential to the titular large-scale multi-figure work which features a series of self-portrait avatars embedded within a succession of interwoven scenes, fashioned with a markedly classicist approach. Utilizing techniques formalized during the High Renaissance, underpainting and toning are central to the conception of each work, beginning with a burnt sienna foundation to establish values. In a timely evolution of his practice, Troyli expands the functionality and influence of his figures, imbuing them with new agency and establishing absurd narratives to consider the timeless conversations surrounding the preconceived notions of identity and value structures.
Through the presence of prop-like iconography and compositions reminiscent of community theater sets, Troyli positions his figures as performing commodities constantly on display. With the titular work, Troyli creates a human formicarium, a continued cycle of labor through which the characters are in a constant state of utility, yet their efforts are futile. The cars seemingly in motion will always remain suspended in traffic, the prop-plane carefully hanging from whisper thin wires will never reach its final destination, and the figures racing to extinguish a blazing fire will never achieve their goal. These strident efforts will forever be in flux.
The additional question Troyli poses is whether or not his subjects are aware of the carefully constructed mise en scene within which they are fixed, as well as the voyeurs they are intended to entertain. Merely spectacles for the audience to enjoy, each figure attempts to establish and perform their given narrative in a way that is just convincing enough to earn the audience’s admiration, with symbols of performance anxiety and vulnerability subtly imbedded within each work.
Presented at a time when the black body is at the height of socio-political discord, this series of work is not necessarily in response to contemporary unrest, but to an eternal debate surrounding the commodification of blackness. The images carefully draw viewers in with a comic sensibility, an entry point to critique the capitalist systems that relegate the black body to be valued as a highly visible yet somewhat disposable form of capital, a legacy of inequality established hundreds of years ago, that still persists today. Troyli’s novel approach creates a platform to engage in the larger conversations surrounding racial discord, black male stereotypes, and our own roles within these systems.
Image: Jake Troyli, Ready When You Are (2020)
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Opening Information: Limited capacity, masks required, and no appointment necessary. Appointments encouraged after opening day, open through Dec 19.
Kajahl's oil paintings merge icons from parallel histories along with his own constructed mythology prodding the viewer to re-examine mainstream historical paradigms. Re-appropriating African garments, ancient Roman military attire, and science fiction iconography, Kajahl references traditional Western portraiture, contemporary technology, and questions both the legitimacy of past records and the direction of future cultures.
Emerging within the 17th-19th centuries, Europe’s most prestigious sculptors and painters were commissioned to create depictions in the form of decorative objects known as the Blackamoor. During a time of colonial expansion and exploration, these objects satisfied and appeased the illusions of the elite and their desire to learn about the ‘specter’ residing in unknown territories, –who were these people and what did they look like?
Image: Kajahl, Huntress In Oasis (Astride A Crocodile), 2020
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Ebony G. Patterson blurs lines between painting, photography, sculpture, and collage, emphasizing the artworks’ materiality. She discusses her meanings and methods with CAM Chief Curator Wassan Al-Khudhairi.
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monqiuemelcohe is thrilled to present Ben Murray’s third exhibition with the gallery, If I Needed You
Enjoy a virtual exhibition walkthrough of If I Needed You thru Feb 13
Well, if I needed you Would you come to me Would you come to me And ease my pain?
- Townes Van Zandt (1972)
Operating between painting’s long history of image-making and the immediate vanishing of images in film, If I Needed You is in direct conversation with works created by pioneers of Avant Garde cinematography, such as Rose Lowder, Hollis Frampton, Joseph Cornell, and Steve McQueen.
While inspired by the oeuvres of other artists, this new body of work reflects a deconstructed vantage point of Murray’s life at the time of applying paint to canvas. Drawing its name from the celebrated Townes Van Zandt song, If I Needed You recalls Murray’s complicated relationship with the notion of home, surveying both the solace and suffering that can be experienced when strongly tethered to family histories and responsibilities. Layered marks embedded on both sides of raw unstretched muslin utilize a range of opacities, transparencies, and refractive hues, as if to composite a myriad of enigmatic moments through deposits of paint. Each mark, a record of the artist’s physical movements through his recollected history, while also paralleling durational movements in the films from which each work’s brilliance is inspired.
Selected for both their formal considerations as well as their structuralism, each experimental film is played on a continual loop in Murray’s studio, integrating within the artist’s vernacular and embracing the precarious relationship to time and brevity of the present. The ever-changing landscapes of Lowder’s Bouquet’s charges the works with transformational images that exist somewhere between urban and native ecological systems, echoing Murray’s coexistence between the city and the Indiana Duneland. While Cornell’s ‘Rose Hobart’ reflects Murray’s personal narrative related to the bonds and obligations of caring for family. They are active participants, destabilizing each image to create works that acknowledge interminability through the movement of light and form and the transition of imagery.
If I Needed You offers a window through which to reexamine and re-experience the different stages of Murray’s life as they relate to the inescapable pull of one’s past and homeland. Depicting fragments of intermittent images and memories stitched together, Murray’s captivating works bring significance to a collection of stages of development sustained all at once in past-present-future- tense.
Top image: Ben Murray, Garden I , 2020, acrylic on muslin, 83 x 102 in (210.8 x 259.1 cm)
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This talk is hosted in part by SOUTH SOUTH VEZA
Jake Troyli solo presentation on view thru March 7, 2021
View OVR here
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EXPO CHGO ONLINE | April 8 – 12, 2021
Nate Young
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moniquemeloche gallery is pleased to present How Far Between and Back, an exhibition of new works by Brittney Leeanne Williams. This is Williams’ first solo show with the gallery, following her participation in the summer 2019 group exhibition SHOW ME YOURS.
Williams’ figures are shapeshifters, each one represents a multitude of women: the artist, the mother, the daughter. The figures become architectural forms, yet also grounding landscape through which resonances of Williams’ childhood terrain in Southern California are captured in red planes.
In response to the classical Eurocentric depiction of the nude female form, Williams presents a series of nude figures in various states of transformation. Rather than a fixed pose – the seductive recline, the pudica, the contrapposto – each figure evokes fluidity, physical yet beset by emotional or psychological entanglements. The landscape and the body adjoin through the surreal; defying the boundaries of ground and figure, gravity and reason. Each scorching figure is grounded in a terrain of grief, the desolate topography presenting a manifestation of psychological and emotional experiences. Space in the work often evokes notions of internal psychological and spiritual distance from the external, physical world. The bridging of these interior and exterior distances is part of Williams’ investigation of the spiritual .
Rather than inviting an appraising gaze of the female form, Williams positions her figures as solid architectural structures, a vault through which to reimagine the body. Williams’ work draws on Zadie Smith’s reading of Rembrandt’s Seated Nude: “This is what a woman is: unadorned, after children and work and age and experience--These are the marks of living.” (On Beauty)Through her abstracted figure’s ever-changing form, Williams’ female becomes evocatively complex, more difficult to locate, lust after, or fully understand.
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she is land...
she is soil...
she is home...
she is nourishment...
she is time...
she is the wailing...
she is the memory...
she is the mourning...
moniquemeloche gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new large-scale tapestries and hand-cut paper works by Ebony G. Patterson. This is her fifth solo show with the gallery.
Emerging from the framework of her immersive post-colonial garden-like installations, Patterson’s recent practice further considers the rich, expansive possibilities of the garden – a space for life and death, a complex entanglement of race, gender, class, and violence.
Opulently embellished with a myriad of materials such as glitter, beading, and varied textiles, these new works hold images of figures in graceful sorrow, utilizing gestures of mourning as a lens through which to consider the measurement of women, vehicles weighted with the obligation not just to care for those lives that have been lost, but to demonstrate and lead others in the act of lamentation. The female form constitutes the site for life, nourishment, first love and joy, while also the impulse for grieving. Each form bravely assumes a posture of distress, the onerous emotional and physical labor required to conduct acts of devotion, the soul care that grants permission to confront historic and inherited traumas.
These complex gardens offer a space for beauty, burial, transformation, and conservation. There is a ubiquitous and undeniable heaviness in the materiality, the cumbersome burden bestowed on those who mourn echoes throughout the furrows of patterning and adornment. Figures are hauntingly woven into the landscapes, disappearing within the lush flora of each tangled tableau. Their headless torsos, decorated in luxurious and glistening wares, are positioned in various gestures of anguish. Disembodied limbs assume their own forms of silhouetted expression throughout the landscape; while those seldom few that remain animate evoke a suggestion of skin, of a life prior, a reminder of the violence inflicted upon the invisible, eternally reverberating through those figures who are left behind to grieve. Large embellished sculpted vultures gaze keenly from the floor upon the mourning figures on the wall. While rapacious in nature, there is much more to their scavenge; they’re integral forces within the greater stratification, they’re cleaners who tend to the remnants of physical form, an act of collective survival that honors the lost and cultivates the land.
Elaborate and beguiling, these works put forth an environment of ominous beauty and pervasive decay. They are spaces in which life and death coexist, where traumas are exposed and healed through the grace of the solemn mourners.
The gallery is excited to introduce Layo Bright (b. 1991, Lagos, Nigeria) who will present a series of new ceramic and pottery plaster portrait works in the gallery’s viewing room. A multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores the migrant experience throughout the African diaspora, Bright’s sculptures present visual compositions that address themes of culture, identity, family, and collective West African histories. Each distinctive work is cast from her own face, as well as her mother’s face, dipped in gold pigment and adorned with gele fabric which she carefully fastens in the style of a headwrap and Ghana-Must-Go bags sculpted into leaves. Together, Patterson and Bright operate in the figurative realm, using novel material interventions as a means to challenge notions of representation, visibility, and perception, arriving at new avenues for reflection regarding the formation and influence of legacy.
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Presented alongside the work of Karen Reimer and Antonius Bui, moniquemeloche introduces new work by Chicago based Nereida Patricia. A multidisciplinary artist and writer of Peruvian descent, Patricia mines Latinidad and Catholic symbolism, as well as feminist theory, to build new mythologies exploring autobiographical themes of history, trans poetics, and identity.
Image: Nereida Patricia, My Dreams Taught Me, 2021
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moniquemeloche gallery is pleased to present The Detour Is To Be Where We Are, an exhibition of intricate paper cutting works by Antonius Bui. This is Bui’s first solo show with the gallery.
Antonius Bui (b. 1992, Bronx, NY) is a queer, gender-nonbinary, Vietnamese American artist. Their intensive paper-cutting process is exceptionally meditative; each sheet of paper represents an archive of memories and oral histories, mirroring the intergenerational trauma that so many refugee communities are faced with.
Image: Antonius Bui with work
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moniquemeloche is pleased to present an exhibition of new textile and embroidery works by Karen Reimer.
The overall effect of Reimer's conceptual technique creates an optical meditation on the larger collapse of cultural foundations and our capacity to coexist within the earth’s ecosystems. Each complex embroidery utilizes found textiles, a physical manifestation of an ethical salvaging of materials; the materials have been dyed and re-dyed, reconfigured, and re-sewn, they represent the many iterations of life and the infinite potential for plurality of existence.
Image: Karen Reimer, Change in Average Temperature (°F), 2020
","type":"Event","state":"published","slug":"karen-reimer-sea-change","created_at":"2021-06-22 15:06:08.672277","updated_at":"2021-06-28 18:43:04.985547","excerpt":"","is_timeless":true,"organization_id":902,"highlighted":true,"opening_starts_at":null,"opening_ends_at":null,"searchable":"'2020':102B 'averag':99B 'capac':42B 'chang':4A,97B 'coexist':44B 'collaps':36B 'complex':51B 'conceptu':27B 'creat':29B 'cultur':38B 'dy':69B,73B 'earth':47B 'ecosystem':49B 'effect':23B 'embroideri':16B,52B 'ethic':61B 'exhibit':11B 'exist':93B 'f':101B 'found':54B 'foundat':39B 'imag':94B 'infinit':88B 'iter':83B 'karen':1A,19B,95B 'larger':35B 'life':85B 'mani':82B 'manifest':58B 'materi':64B,66B 'medit':32B 'moniquemeloch':5B 'new':13B 'optic':31B 'overal':22B 'physic':57B 'pleas':7B 'plural':91B 'potenti':89B 'present':9B 're':72B,77B 're-di':71B 're-sewn':76B 'reconfigur':74B 'reimer':2A,20B,25B,96B 'repres':80B 'salvag':62B 'sea':3A 'sewn':78B 'techniqu':28B 'temperatur':100B 'textil':14B,55B 'util':53B 'within':45B 'work':17B","thumbnail":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1721668512/p4lqudvpqrd7zgkkchlo.png","calendar":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/raw/upload/v1721669571/event_ics_1721669571427.ics","carousel":null,"category_name":"Exhibitions"},{"id":8049,"title":"Virtual Conversation Between Artists Karen Reimer and Antonius Bui","starts_at":"2021-07-17 13:00:00","ends_at":"2021-07-17 14:00:00","body":"
ARTISTS IN CONVERSATION
Join us for a virtual conversation between artists Karen Reimer and Antonius Bui,moderated by Karen Patterson, Director of Exhibitions and Curator at The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA
July 17, 2021
1:00 PM
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Destiny Belgrave (b. 1996, she/her) was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY and nurtured, with a Bajan and African American upbringing. Both cultures reside soundly within her, giving her a place to rest within the house of Blackness. She persevered and grew, through four fulfilling years of college. Eventually she graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2018 where she acquired a BFA in General Fine Arts, a concentration in Painting, some debt and beautiful bonds. Belgrave's work has taken trips to a few states and out of the country. Her work gets to be seen by many eyes and felt by many hearts. She is a mixed media whirlwind, almost always using papercuts as her primary medium.
Top Image: Destiny Belgrave, Bakin Nilla Wafers, Waiting for What's to Come, 2021, 36 x 24 inches
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Ariel Dannielle creates large-scale paintings that depict the daily experiences of young Black women. Drawing directly from her life, she believes in the importance of her artwork to provide new lenses through which Black womanhood can be represented, understood, and related to. Arielle Dannielle was born and raised in Atlanta, GA and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of West Georgia.
Top image: Ariel Dannielle, Party of Four, 2021
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Cruz explores the intersectionality of queerness and race through painting, sculpture, and performance. Focusing on queer, trans, and genderfluid communities of color, Cruz examines the violence perpetrated against their members, conveying his subjects both as specific individuals and as monumental signifiers for large and urgent systemic concerns.
Artists Bio: David Antonio Cruz is a multidisciplinary artist and a Professor of the Practice in Painting and Drawing at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. Cruz received a BFA in painting from Pratt Institute and an MFA from Yale University.
Cruz explores the intersectionality of queerness and race through painting, sculpture, and performance. Focusing on queer, trans, and genderfluid communities of color, Cruz examines the violence perpetrated against their members, conveying his subjects both as specific individuals and as monumental signifiers for large and urgent systemic concerns.
Using a vast trove of images mined from the internet, including the personal social media accounts of his subjects, Cruz brings these individuals out of the shadows and into the light. He inserts these individuals’ likenesses into lush, sensuous compositions directly inspired by the aspirational aesthetic of luxury and fashion, creating a dissonance that critically elevates his black and brown subjects while also emphasizing the extreme injustice of their plights.
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No appointments necessary, but masks are mandatory
Dan Gunn is an artist, writer, and educator in Chicago. He received an MFA in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007 where he is now an Adjunct Assistant Professor. He was awarded residencies at the Wassaic Project (upcoming 2021), University of Arkansas (2019), Anderson Ranch Art Center (2018), Vermont Studio Center (2015), and The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2012).
Gunn’s work relies on the imagery, aesthetics, and craft traditions of the American Midwestern vernacular and investigates their ideological function in politics and for the formulation of male subjectivity. His practice mines materials for their unconscious associations and emotional potential. Woodworking and ceramics are used for their historical connection to Midwestern mythologies in an attempt to construct a counterfactual folk art, one not riddled with nostalgia but more accurate to the current state of affairs.
","type":"Event","state":"published","slug":"dan-gunn-of-the-land-behind-them","created_at":"2021-12-13 21:12:19.642618","updated_at":"2022-01-06 16:32:27.156973","excerpt":"","is_timeless":true,"organization_id":902,"highlighted":false,"opening_starts_at":"2022-01-08 11:00:00","opening_ends_at":"2022-01-08 18:00:00","searchable":"'2007':40B '2012':80B '2015':71B '2018':67B '2019':62B '2021':58B 'accur':150B 'adjunct':46B 'aesthet':88B 'affair':156B 'american':94B 'anderson':63B 'appoint':8B 'arkansa':61B 'art':35B,65B,142B 'artist':18B 'assist':47B 'associ':118B 'attempt':136B 'award':51B 'behind':6A 'center':66B,70B 'ceram':124B 'chicago':23B,38B 'connect':130B 'construct':138B 'counterfactu':140B 'craft':90B 'current':153B 'dan':1A,14B 'educ':21B 'emot':120B 'folk':141B 'formul':107B 'function':101B 'gunn':2A,15B,81B 'histor':129B 'ideolog':100B 'imageri':87B 'institut':36B 'investig':98B 'land':5A 'male':109B 'mandatori':13B 'mask':11B 'materi':114B 'mfa':27B 'midwestern':95B,132B 'mine':113B 'mytholog':133B 'necessari':9B 'nostalgia':147B 'one':143B 'paint':29B,77B 'polit':103B 'potenti':121B 'practic':112B 'professor':48B 'project':56B 'ranch':64B 'receiv':25B 'reli':84B 'resid':52B 'riddl':145B 'school':32B,75B 'sculptur':79B 'skowhegan':74B 'state':154B 'studio':69B 'subject':110B 'tradit':91B 'unconsci':117B 'univers':59B 'upcom':57B 'use':126B 'vermont':68B 'vernacular':96B 'wassaic':55B 'woodwork':122B 'work':83B 'writer':19B","thumbnail":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1721668533/anek8wovvdrqswnboryo.jpg","calendar":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/raw/upload/v1721669592/event_ics_1721669592309.ics","carousel":null,"category_name":"Exhibitions"},{"id":8906,"title":"Jake Troyli: Slow Clap","starts_at":"2022-02-26 12:00:00","ends_at":"2022-04-09 12:00:00","body":"
Jake Troyli investigates the construction of otherness and the commodification of the Black/Brown body, confronting and exploring labor capitalism and sweat equity as a demonstration of value. He makes energetic paintings, often featuring a self-portrait or avatar of himself embedded in engaging scenes, with a markedly classicist approach. Utilizing techniques formalized during the High Renaissance, underpainting and toning are central to the conception of each work, beginning with a burnt sienna foundation to establish values. In a timely evolution of his practice, Troyli expands the functionality and influence of his figures, imbuing them with new agency and establishing absurd narratives to consider the timeless conversations surrounding the preconceived notions of identity and value structures. Through the presence of prop-like iconography and compositions reminiscent of community theater sets, Troyli positions his figures as performing commodities constantly on display.
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Join artist Jake Troyli and curator Zoe Lukov for a gallery talk about his solo show SLOW CLAP at moniquemeloche and her group exhibition, Skin in the Game, opening during EXPO Chicago and including work by Troyli.
proof of vaccination or negative COVID test within 72 hours required upon entry
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Open as part of EXPO CHICAGO's Art After Hours
On view: Jake Troyli: Slow Clap
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(un)time reveals a series of new drawings by Nate Young that are a continuation of works which stem from a shared source image–a photograph of Young posing with his horse, based on his memory of a photograph of his great grandfather also posing with his horse–referencing the story of his equestrian escape from North Carolina to Pennsylvania. Dealing with notions of remembrance, identity, and death, the artist recreates this imagery as an attempt to access the past in the present, thinking about how images and memories behave in the presence of (un)time.
“Untime” is a framework for the absence of time, and in this context, its relation to Blackness and its immeasurable, permanent condition of being that is dictated by an endless proximity to death (Murillo 54). Each image depicting the artist and his horse and/or his ancestor and their horse offers an ontological glimpse into the temporal distance (or overlap) between two identities. The figures, with their haunting presence, each shift slightly, yet appear frozen against a vast cosmic backdrop, which the artist carefully renders in graphite. They subsist in various distortions–warping, duplicating, blurring–a visualization of Black atemporality, or Black untime, which is dictated by persistent time loss, lapse and loops, a result of the indeterminate negation of Blackness in history, politics, and culture (55). Some figures recede and disappear entirely through the use of vellum, a semi opaque material which Young deliberately employs to obscure their appearance. Like trying to recall an old memory, the figures’ relationship to the viewer is constantly shifting, suggesting an unknowable relationship to time. In what appears to be a sequence of various stages of erasure, we are left in this simultaneous in-between state of never having existed, or, not being while existing (60).
Taken together, (un)time is a meditation on personal and collective memory within the historical framework of Black erasure. By repeatedly rendering and recuperating his personal memory, Young underwrites the notion that the past only exists because we reproduce it.
Nate Young (b.1981 Phoenixville, PA, lives Chicago, IL) received his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2009 and BA from Northwestern College in 2004. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2009 and was invited back as a Dean of the residency in 2015. That same year, Young exhibited his first solo show with moniquemeloche, followed by a solo booth at Artissima, Italy, and a duo booth at UNTITLED Miami. Since then, Young’s work has been shown at Bridge Projects, Los Angeles, CA (2021); Museum of Contemporary Arts, Chicago, IL (2021); De Pree Art Gallery, Holland, MI (2020); The Driehaus Museum, Chicago, IL (2020); Front Triennial at the Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, OH (2018); Visual Arts Center, Richmond Virginia (2017); and The Studio Museum, Harlem, NY (2012).His work is in the permanent collections of DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, IL; Fabric Workshop Museum, Philadelphia, PA; Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C.
Image: Nate Young, In Black Untime No. 3, 2022 (detail)
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Join artist Nate Young and scholar-educator Romi Crawford (PhD) for a gallery talk about his solo show (un)time at moniquemeloche. A closing reception to celebrate the exhibition's last day will follow from 4–6pm.
proof of vaccination or negative COVID test within 72 hours required upon entry
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It’s a story that happens to you once and then lives in you forever……
Tenderness is a choice, it’s what you choose when you’ve suffered enough……
Because everywhere you look, there are stories telling themselves……
There is nothing harder to let go of than an already gone thing……
Love is, after all, what fights for us so that we can hold our peace……
–selections from the novel Vegabond by Eloghosa Osunde
moniquemeloche is pleased to present Cheryl Pope, Variations on a Love Theme. This is the artist’s fifth solo show with the gallery. Variations on a Love Theme presents a series of new works that feature the artist’s unique needle punched wool technique to create richly textured and colorful textile paintings. Referencing the familiar repertoire of the French Post-Impressionist, Intimist, and Imagist paintings, Pope recreates deeply personal recollections that cinematically compose the silent complexities of beautiful and tragic oscillations between love and loss in our everyday lives.
Spanning both galleries, the works on view feature interior scenes of couples, portraits of women, and depictions of motherhood. At once autobiographical and fictional, the paintings offer a unique perspective into the artist’s memoirs. Images of couples are drawn from memory, referencing the artist’s own relationships and moments of disconnect, anxiety, and desire, while beach scenes depicting a mother and child accentuate a tender stillness of caregiving. Portraits of women–often friends of the artist–reveal an orchestra of silence depicted through the subjects’ inward gaze and the psychology of interior spaces. In these scenes, the figures exist in a nest of choreography–a rotating stage of mystery, tragedy, and poetry of day-to-day living with feelings of presence and absence woven throughout.
Through material intervention, Pope employs a sense of magical realism where the foreground and background are collapsed into patterns and basic shapes, blurring the lines between fantasy and reality. Taking inspiration from Les Nabis artists, the works seek to create an art of suggestion and emotion, and calls forth the malleability of experience, memory, and storytelling. Variations on a Love Theme is a telling and a withholding of the real and the imagined where memories of love and loss are both fact and fiction. By placing the viewers in a surveillance perspective–simultaneously inside and outside the figurative frame–we become implicated in the artist’s memories, bearing witness to the complexities of love and words left unsaid.
This exhibition will travel to the Ulrich Museum of Art, KS August 25–December 3, 2022. A digital catalogue will be published with an essay by Ksenya Gurshtein.
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moniquemeloche is delighted to announce the representation of Portland-based artist Arvie Smith, who will have his first solo exhibition in Chicago this fall, and will be included in the gallery's booth at EXPO Chicago. Please join us in welcoming Arvie Smith!
In his artistic career spanning over 4 decades, Smith transforms the history of oppressed and stereotyped segments of the American experience into lyrical two-dimensional master works. His paintings are commonly of psychological images revealing deep sympathy for the dispossessed and marginalized members of society in an unrelenting search for beauty, meaning, and equality. Smith’s work reflects powerful injustices and the will to resist and survive. His memories of growing up in the South add to his awareness of the legacy that the slavery of African American’s has left with all Americans today. His intention is to solidify the memory of atrocities and oppression so they will never be forgotten nor duplicated.
Arvie Smith (b.1938, Houston) lives and works in Portland, OR. He holds an MFA from the Hoffberger School of Painting, Maryland Institute College of Art and a BFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art. Smith studied at Il Bisonte and SACI in Florence in 1983. He has had recent solo exhibitions at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Salem, OR; Jordan Schnitzer Museum, Portland, OR; and Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, Portland, OR. His work has been included in group exhibitions at UTA Art Space, Beverly Hills, CA; Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; and Upfor Gallery, Portland, OR. Smith’s work is held in the Permanent Collections of the Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; Delaware Museum of Art, Wilmington, DE; Reginald F. Lewis Museum, Baltimore, MD; Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Portland, OR; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon, Eugene, OR; and Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art, Asbury, NJ.
Arvie Smith will continue to be represented by Galerie Myrtis in Baltimore, MD, who has been invited by the European Cultural Center to include his work as part of their group exhibition The Afro-Futurist Manifesto: Blackness Reimagined during the 2022 Venice Biennale.
Image: Arvie Smith, Quick Step, 2019
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Kajahl resurrects objects that are lying dormant in historical archives. He endlessly scours and sifts through books, online images, and visits museums to gather source material. He takes these finds from his excavations and hybridizes entities that eventually become grandiose figures. Although the characters he constructs belong to a multiplicity of time periods, locations, and cultures, they foreground the forgotten past and reanimate minor artifacts of history into what amounts to a transformative assemblage. For Kajahl, painting is a place where we can traverse different cultures and temporalities to challenge our ideas about how we see ourselves and others. His work questions the boundaries of identity by treating painting as a site where radical mixtures, overlooked history and speculative fiction come into play. His paintings take us to a time before race existed by opening to the chaos and complexity, expanding the periphery around how we perceive ourselves in the past and present day.
Kajahl was born and raised in Santa Cruz, CA. In the fall of 2008, he received a BFA from San Francisco State University and spent his final year studying at the Accademia di Belle Arti Firenze, Italy. In the spring of 2012, he received his MFA from Hunter College in New York City. Currently, Kajahl is an Adjunct Faculty member at the New York Academy of Art. His work is in the permanent collections of The Studio Museum, Harlem, NY, the 21C Museum, and the Dean Collection.
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Layo Bright (b. Lagos, Nigeria) is a sculptor whose works explore themes of migration, inheritance, legacy and identity through hybrid portraits, textiles, and mixed media. Concerned with mining personal archives and collective experiences she interrogates how materials shape perception, culture and politics. She draws inspiration from plant forms, family and ancestry in creating sculptural works that merge notions of nurture and legacy. Working with a range of materials such as glass, clay, wood and textiles, these forms mirror fragile yet complex relationships with the personal, natural and built environment.
Working with ubiquitous plastic checkered bags often linked with migrants around the world, Bright juxtaposes the material with crushed glass, addressing overlooked histories and notions of class. In fusing these materials, she considers suppressed histories and the inevitability of migration in the current global climate.
Bright received her LL.B (Hons.) from Babcock University (2014), was called to the Nigerian Bar Association (2015) and received her MFA in Fine Art (Hons.) from the Parsons School of Design (2018). She is the recipient of honors and awards including the UrbanGlass Winter Scholarship Award (2021), UrbanGlass Winter Scholarship Award (2020), the International Sculpture Center’s 2018 Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award (2018); and the Beyoncé Formation Finalist Scholarship (2017). She has exhibited work internationally in exhibitions including Woman to Woman, Bode Projects, Berlin, Germany; House of Crowns, Phillips, NY, USA; To Heal and Protect, Welancora Gallery, NY, USA; I Am Not A Goddess...Unless I Say I Am, Mike Adenuga Centre, Lagos, Nigeria; Something About Us, Anthony Gallery, IL, USA; A Chance Encounter, Parts & Labor, NY, USA; Migration(s) and Meanings in Art, Meyerhoff Gallery at MICA, MD, USA; Maid in Nigeria, Untitled AWCA, Lagos, Nigeria; Through Her Eye, Mana Contemporary, IL; Carry Over: New Voices from the Global African Diaspora, Smack Mellon, NY, USA; Lubeznik Center for the Arts, Michigan City, IN, among others.
She is currently partaking in the Tyler School of Glass Residency in Philadelphia, PA. Previous residencies include Art Cake Residency in Brooklyn, NY; Nxthvn Fellowship in New Haven, CT; Triangle, Brooklyn, NY; Flux Factory, Queens, NY; The Studios at Mass MoCA, North Adams, MA; Tri-tryagain Studio Residency, Brooklyn, NY; International Studio Center Sculpture Residency at Grounds for Sculpture, Hamilton Township, NJ.
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moniquemeloche is pleased to present Lavar Munroe, Sometime Come to Someplace. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Munroe, a Bahamian artist, works with acrylic and mixed media on unstretched canvas, often incorporating sentimental objects and materials such as beads, jewelry, ceramic tiles, glass, textiles, chicken hides, and feathers. His work is described as a hybrid medium between painting and relief sculpture and reflects the environment where he grew up. Munroe was born in the impoverished, stigmatized and often marginalized Grants Town community in Nassau, Bahamas. In 2004, he moved to the United States at the age of 21. Drawing from memory and local folklore, Munroe’s work uses bold visual language to map a personal journey of trauma and survival.
In his new series, Munroe centers on their recent travel to Zimbabwe, exploring the cultural similarities between the Caribbean and southern Africa. Sometime Come to Someplace, a line spoken by Dorothy in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, references the notion of a journey and feeling at home in a foreign place. Using the land of Oz as a conceptual framework, Munroe considers the parallels between both countries as places that are rich in social, political, and mythological histories. The artist’s material exploration and unique visual language viscerally captures his experience of late nights spent under the stars, conversing and dancing to the familiar sounds of steel drums around a crackling fire. Fire–often the night’s only source of light and heat–represents the collective energy of the subjects who have been brought together by the element, their bodies in musical harmony with the cosmos. The tonal hues of bright orange, pink and fire red are juxtaposed against the subdued color palette of green, gray, blue, and purple; a landscape influenced by the blackness of vast plateaus energetic with nocturnal wildlife. In contrast to Munroe’s previous works, the paintings are contained within the confines of the canvas, like doorways which allow viewers to walk from one space to the next. For Munroe, home is here and elsewhere, an elusive double entity that is unbound yet inextricably linked to the uprooted self. Taken together, the works on view embody the journey, magic, love, and celebration of escape through fantastical and dreamlike imagery. Sometime Come to Someplace is a story about finding friendship away from home, courage, and human flourishing against the odds.
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moniquemeloche is pleased to present Maia Cruz Palileo: Days Later, Down River, the artist’s third solo show with the gallery. Palileo is a multidisciplinary artist whose paintings, installations, sculptures, and drawings navigate themes of migration and the persistence of tacit knowledge in the face of assimilation. The works on view map an archival, geological, and spiritual topography of the Palileo family’s homeland—the Philippines—and are inspired by their recent residency at the University of Michigan, which houses one of the largest collections of Filipino artifacts outside of the country. Building off their past research at the Newberry Library in Chicago and their personal family archive, Palileo explores the Bentley Historical Library’s photographic archive of Frank C. Gates, a professor of botany at the University of the Philippines (1912-1915) and objects from the Museum of Anthropological Archaeology’s Philippines collection. By incorporating research from these various archives, their paintings recontextualize stories, portraits, and images to resuscitate and remove from the exploitative gaze of the ethnographic image.
While at the archive, Palileo discovered photo albums of Mount Makiling and Mount Banahaw, dormant volcanoes in the Laguna region of the Philippines. Each mountain is a birthplace of legend; Mount Makiling is the home of the protective spirit Makiling, whose legend was written about by national hero José Rizal, and Banahaw is a sacred mountain for spiritual pilgrimage. These albums served as a portal into the artist’s familial relation to this land, making connections to artifacts in their personal collection of family photographs, blessed amulets, and oral histories. As with volcanoes, they propose history as a site where perceived extinction and dormancy can be uncovered to reveal activity and potential. Memorializing the legacy of invisible histories, dense layers of foliage reveal mysterious figures shrouded by overgrowth and shadow. Parasitic liana vines further complicate the canvas. Native to tropical forests, these rapidly expanding woody vines are increasingly shady, choking rainforest trees, and competing for resources. In contrast, when Rizal writes of the mountain forests in Mariang Makiling he describes, \"Tall trees with straight and mossy trunks, among whose branches the vines weave most beautiful laces embroidered with flowers.” Palileo renders the liana’s proliferation, interlacing the visible and invisible through layers of paint, echoing the selective means through which history is presented.
Translating these documents into a creative medium, Palileo cuts out archival images and reassembles them into panoramas where figures occupy mirrored and layered landscapes, offering new dimensions that intertwine ancestry, flora, and fauna. Transferring collaged black-and-white photographs into a vibrant palette, they pollinate a reimagined terrain in paint—an act of becoming where brush strokes render their homeland anew with self-possession and agency. At the center of the exhibition is a banig, a century-old woven mat loaned from the Museum of Anthropological Archaeology; an object used as a place for daily rest and gathering. Surrounded by projections of tree canopies and hand-sculpted clay figures, their foraged memories and histories honor the Filipino heritage that endured during the colonial era. Days Later, Down River uses installation, painting, projection, and ceramic to destabilize fixed narratives from the imperial occupation of the country, reframing artifacts into imagined sacred realms for their ancestors, and inviting viewers the chance to walk into Palileo’s imaginative spaces.
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Their works are a panorama of metamorphosis, portraits that bear witness to whole beings in their myriad complexities which are carved in precious detail to communicate each person’s unique journey of breaking and becoming—rejecting stereotypes, shame, and internalized racism experienced by the AAPI (Asian American Pacific Islander) community by depicting scenes of intimacy, sexuality, and emotional release with nuance, sanctuary, and, in moments, ecstatic eruption.
Between both galleries, Bui interlaces personal subjects with archival objects, featuring images of friends, relatives, artists, porn stars, historic figures, and deceased creatives. Among these portraits are Nicholas Oh and Ayoung Yu, artists Bui has collaborated with for many performances, and Anthony Veasna So, the queer Cambodian-American writer—individuals who provide Bui with a sense of possibility and guide them towards future understandings of themself. Other works present images of exploded vessels, fragments of ceramic vases from Asian art collections that Bui activates to confront Western institution’s historic practice of siloing Southeast Asian cultural narratives by emphasizing porcelain, resulting in an overgeneralized Orientalist perspective of the past. Bui shatters these vessels and reassembles them, tapping into the messiness, tensions, and trappings of visibility. In homage to each subject, Bui likens the hand-cut works to Joss paper: a ceremonial parchment burned as an ancestral offering in pan-Asian culture. To them, the act of burning symbolizes “the delicate dance between negative and positive space, presence and absence, and how so much of our formulation is through what we reject or take away.” Instead, they propose “purging societal projections of who we should be, burning away expectations, unlearning our ideas of gender and sexuality.”
Bui creates each work from a single sheet of paper. First, with their instinctive hand, they render a composition on the page’s verso in colored pencil and marker. When the drawing is finished, the surface reveals a cartography of patterns, outlines, and silhouettes which they then incise with a scalpel until the image is revealed on the paper’s front side. With each work, the process of cutting is a means of engaging with their subject, the technical demands of the work offering them deep time to reflect on their relationships—presently or posthumously—and emulate intricacies of their kaleidoscopic lives. Each muse is settled in an interior space such as their home or studio, or an imagined landscape that incorporates details from their upbringing and heritage with natural elements—a garden of Eden of their own creation. Once the cut-out is complete, they glaze the paper with black, red, or blue paint, a palette that encourages the works to stand out from the wall and cast a phantasmagoric shadow. While Bui’s first solo show featured untreated paper, this series plays with symbolic connections to color, such as blue painted porcelain or traditional red paper cut-outs displayed for good luck during Lunar New Year. Ambitious in their scale, these works physically and conceptually hold space, portraying Bui’s monumental subjects in all of their divinity—a latticework of queer representation that celebrates their loved ones as they evolve over the course of their lives.
The exhibition is named after a verse from Franny Choi’s poem Orientalism Part I which reads: \"There are many ways to hold water / without being called a vase. / To drink all the history / until it is your only song.” In their family’s native Vietnamese, the word nước is a homonym meaning both water and country. Honoring the term’s fluidity, Bui considers how water, and by extension the ocean, is a vessel of human movement for diasporas, migrants, and refugees, referencing their own family separating from their motherland and coming to call a new country home. Like precious fragments from a shipwreck, Bui is interested in the beauty and suffering which inform a multi-conscious existence, aspiring to find a more honest dynamic between interiority and exteriority—releasing a burst of joy from the sum of their parts.
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Agada’s surrealist paintings of disembodied figures and dream-like grounds reference identity and the transformation of the postmodern human, where both time and space produce complex bodies of difference. Overlapping thepast and present, the other and the self-reflect the ambiguity of our identity within post-structuralist theory. Agada’s work has been inspired by the postcolonial writings of Homi Bhabha, Edward Said and literary works by fellow Nigerian authors Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. His work is a continuous reflection of his investigative approach to history and critical theory with regards to the examination of the culture of dominance through globalization.
Agada (b. 1992, Lagos, Nigeria) received his MFA in Painting and Drawing at theSchool of the Art Institute of Chicago (2023) and a DVM at Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta (2018). He has had recent national and international exhibitions with Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Berlin, Germany (2023); African Artist’s Foundation, Lagos, Nigeria (2021); and Gallery 1957, Accra, Ghana. He will be presenting a solo show at Monique Meloche Gallery in 2023.
He has also been a recipient of various awards and fellowship including: The James Nelson Raymond Fellowship Award (2023); Dean’s Grant, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL (2023); Janet and Russell Doubleday Award at The Art Students League of New York (2022); The Helen Frankenthaler Award at SAIC in (2022); George and Ann Siegel Award, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL (2021); Global Warming International Art Prize, New York, New York (2020). Agada currently lives and works in Chicago, IL.
Image: Luke Agada, Arms, Feet, and Fitful Dreams, 2023. 72 x 96 in. Oil on canvas
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Monique Meloche Gallery is pleased to announce Sanford Biggers' exhibition, Back to the Stars, the artist’s fourth solo presentation with the gallery. The exhibition showcases new artworks from his ever-evolving Chimera and Codex series, which juxtaposes figurative marble sculptures and quilt compositions. These new works bring aesthetic, poetic, and social insights to the intertwining stories embedded in material culture. Biggers’ creative processes recognize and conflate syncretic impulses between aesthetic expressions from seemingly disparate societies and histories, transforming them into rigorously formal and conceptual new works.
Biggers’ Chimera sculptures combine various African and European masks, busts, and figures that explore historical depictions of the body and their subsequent myths, narratives, archetypes, perceptions, and power. Back to the Stars will feature two new cast marble busts adorned and enigmatically veiled with hand-painted elements. Biggers’ polychromatic intervention disrupts the historically revered iconic white marble canon, questioning the nature of authenticity, authority, and origin just as early 20th-century documentation of African objects were “blackwashed” or memorialized without their original paint and raffia decoration restored. Intrigued by recent scholarship on the historical “whitewashing” of classical Greco-Roman sculpture and its convergence with the “blackwashing” of various African sculptural objects in the early twentieth century, Biggers revitalizes the ancient tradition of polychromy and challenges the associated cultural and aesthetic assumptions connected to the source materials while acknowledging the often inconsistent provenances of these objects.
The marbles will be shown alongside a new work in his kaleidoscopic Codex series—a large-scale quiltwork composed from stitched geometric swatches stretched across a plywood armature to form a three-dimensional object that resembles folded paper. These origami-like quilts map a constellation of references from Japanese woodblock prints to Gee’s Bend quilts, from Duchamp ready-mades to signposts on the Underground Railroad. Having collected quilts over the course of many years, in this series Biggers’ aesthetic considerations of palette and pattern illuminate conceptual considerations of syncretism and appropriation.
Back to the Stars rejects fixed narratives of quilt and marble traditions. Instead, Biggers’ new works gracefully traverse the intricate layers woven into their composition, embracing the balance between the masculine and feminine, resilience and fragility, eternal and ephemeral. Through this nuanced and conceptual patchwork, the artist ushers his practice into the future, revealing the inherent essence of each piece as it harmonizes with the passage of time.
Sanford Biggers’ work is an interplay of narrative, perspective and history that speaks to current social, political, and economic happenings, while also examining the contexts that bore them. His diverse practice positions him as a collaborator with the past through explorations of often overlooked cultural and political narratives from American history. Working with antique quilts that echo rumors of their use as signposts on the Underground Railroad, he engages these legends and contributes to this narrative by drawing and painting directly onto them. Further complicating the work, Biggers deconstructs the quilts and rebuilds them into 2D quilt paintings and 3D abstract quilt sculptures. Within his 2017 Residency at the American Academy Fellow in Rome, Biggers began manufacturing marble sculptures called “Chimeras”, creating hybridized forms that combine and juxtapose historical subjects to give them new alternative meanings. In response to the ongoing occurrences of police brutality against Black Americans, the “BAM” Series is composed of wooden African sculptures dipped in wax and ‘resculpted’ ballistically. As creative director and keyboardist, he fronts Moon Medicin, a multimedia concept band that straddles visual art and music with performances staged against a backdrop of curated sound effects and video.
Biggers (b.1970, Los Angeles, CA) received a BA from Morehouse College, Atlanta, and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he sits on the Board of Governors. He was a former Associate Professor at Columbia University's Visual Arts program. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1998). Notable solo-exhibitions include Salina Art Center Kansas, Salina, KS (2022); Chazen Museum, Madison, WI (2022); Speed Museum, Louisville, KY (2022); The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C. (2021); The California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2021); and The Bronx Museum, Bronx, NY (2020). Notable group exhibitions include Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, CO (2023); Lubeznik Center for the Arts Michigan City, IN (2022); Rudolph Tegner Museum, Dronningmølle, Denmark (2022); Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN (2022); Cleveland Art Museum of Art and Design, Cleveland, OH (2022); Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR (2022); Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn Museum, NY(2021); Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA (2021); North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC (2021); Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY (2021); Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, TX (2021); and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2020).
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moniquemeloche is pleased to present Multihyphenate, a solo exhibition by Candida Alvarez and the artist’s second show with the gallery. The exhibition presents a series of new large-scale paintings on linen, intimate paintings on dinner napkins, and framed drawings. Alvarez’s complex and colorful works delicately balance abstraction and representation, interweaving the artist’s daily observations with material life. Multihyphenate represents a mashup of how experiences are accumulated and what stays with us, visualizing our evolving histories and the shapes that come from the world.
The exhibition’s origin begins with Alvarez’s mother, who has been living in the US since Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico. In a long-standing practice of capturing the world around her, Alvarez takes photos of anything interesting that catches her eye. Among her large inventory of inspiration are printed iPhone photos of her mother sitting: at a restaurant (a particular pose caught her eye), in her home (the sunlight hitting her cheek), at the doctor (the way she dressed that day), etc., which span her studio walls. Sitting, a gesture that the artist’s 93-year-old mother frequently performs, lingers with Alvarez as she recalls Raphael’s The Madonna of the Chair, one of the first paintings she remembers seeing as a child, a coveted reproduction on her mother’s well-worn bible. Watching her mother through a photo lens, the shape of the relationship builds into a formal image and the photos become reassembled into paintings; Alvarez’s mother embodied. Sitting allows one to linger, which the artist finds comfort in, granting space to discover something mysteriously wonderful. The studio hosts a blooming orchid plant, an avocado tree, and beyond that, the tranquil rural Michigan landscape on which the artist’s studio sits, eliciting memories of the vista from her late father’s workshop in Puerto Rico. This new body of work was birthed in the studio and continued through two residencies at the LUMA Foundation in Arles, France in April and at Skowhegan in Maine this summer, marking Alvarez’s return as a mentor 42 years after her first residency there. Together, these bits and pieces become the compositional building blocks for her paintings and drawings, hybrid spaces ripe with color and pattern.
Amongst a series of distinct large kaleidoscopic paintings, ten small works on Yupo paper hold space for drawing. Titled Arles Drawings, the works capture the artist’s time in the south of France. For Alvarez, drawing is essential, it is every day, it is the first thing you learn as a child, and it always informs her paintings. Drawing is the artist’s starting point–direct, gestural, primal, mark making. It affords the freedom to use line as a beginning point, from which color interjects. Drawing concretizes and then slips away as color fills the atmosphere, a call and response shaped by intuition. Accumulations of moves turn into visual material, a language of shapes and colors. Shape is metamorphosized from light, sound, a plant, a body, a sculpture, a mother, a daughter, Raphael’s Madonna, orchids, the French countryside; it’s all those things and not just one thing which become her work. It’s the multihyphenate personality of the painter and the drawer which gives permission for these collisions to happen in a way the artist can control.
Multihyphenate showcases Alvarez’s methodology, always flexible, imaginative, and fueled by an unrelenting curiosity with the world around her. It’s the living part, the love part, the trusting part, the multiples that accumulate together to shape the way we see the world. Moreover, it’s simply allowing painting to speak on its own terms, away from the hierarchy of what painting should be about, it’s the possibility to create portraiture through abstraction. For Alvarez, it’s living palimpsest.
Image: Candida Alvarez, Skowhegan #4, 2023. Flashe paint on cotton, 19 x 19 in
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moniquemeloche is pleased to present David Shrobe: Natural Sovereignty, the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Through assemblage, collage, drawing, and painting, the works on view draw from oral histories, family portraits, and online archives to present the vitality of family life among Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities. Pulling from the past to project new possibilities of the future, Shrobe considers the backyard and garden as an extension of the home and a site of sustenance, survival, and resistance.
Natural Sovereignty is the last body of work created in the artist’s longtime studio in Harlem, NY. Next month, the artist will vacate his studio in the apartment that has housed his family for nearly a century. Slices of the domestic materialize through found objects such as tabletops, doors, molding, mirror frames, wood flooring, and textiles. The artist collects these objects over long periods of time–often found within the surrounding blocks near his building–filling every corner of his studio. In a process driven by intuition, Shrobe’s labor-intensive practice reflects the cultural tapestry woven by his ancestral predecessors. Layered hand carved wood panels frame the narrative and create the push and pull of exterior and interior realities. The figures within Shrobe’s liminal spaces seamlessly integrate with their natural and cosmic environments, depicting everyday family life amongst growers and traditional healers. As we glimpse into the landscape of flora and fauna, we see the backyard as a sanctuary, a space of work, pride, wellness, and leisure. For the artist, they are spaces for self-governance, community, and legacy; worlds that return us to the natural sovereignty of the human being.
Inspired by bell hooks’ reflection on photography, several of Shrobe’s assemblage paintings are drawn from turn of the century photographs of Black and Indigenous Americans, representing autonomy for people of color and a declaration of their presence. The camera and photography, as described by hooks, offered African Americans a way to empower themselves through counterhegemonic representation and offered the possibility of immediate intervention. In Art on My Mind: Visual Politics, hooks writes: “photography has been and is central to that aspect of decolonization that calls us back to the past and offers a way to reclaim and renew life-affirming bonds.” Shrobe’s works serve as declarations, depicting families in their complete humanity, in harmony with the natural environment. While the artist also recalls his own family photos as a starting point, his subjects as well as the materials used undergo a transformation, becoming generative of new meanings and inviting a set of associations and experiences of the familiar or uncanny in each work. Female figures in the works often represent the women in his family, while other characters embody the artist with similar tendencies or dispositions yet exist in another reality.
Natural Sovereignty showcases the artist’s process of image making and its essential connection to pictorial genealogies. By rendering his figures in nature, Shrobe suggests that our complete freedom survives within our inherent connection to each other and the natural world; that we may find oneness by planting our feet in the ground.
David Shrobe’s work is currently included in the group exhibition Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage, which originated at the Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN from September 15–December 23, 2023 and travels to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX from February 18–May 12, 2024, followed by the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., from July 6–September 22, 2024.
Image: David Shrobe. Pure Light Energy (nature within), 2023. 30 x 27 in
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first solo exhibition with the gallery. Renowned for her monumental fabric sculptures and abstract paintings of calligraphy and collage, Smith’s wide-ranging practice operates at the convergence of consumption and spiritual sanctuary, balancing forces and revealing connections across space, time, race, gender and place to suggest the possibility of new worlds. Inspired by as the artist refers, her “magical childhood experiences” (from chanting with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, to tagging in a graffiti crew in Baltimore, to attending fashion shows in Paris and New York with her mother), Smith’s practice expresses the wonder, connections and ecstatic moments, that she as a Black woman, finds within textiles, keepsakes and sayings exchanged between her family, friends and travels.
METAMORPH refers to a process of changing form and nature. For the past 20 years, Smith has engaged ideas of transformation through material processes that include hand-dying and bundling gently loved garments into totemic bale sculptures, as well as exploring gesture and movement in her kaleidoscopic paintings and performances. Smith’s exhibition will debut a series of new large-scale collaged paintings incorporating fabric, brocades and embroideries that bring forth a sensual experience of color, light, memory, breath and motion. Reflecting on the complex networks of everyday life, fabric represents the connective tissue linking global histories of trade and consumption to the expanded language of how we describe our place in the universe within the fabric of time. For Smith, fabric and clothing are multimodal and self-referential materials in their ability to shape-shift, reveal and hold meaning. Through the ritual of bundling and tying cloth elements, Smith commemorates the ways we \"adorn, wrap and shroud ourselves to symbolize our belonging and articulate the value of our existence.\" The artist has amassed a sizable collection of textiles and objects throughout her lifetime. Pattern and color carry both cultural and personal meaning to a place or time, to spiritual significance and to shared histories.
The exhibition further explores metamorphosis through the inclusion of collaged elements and large, sweeping gestures that are evocative of blooming flowers, whirling nebulas or a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. As Smith describes, \"unfolding, unraveling and dancing around the perimeter of the gallery, the paintings are a reminder that everything is in motion and constantly evolving.\" Like the butterfly, their evolution on this planet relates directly to the artist’s lifelong journey to grow creatively and spiritually through her personal research and travels. These dynamic compositions as Smith articulates, create a sense of wonder akin to \"portals that lead to secret gardens,\" inviting viewers into ethereal realms where the poetic and divine intertwine. Language permeates the canvases through Smith’s emblematic calligraphic lines, becoming a principle of order and crafting ceremony in the process of making, akin to writing affirmations or creating prayers.
Through layered and transformative processes, METAMORPH presents intersecting forces of personal history, influence and vibrant energy as seen through Smith’s keen and emphatic lens. Reflecting on her journey of growth, the works on view create a world for herself that she can revel in and share, foregrounding the universality of the human experience and our desire to find wonder in the everyday movements of life.
Smith’s work can also be seen throughout Chicago. Her mural I Am Love (2017) is located at the Wabash Arts Corridor, 1600 N. State Street, and her sculpture Sunburst (2021) at the Chicago Transit Authority, 5960 W. Chicago Ave. Her work is included in group exhibition Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage, which originated at the Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN in 2023, is currently at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX through May 12, 2024, and travels to the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., from July 6–September 22, 2024. Smith's major solo museum exhibition Parade is on view at the Ringling Museum, Sarasota, FL through January 5, 2025. Smith will present a newly commissioned installation at the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields this summer.
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FRIDAY, APRIL 12TH
FROM 5-8 PM
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Sanford Biggers' (b.1970, Los Angeles, CA) work is an interplay of narrative, perspective and history that speaks to current social, political, and economic happenings, while also examining the contexts that bore them. Working with antique quilts that echo rumors of their use as signposts on the Underground Railroad, he deconstructs the quilts and rebuilds them into 2D quilt constructions referencing urban culture, the body, sacred geometry, and American symbolism.
Antonius-Tín Bui’s (b.1992, Bronx, NY) work traverses the realms of hand-cut paper, community engagement, performance, and soft sculpture to visualize hybrid identities or histories that confront the unsettling present. Bui’s hybridized identity as a queer, genderfluid, and Vietnamese American informs the way they employ beauty as a refuge for fellow marginalized communities. Their collages blend ancestral burning paper, vintage porn magazines, marbled paper, and gold leaf, exploring the intersections of spirituality and sexuality.
Genevieve Gaignard (b.1981, Orange, MA) uses self-portraiture, collage, sculpture, and installation to investigate personal histories, popular culture, and racial currents through her lens as a biracial woman navigating unsettling American realities. Her collage works incorporate vintage wallpaper and photography with xeroxed historical news media, magazine clippings, and portraiture to create visual renderings that affirm Black livelihood, provoking reflections on the often-hostile realities of the outside world.
Kathia St. Hilaire’s (b.1995, Palm Beach, FL) distinctive technique combines printmaking, painting, collage, and weaving. Informed by her experience growing up in Caribbean and African American neighborhoods in South Florida, her work draws inspiration from Haitian Vodun flags, which are used to tell the country’s history and honor ancestral spirits. Using nontraditional materials such as beauty products, industrial metal, fabric or tires, she creates ornate tapestries that seek to preserve Haitian history.
Sheree Hovsepian (b.1974, Isfahan, Iran) Foregrounding the materiality of photography in a digital age, Hovsepian works with film-based cameras, light-sensitive paper, various objects, and her own body to produce cerebral and sensual photographs in which she deconstructs her medium. Her assemblage works incorporate found materials from her studio arranged into constellations that hover above a photographic ground. Operating as an object and an archive, Hovsepian’s works mimic the photograph’s physical and temporal duality.
Yashua Klos’ (b.1977, Chicago, IL) practice maintains a nuanced, and at times deeply personal, engagement with themes of identity, the human form, and the built environment. His collages, portraiture, and sculptures reflect strategies of fragmentation and adaption, and their influence upon ideas of Blackness and Black existence, employing a unique reinterpretation of traditional methods of woodblock printing from a vast collection of textures and imagery.
Helina Metaferia’s (b.1983 Washington, D.C.) diverse process incorporates collage, assemblage, video, performance, and social engagement. Her work integrates archives, somatic studies, and dialogical practices, supporting often overlooked narratives that amplify BIPOC/femme bodies. Through collage, Metaferia literally weaves together women of color across time to create an intergenerational exchange of care and activist labor.
Lavar Munroe (b.1982, Nassau, Bahamas) is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in mixed media and painting, often incorporating sentimental objects collected and gifted from his family and objects found during his travels. His work examines themes present in folklore, fables, and historic films–drawing comparison between his upbringing in the Bahamas and travels to various countries in Africa.
Ebony G. Patterson's (b.1981, Kingston, Jamaica) expansive practice addresses visibility and invisibility through explorations of class, race, gender, youth culture, pageantry, and acts of violence in the context of postcolonial spaces. Working across multiple media including tapestry, photography, video, sculpture, drawing, and installation, each work is intricately embellished and densely layered in order to draw the viewer closer and to question how we engage in the act of looking.
Monika Plioplyte (b.1989, Kaunas, Lithuania) weaves printed and cut paper, photographs, and other materials into narrative structures that connect Baltic folklore, gender identity, and her Lithuanian immigrant experience. In work that combines printmaking, sculpture, performance, and photography, Plioplyte often uses her body as subject or object. Her storytelling is animated by Baltic Pagan symbolism, female archetypes, personal rituals, and the uncanny.
David Shrobe (b.1974, New York, NY) creates multi-layered portraits and assemblage paintings made in part from everyday materials that he finds in multiple geographies. He disassembles furniture, especially from his familial home in Harlem, separating wood from fabric and recombines them as supports for collage, painting, and drawing. Through these various modes of production, his work brings notions of identity, history, and memory into question while challenging conventions of classical portraiture.
Nyugen E. Smith’s (b.1976, Jersey City, NJ) practice revolves around the construction of narrative through the prism of Black cultural identity, responding to the legacy of European colonial rule in African history. His sculptural collages bundle various found materials together representing found-object shelters, bringing an intentional artistic voice and awareness to the trauma, resilience, spirit, violence, and memory of both ancestral and living people in the Black African diaspora.
Shinique Smith (b.1971, Baltimore, MD) is known for her striking creations of fabric, calligraphy, and collage which contain vibrant and carefully collected mementos from her life. Inspired by the vast nature of the things that we as a culture create, consume, and discard, her works operate at the convergence of consumption and spiritual sanctuary, balancing forces and revealing connections across space, time, race, gender, and place to suggest the possibility of new worlds.
Wendy Red Star (b.1981, Billings, MT) is an enrolled member of the Apsáalooke (Crow) Tribe who works across disciplines to explore the intersections of Native American ideologies and colonialist structures, both historically and in contemporary society. Drawing on pop culture, conceptual art strategies, and the Crow traditions within which she was raised, Red Star pushes the conversation surrounding Native American perspectives in new directions.
Mickalene Thomas’ (b.1971, Camden, NJ) portraits critically deconstruct accepted definitions of beauty, race, and gender, specifically in relation to Black women. Her mixed media photo collages, often rhinestone-encrusted, incorporate aesthetics of Western painting and the heavily sexualized blaxploitation films of the 1970s to addresses issues of femininity, race, and beauty alongside personal histories and childhood memories.
Image: Ebony G. Patterson, …kiss goodbye … goodbye kiss… (detail), 2022; Yashua Klos, The Wildflowers Dance For You, (detail) 2023; Shinique Smith, Juba, 2024
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13:00:00","ends_at":"2024-06-08 15:00:00","body":"moniquemeloche is pleased to present Collage Culture, a group exhibition that delves into the multifaceted realm of collage as a hybrid process, presenting a selection of artists whose practices traverse diverse visual languages. The works on view contribute to a rich tapestry of hybridity, weaving together narratives of personal histories, cultural identities, and societal critiques. Like the title suggests, Collage Culture embodies the myriad ways the artists incorporate process and material to explore the transformative power of collage and boundless possibilities it offers in reimagining the complexities of contemporary existence.
Image: Ebony G. Patterson, …kiss goodbye … goodbye kiss… (detail), 2022; Yashua Klos, The Wildflowers Dance For You, (detail) 2023; Shinique Smith, Juba, 2024
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come close, like before is a continuation of Cruz’s “chosenfamily” series–exploring the non-biological bonds between queer people that are based in mutual love and support–and centers this structure within the historical canon of western art, specifically maritime and landscape painting. Cruz produced this body of work after extensive travel during the last year and a half, having undergone an artist residency in Laguarres, Spain and visiting his grandparent’s land in Humacao, Puerto Rico. Reflecting on themes of lineage, family, and home, as well as the complex history between Spain and Puerto Rico, Cruz contemplates ideas of drift and voyage rendered through a distinctly queer, Brown perspective.
The colonial and Eurocentric roots of maritime painting evolved alongside European colonization of the Americas, Africa, and various other regions worldwide, made possible through seafaring. A particular work resonated with the artist during his travels, Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault. Monumental in stature and considered to be the most famous painting of a shipwreck, it narrates the tale of the French frigate Medusa's shipwreck and the plight of the survivors adrift on a makeshift wooden raft. America’s deep relationship with its waterways involve complex histories, with the sea representing a feeling of connection, vast expansiveness, beauty, and violence. For Black and Latinx Americans, the history of home making is inextricably linked with conflict. In the painting titled, iknowyou'vebeenwonderingwherei'vebeen:adrift,adraft,astare,atill,asigh,exhale.but,icamebacktoletyouknow,gotathingforyou,andican'letitgo_the raft, Cruz’s subjects billow atop fragmented furniture within a liminal space, their forms enacting a similar composition to Medusa, à la lost at sea. But rather than a hopeless depiction, the figures are resolute in their commitment to and safe keeping of each other. iknowyou’vebeenwondering… is a celebration of how our bodies represent home, and there is room for everyone on this raft.
In Cruz’s works on paper, bodies are fragmented, drifting in and out of the foliage, floating in air. Birds delicately rendered suggest migration and movement, while the limbs of spiked Ceiba trees hold us tight to the land, a lightness and heaviness at the same time. This motif found in Cruz’s drawings permeate into his paintings. Whether as a backdrop, garment, or textile, this lush vegetation centers around a geographic location personal to the artist or subjects depicted (Laguarres, Philadelphia, Brooklyn), and is a way of tracing things back to their roots. In his painting icamebackthefollowingnightandwalkedthegroundslookingforyou,wegotturnedawayonthesecondnight,buticamebackagainandagain,andagain, figures pile together suggestive of a mountain, the collective mound of identities and histories coalesce into a single unified body. Prolonged viewing gives way to the layers beneath, where we realize the figures are simultaneously bound together and disjointed, a necessary tension created to shift modes of thinking.
Topographical influences aside, one cannot ignore the spectrum of texture, pattern, color, and design that Cruz’s subjects employ. Before paint meets panel, elaborate photoshoots ensued in the artist’s Bronx studio and Los Angeles. Chosen family members play dress up, combining sequins, lace, and pearls with high fashion garments. Cruz purposefully choreographs the composition, gaining the trust of his sitters along the away. Poses inspired by 1990s fashion photography encapsulate a sexy freedom or dirty realism, highlighting a visual language that helped shape the perspective of a generation. Subtle coding references 60s, 70s and 80s gay culture and bits of flat color and glitchy moments when the compositions break channel a resistance to the status quo.
As the title suggests, come close, like before asks us to reflect how and who we consider home. It’s a return to our roots after drifting away, its knowing that everything you need you already carry with you.
Cruz’s exhibition opens on the tail of his traveling museum show when the children come home, curated by Monique Long, which debuted in his hometown at ICA Philadelphia last summer and opens in his current hometown in Harlem, NY at the Sugar Hill Museum on Tuesday, September 10.
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Extended CXW Hours:
October 4: 11-7pm
October 5: 11-6pm
October 6: 12-4pm
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Taking cues from the technical and compositional elements of Northern Renaissance paintings, Troyli's self-portraiture fuses comic language with social critique as he explores the performance of identity and the commodification of the Black/Brown body. Collision Course centralizes the artist's ongoing investigations within a larger context of the battle, posing questions around the spectacle through micro and macro examinations of conflict.
This new series was initiated during a year-long residency as an inaugural Visual Artist Fellow at the Académie des beaux-arts x Cité Internationale des arts program in Paris, France. During this time abroad, Troyli became heavily inspired by the compositions of epic battle and martyr paintings present throughout European museums. In a timely presentation, the works in Collision Course subvert humanity's fixation on conflict and the need to create narratives based on heroism and villainy to define ourselves. This notion of code-switching has been a central theme within the artist's practice, rendered through the steady use of his own avatar engaged in constant cycles of performance. Collision Course presents an expanded cast of characters and symbols to extend further beyond the self-portrait, complicating this hero-villain dynamic and the elasticity of these roles, whereby the figures function as both subject and sacrifice.
Grounding the exhibition, a two-part painting analogous to a theatrical backdrop provides a plethora of choreographed chaos. Multiple Troyli figures appear manifold–engaged in a congressional assembly hall, rejoicing in church, protesting near a tent community, manufacturing AR-15 rifles blindfolded, serving champagne at a private Dior party, or voting on whether Kendrick or Drake won, while new figures donning Troyli masks complicate our ability to discern which role is being played. These figures are both police and policed, shooter and target, leader and follower, persecutor and persecuted. Part combative, part cannibalistic, the figures are defined by their opposition. Across moments of martyring throughout the show, questions around what it means to self-mythologize and self-valorize come to light. While we are unsure what is being fought for, it becomes more important that they are fighting. This perpetual collision course speaks to the anxiety of it all. Upon entering the gallery, viewers are greeted by a singular Troyli, nude and exhausted blowing on a bugle, as if to say he's doing this for the thousandth time. Nearby, multiple Troylis are engaged in battle on horseback. Apathetic expressions abound, we wonder who is really at war as our eyes greet the mad gaze of two horses in an enraged clash. Warhorses, and the bugler for that matter, become metaphors for participants in this never-ending confrontation who are neither actively involved nor invested, but whose lives are nevertheless on the line. This idea of impassivity or complicit participation echoes throughout, as we see that no matter which role they're playing, all the figures in the compositions are in their own way implicated in the Orwellian unending battle at the center of the show.
Jake Troyli is also on view in Chicago featuring a new permanent mural in Chicago's West Side commissioned by the nonprofit SkyART, as well as a billboard in collaboration with For Freedomsleading up to the election. His work is included in the recently opened group exhibition Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture, curated by Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, Seph Rodney, and Katy Siegel, at SFMoMA, which travels to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the Pérez Art Museum Miami, and is accompanied by a scholarly publication.
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Jake Troyli in conversation with Devon Van Houten Maldonado, Executive Director, SkyArt
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Crossing Clear Creek presents an autobiographical body of work that portrays a significant time in the artist’s life, revealing memories of events and emotions he experienced during his youth during his migration from Jim Crow-era rural Texas to South Central Los Angeles, a city laden with violent crime and gang activity that would become the center of the Civil Rights Movement. Here, Smith shapes an intimate journey of identity, resolve and deliverance, a story he has never shared or acknowledged in its entirety. This new personal narrative led Smith to receiving the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, a mark of distinction that emphasizes the importance of the recipient's unique vision and artistic voice, serving as the impetus for his solo exhibition.
The exhibition’s title Crossing Clear Creek is explicit and metaphoric. Clear Creek, a body of water that runs through Roganville, Texas–Smith’s hometown–must be crossed in order to travel from the “Black side of town to the white.” Grounding the exhibition, Smith’s massive two-part painting of the same name presents hopeful crossers on horseback pulling a chariot, eyes forward toward the winding path of a perceived better future as symbolized by a large white castle in the distance. Metaphorically, Smith addresses the state of the country and how the shifts in systems and policies affect people's lives. His subjects are women and people of color, representing the marginalized groups who become pawns, creating tension and uncertainty as the ruling leaders play the cynical game of give and take. For the artist, Crossing Clear Creek symbolizes the transition of himself and his siblings from their early years in the South to a land where the promise of better times remained elusive.
Art has been an ever-present facet of the artist’s life. From copying Michelangelo’s Renaissance masterpieces in his grandfather’s single room elementary school in Roganville, to becoming the self-proclaimed “school artist” at his high school in Los Angeles, to being dissuaded from applying to art school by a racist receptionist, Smith reflects that his early development in art ran parallel with his formation as a Black citizen—\"as a child, I understood that the Black man's life is disposable; as an adult, I understood that I could use art as a means of comprehending and explaining what it is like to be a person of color in America…The recognition conferred on me by the Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts is the most meaningful artistic honor of my lifetime. This acknowledgement and support led me to create this body of work. I embarked on this exhibition with a heightened sense of significance and purpose.”
Smith’s work will be included in the forthcoming group exhibition When Langston Hughes Came to Town at the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV which opens May 2025, and this summer he will participate in the Baltimore Museum of Art x Sherman Family Foundation Residency in Camden, Maine, which was founded in 2024.
I, Too, Am America, 2025 site-specific installation in collaboration with the New Art School Modality
Join us for a closing toast and remarks with artist Shonna Pryor and NASM founder Romi Crawford.
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Since its founding in 2000 by Monique Meloche, the gallery has been a driving force in Chicago’s contemporary art scene, championing diverse and politically engaged voices while serving as an early advocate for groundbreaking talent. Artists such as Rashid Johnson, Amy Sherald, Ebony G. Patterson, and Sanford Biggers launched pivotal moments of their careers at moniquemeloche, contributing to the gallery’s far-reaching influence—both within the city and across the international art world.
Beyond the gallery walls, moniquemeloche has been deeply committed to curatorial and institutional outreach, ensuring its artists gain lasting recognition. Works by the gallery’s artists have entered the permanent collections of major institutions, including The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago, while their practices have been highlighted in significant museum solo exhibitions at El Museo del Barrio, The Pérez Art Museum Miami, and many others.
Renowned for its conceptually rigorous programming and dynamic, cross-media installations, moniquemeloche continues to push boundaries and spark critical dialogue both in its Chicago gallery and at art fairs globally. 25! honors the artists who have shaped its legacy, presenting a powerful mix of historic and new works that will span the entire gallery.
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moniquemeloche is proud to celebrate its 25th anniversary with a landmark exhibition that honors the gallery's legacy of championing diverse artistic voices in Chicago. This milestone showcase will feature new and legacy works by both emerging and established artists from the gallery’s roster, reflecting the core values of innovation, inclusivity, and cultural dialogue that have defined the gallery since its inception.
","type":null,"state":"published","slug":"expo-art-after-hours-2025","created_at":"2025-04-23 20:57:05.407","updated_at":"2025-04-23 20:57:05.407","excerpt":"","is_timeless":true,"organization_id":902,"highlighted":false,"opening_starts_at":"2025-04-25 18:00:00","opening_ends_at":"2025-04-25 20:00:00","searchable":"'00':9B '00pm':11B '2025':5A '25th':18B '6':8B '8':10B 'anniversari':19B 'art':2A 'artist':33B,51B 'celebr':16B 'champion':31B 'chicago':36B 'core':59B 'cultur':65B 'defin':69B 'dialogu':66B 'divers':32B 'emerg':48B 'establish':50B 'exhibit':23B 'expo':1A 'extend':6B 'featur':41B 'galleri':27B,54B,71B 'honor':25B 'hour':4A,7B 'incept':74B 'inclus':63B 'innov':62B 'landmark':22B 'legaci':29B,44B 'mileston':38B 'moniquemeloch':12B 'new':42B 'proud':14B 'reflect':57B 'roster':56B 'showcas':39B 'sinc':72B 'valu':60B 'voic':34B 'work':45B","thumbnail":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1745441782/e1ftuuxxxwi5kc7vu71i.jpg","calendar":null,"carousel":false,"category_name":"Special Event or Closing Reception"},{"id":20808,"title":"Yvette Mayorga: Pu$h Thru","starts_at":"2025-06-14 00:00:00","ends_at":"2025-07-26 17:00:00","body":"moniquemeloche is pleased to present Yvette Mayorga: Pu$h Thru, the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Yvette Mayorga is a multidisciplinary artist based in Chicago renowned for her confection-inspired artworks that intertwine themes of immigration, identity, and feminized labor through a maximalist lens. Utilizing materials like acrylic piping applied with bakery tools—a nod to her mother's labor as a baker—Mayorga crafts opulent, Rococo-influenced pieces dominated by shades of pink to critically examine the American Dream and the Latinx experience, often borrowing compositions from personal and family photos and art history.
Pu$h Thru is Mayorga’s first solo show in Chicago since 2018 and reflects on the last decade of the artist’s life in the city. Showcasing a vibrant fusion of personal narrative, cultural critique, and aesthetic exploration, the works on view weave together a visual diary of protest, neighborhood scenes, and fleeting memories captured on the artist’s phone. Interspersed throughout are images from her family archive—snapshots of the artist as a child celebrating a birthday and sitting in her childhood living room—grounding the exhibition in ancestral history.
Mayorga, who is first generation Mexican American, engages deeply with the aesthetics of Rococo, specifically referencing 17th- and 18th-century painters like Jean-Honoré Fragonard, François Boucher, and Elizabeth Vigee Le Brun. Staged portraits of the artist and her community adopt and remix Eurocentric narratives, offering a Latinx, feminist, and contemporary lens to center overlooked bodies and experiences. Pink, a color that has a long history with Mayorga’s practice, is deployed as a conceptual strategy to destabilize Western ideals of skin tone, evoking questions of race, class, and gendered embodiment while also referencing cosmetic and domestic aesthetics—an ironic and radical reclamation of softness as strength. “Latinxoco,” a term coined by Mayorga, merges Latinx identity with Rococo aesthetics to elevate the Mexican American domestic spaces primarily in the Midwest. Drawing on Rococo’s history of intimate salons and ornate social settings, Mayorga connects this to Diasporic cultural traditions—family celebrations, communal gatherings, and richly adorned homes, reclaiming decorative excess as a form of cultural memory.
Materially, the work is sculptural and immersive. Thick piped paint, “paint skins,” textiles, rhinestones, nail charms, and domestic ephemera sourced from thrift stores are layered to build textured surfaces that blur the line between painting and installation. A custom wallpaper—based on a 1970s pattern from her childhood home—features gilded floral motifs and subtle renderings of the female reproductive system, signaling both beauty and rupture in a moment of heightened political tension surrounding women’s bodies. The exhibition also explores the politics of place, particularly the impact of gentrification on Chicago’s South Side and the erasure of culturally significant spaces. Imagined storefronts serve as speculative interventions—sites where hyperfeminine care practices are re-centered as both joyful and subversive.
These visual constructions explore how gender is performed, how womanhood is politicized, and how Latinx communities, particularly in Chicago, continue to push through structural inequality, environmental crisis, and cultural erasure with humor, care, and defiance. Taken together, Pu$h Thru is a love letter to the last decade while looking ahead; it is a reclamation of space and time, both intimate and collective.
Mayorga’s work will be included the group exhibition Los Encuentros at Ballroom Marfa, TX on view July 4-October 12, 2025, and is working on a large-scale public art project with Times Square Arts for fall of 2025. Mayorga’s public artwork installation Pilgrimage to the Isle of Pink, (2023) for the City of Chicago’s O’Hare airport Terminal 5, is on view for the next 25 years. In 2026, Mayorga’s work (along with gallery artists Candida Alvarez and David Antonio Cruz) will be included in a landmark exhibition of paintings by contemporary Latinx artists living throughout the United States and Puerto Rico at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, NY.
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","type":null,"state":"published","slug":"25-encore","created_at":"2025-06-18 18:04:46.701","updated_at":"2025-06-18 18:04:46.701","excerpt":"","is_timeless":true,"organization_id":902,"highlighted":false,"opening_starts_at":null,"opening_ends_at":null,"searchable":"'25':1A '25th':8B 'anniversari':9B 'encor':2A 'exhibit':10B 'mileston':7B 'select':3B 'view':14B 'work':4B","thumbnail":"https://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1748457098/gkst9wf8whdnz7qzs38v.jpg","calendar":null,"carousel":false,"category_name":"Exhibitions"},{"id":21782,"title":"Gallery Talk: Yvette Mayorga and Emmanuel Ortega","starts_at":"2025-07-26 15:00:00","ends_at":"2025-07-26 17:00:00","body":"Join artist Yvette Mayorga and scholar Emmanuel Ortega for a gallery talk discussing Pu$h Thru, Yvette's first solo exhibition at moniquemeloche. The event will take place on Saturday, July 26 at 3pm at Monique Meloche Gallery, located at 451 N. Paulina St., Chicago, IL 60622. The exhibition, Pu$h Thru, is on view through Saturday, July 26.
","type":null,"state":"published","slug":"gallery-talk-yvette-mayorga-and-emmanuel-ortega","created_at":"2025-07-16 19:54:53.793","updated_at":"2025-07-16 19:54:53.793","excerpt":"","is_timeless":false,"organization_id":902,"highlighted":true,"opening_starts_at":null,"opening_ends_at":null,"searchable":"'26':39B,66B '3pm':41B '451':48B '60622':54B 'artist':9B 'chicago':52B 'discuss':20B 'emmanuel':6A,14B 'event':32B 'exhibit':28B,56B 'first':26B 'galleri':1A,18B,45B 'h':22B,58B 'il':53B 'join':8B 'juli':38B,65B 'locat':46B 'mayorga':4A,11B 'meloch':44B 'moniqu':43B 'moniquemeloch':30B 'n':49B 'ortega':7A,15B 'paulina':50B 'place':35B 'pu':21B,57B 'rsvp':67B 'saturday':37B,64B 'scholar':13B 'solo':27B 'st':51B 'take':34B 'talk':2A,19B 'thru':23B,59B 'view':62B 'yvett':3A,10B,24B","thumbnail":"http://res.cloudinary.com/dfafo598z/image/upload/v1752620407/7a08a86d-3a9c-489f-bf27-a688d2a6c031_x8natd.png","calendar":null,"carousel":false,"category_name":"Talks"},{"id":23280,"title":"Gallery Talk: Luke Agada","starts_at":"2025-09-20 15:00:00","ends_at":"2025-09-20 16:00:00","body":"moniquemeloche is pleased to present To Translate is to Move Across, a solo exhibition of new works by Lagos-born Luke Agada. Agada’s work investigates the forces of globalization, migration, and cultural dislocation, situating them within a postcolonial context to explore how they shape the emergence of new cultural forms. Heavily inspired by the writings of Homi Bhabha and his concept of the “third space”–a psychological realm of cultural hybridity and negotiation where identities are not fixed but constantly changing–Agada’s surrealist paintings hover between form and fluidity. The Bhabhaian concept states that individuals in the third space constantly navigate between different cultural influences and adapt their identities to their new environment–something alto familiar to Agada who emigrated to the US in 2021 to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for his MFA. Agada, who now resides in Chicago, contends with how home has come to mean more than one place. For the artist’s first full solo exhibition with the gallery since graduating in 2023, the works in To Translate is to Move Across articulate a vision of movement that defies rigid categorization, exposing the hybrid, unstable, and fluid nature of meaning and belonging.
Agada’s paintings inhabit the in-between, rendering translation as both subject and practice. His compositions draw from abstract expressionism and surrealism; his color palettes blend the sun scorched tones of his native landscape with the rich color palettes of the Old Masters and Baroque painters; his forms materialize memory, imagination, and observed reality. Yet, as a whole, they align not to one source or fidelity, but rather encompass a visual form of displacement, where elements migrate, meanings shift, and identities fracture and recombine. However, translation is not seamless. It is uneven, unstable, and often ruptured. Agada examines these occurrences through his process by in which texture and surface tension straddle representation and spatial ambiguity. Paint is layered–sometimes with dry brush application–shifted, removed, and reworked revealing earlier strata. But while the artist invites spontaneous influence and unexpected forms, he ultimately retains a sensitive control over the compositions – a delicate struggle between figurative elements and abstraction.
As an extension of Agada’s painting practice, a series of new charcoal drawings on canvas offers a quieter, more intimate counterpoint. Stripped of color and painterly texture, Agada’s drawings trace elusive, interconnected lines that resemble neural pathways, visualizing a more internal, psychological terrain and are perhaps the core structures that underpin his exploration of identity in flux.
In a time marked by escalating cultural and political fragmentation, Luke Agada’s work invites thoughtful engagement with the politics of shared spaces–those fraught, often contested zones shaped by histories of movement, displacement, and transformation. Here, Agada frames translation not as a neat resolution, but as survival, adaptation, and reimagination. To Translate is to Move Across asks us to linger in ambiguity, not to resolve it, and to consider how art becomes a means not of closure, but of continual negotiation.
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Working in betwen cultures, Garneau combines visual influences from classical and contemporary forms with material investigations to consider cultural, social, and historical implications. Garneau is interested in what he refers to as \"material honesty\", or the idea that the use of living matter can imbue work with their essence and power. Exploring and exploiting the physical qualities of materials, Garneau works with harvested and hand-processed mediums including asphalt, raffia, cotton, linen, sugarcane pulp, bones, and shells. Garneau's work investigates transformation through both natural cycles and the inherent human tendency for adornment, costuming, and masquerade. Connecting materials, customs, and clothing, he explores the ability of the natural world, and of the people in it, to adapt and transmute to whatever circumstances they may find themselves in.
Braxton Garneau is a visual artist based in amiskwaciwâskahikan (Edmonton, Canada). He holds a BFA from the University of Alberta and has had solo exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton (2024), Efraín López, New York (2024), GAVLAK, Los Angeles (2023) and Stride Gallery, Calgary (2021). Recent group exhibitions include Land, Sea, Sugar, Salt: Terrestrial and Aquatic Contemplations of the Caribbean, Remai Modern (2025); Black Every Day, Art Gallery of Alberta (2021); and It's About Time: Dancing Black in Canada 1900 - 1970 and Now, Mitchell Art Gallery, Edmonton (2020). In 2024, his work Pitch Lake (Pietà) was acquired by the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego through the Northern Trust Purchase Prize at EXPO Chicago, and he was awarded the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Emerging Artist Award. In Spring 2025, he was in residency at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP), Brooklyn, NY.
Luke Agada’s practice examines themes of globalization, migration and cultural dislocation within the framework of a postcolonial world and its impact on neo-cultural evolution. Agada's surrealist paintings of disembodied figures and dream-like grounds reference identity and the transformation of the postmodern human, where both time and space produce complex bodies of difference. Overlapping the past and present, the other and the self-reflect the ambiguity of our identiy within post-structuralist theory. Agada's work has been inspired by the postcolonial writings of Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, and literary works by Nigerian authors Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. His work is a continuous reflection of his investigative approach to history and critical theory with regards to the examination of the culture of dominance through globalization.
Agada (b.1992, Lagos, Nigeria) received his MFA in Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2023) and a DVM at Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta (2018). He has had recent national and international exhibitions with Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, CA (2024); African American Museum of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA (2024) moniquemeloche, Chicago, IL (2023); Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Berlin, Germany (2023); Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China (2023); African Artist’s Foundation, Lagos, Nigeria (2021); and Gallery 1957, Accra, Ghana. Agada’s work is included in the forthcoming group exhibition Ever So Present II: Between Home and Elsewhere at Gagosian, NYC, alongside artists Amoako Boafo, Joséfa Ntjam, and Emma Prempeh, curated by Brice Arséne Yonkeu. Agada will present a solo exhibition at moniquemeloche Fall 2025.
He has been a recipient of various awards and fellowships including Newcity’s Breakout Artist (2024); Studios at MASS MoCA Fellowship (2023); The James Nelson Raymond Fellowship Award (2023); Dean’s Grant, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL (2023); Janet and Russell Doubleday Award at The Art Students League of New York (2022); The Helen Frankenthaler Award at SAIC in (2022); George and Ann Siegel Award, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL (2021); Global Warming International Art Prize, New York, New York (2020). Agada currently lives and works in Chicago, IL.
Pedro Montilla is a Colombian artist whose practice unfolds through painting as a way to understand the experience of being alive and surrounded by life. His work stems from the understanding of painting as a mystical being, voracious and capable of imbuing objects with life. Through this lens, his practice becomes a space for transformation, reflection, and attentive presence. Pedro works primarily on fique fabric, a fiber cultivated, dried, and woven in the Colombian Andes, traditionally used to transport coffee beans and harvests. This surface mirrors both belonging to a place while also holding a sense of dislocation and memory for what it touches. On it, he creates hybrid objects that exist between painting and tapestry, holding an imagery of landscapes, scenes, and abstractions that reflect an amalgam of internal states and lived experience.
Montilla (b.1997, Bogotá, Colombia) holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2025) and a BFA from Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá (2020). He has presented solo exhibitions at Policroma Galería, Medellín (2023; 2021), and participated in group exhibitions at the Epiphany Center for the Arts, Chicago, IL (2025); Chili Art Projects, London, UK (2024); National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago, IL (2024); Galería El Museo, Bogotá (2024); SGR Galería, Bogotá (2021); among others. He was a Fellow at Ox-Bow School of Art, Saugatuck, MI (2025) and is currently a resident at the Chicago Artists Coalition, Chicago, IL. Montilla lives and works in Chicago, IL and is currently a Lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Image: Pedro Montilla, Primero está la soledad / First there is loneliness, 2025, oil and tempera on fique, 57 x 78 in
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Palileo (b.1979, Chicago, IL) received an MFA in sculpture from Brooklyn College, City University of New York, Brooklyn, NY (2008) and BA in Studio Art at Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA (2001). Palileo has had solo exhibitions at David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2025); moniquemeloche, Chicago, IL (2023, 2021, 2019); The Cummer Museum, Jacksonville, FL (2023); Kimball Arts Center, Park City, UT (2022); the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, CA (2021); the Katzen Arts Center, Washington D.C. (2019); Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY (2018); Taymour Grahne Gallery, New York, NY (2017); and Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space, curated by Jordan Buschur, New York, NY (2015). Palileo has been featured in recent group exhibitions at the Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL (2024); Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, Stanford, CA (2024); Sargent’s Daughters, Los Angeles, LA (2024); Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (2023); Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE (2023); The Nasher Museum, Durham, NC (2023); National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C. (2022); Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA (2022); San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA (2022); Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2022); The Rubin Museum of Art, New York, NY (2018); and the Bureau of General Services Queer Division, New York, NY. Palileo will present a solo show at moniquemeloche, Chicago, IL (2025).
Their work is in the collections of The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; The San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens. Jacksonville, FL; The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C; The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC; The Speed Museum, Louisville, KY; and The Fredriksen Collection at the National Museum of Oslo, Norway. Palileo is a recipient of the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program Award, NY (2022); NYFA Painting Fellowship (2021); Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Program Grant (2017); Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2014); Astraea Visual Arts Fund Award (2009); Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (2008); and Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Award (2018). Palileo has participated in residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison, ME; Lower East Side Print Shop, NY; Millay Colony, Austerlitz, New York; and the Joan Mitchell Center, New Orleans. They currently live and work in Brooklyn, NY.
Image: Maia Cruz Palileo, I Am Well, How Are You?, 2025, oil on linen, 72 x 68 in
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Antonius-Tín Bui (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work traverses the realms of hand-cut paper, community engagement, performance, and soft sculpture to visualize hybrid identities or histories that confront the unsettling present. Bui’s hybridized identity as a queer, genderfluid, and Vietnamese American informs the way they employ beauty as a refuge for fellow marginalized communities. Their intensive paper-cutting process is exceptionally meditative; each sheet of paper represents an archive of memories and oral histories, mirroring the intergenerational trauma that so many refugee communities are faced with. Through their rigorous and reductive process, they deconstruct the white canvas, metaphorically carving out space for the narratives that are so often omitted from recognized histories.
Bui (b.1992, Bronx, NY) received their BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD. Bui has had recent solo exhibitions at Various Small Fires, Dallas, TX (2024); moniquemeloche, Chicago, IL (2023); Hudson D. Walker Gallery, Provincetown, MA (2020); Laband Art Gallery, LMU, Los Angeles, CA (2019); Lawndale Art Center, Houston, TX (2018). Bui’s work has been presented in group exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C.; Portland State University, OR; The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Saratoga Springs, NY; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, Sacramento, CA; Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University, Hamilton, NY; the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX; Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York, NY; USC Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena, CA; Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Houston, TX; Blaffer Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; among others. Bui will present a solo exhibition at moniquemeloche in 2026.
Public collections include the Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC; University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI; New York Historical Society, New York, NY; BMO Harris Bank Corporate Art Collection, Chicago, IL; Bank of America Art Program, Newark, DE; JP Morgan Chase Art Collection, New York, NY; Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation, Portland, OR; Eaton Workshop, Washington D.C.; Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, Little Rock, AR; Wesley Theological Seminary, Washington D.C.; and the Pennsylvania College of Art & Design, Lancaster, PA. They are a recipient of The Outwin Boochever Prize (2021) and MICA Alumni Grant (2018). Bui is a fellow of the 2022 Queer|Art|Mentorship program, and has received additional fellowships from MASS MoCA (2025); Golden Foundation, New Berlin, NY (2024); James Castle House, Boise, ID (2022); Kimmel Nelson Center for the Arts, Nebraska City, NE (2022); Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA (2019); Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY (2024, 2019); The Growlery, San Francisco, CA (2019); and Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Houston, TX (2018).
Bui lives and works in Chicago, IL.
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Join us for a special event as the gallery transforms into a living score within Antonius-Tín Bui’s solo exhibition, here, there is a different kind of sun.
Commissioned for the exhibition, MIZU’s immersive soundtrack comes alive in a special performance featuring the artist on live cello with Antonius-Tín Bui and collaborator Kimiko Tanabe moving throughout the installation in an unfolding activation of ritual, spirit, and diasporic memory. Together, sound, movement, and sculpture converge for an intimate, durational experience that invites collective witnessing inside Bui’s luminous world.
about the performers
“Frequently gorgeous, at times unsettling, and constantly in flux” (Pitchfork), MIZU (she/her) explores themes of transformation and the infinite possibilities of self through her singular cello playing and daring performing. Trained as a cellist at Juilliard, her experimental practice sees her transforming self-recorded explorations on her instrument into bold and distinct soundscapes. Her works 4 | 2 | 3, Forest Scenes, and Distant Intervals received critical praise and attention from platforms such as Pitchfork, The FADER, NOWNESS Asia, Bandcamp Daily, The New York Times, and New Sounds.
Kimiko Tanabe (she/her) is a fourth-generation Japanese American experimental dance artist based in Brooklyn. Her research moves through the social, cultural, and political landscape of post-internment Japanese-America. She draws inspiration from Japanese ghost tales of yūrei and yokai to tease at the seams of perceived reality, making space for the logic of spirits, dreams, and the afterlife to emerge.
Antonius-Tín Bui (they/them) is a polydisciplinary artist and shapeshifter invested in the transformative potential of ritual, portraiture, craft, and performance, traversing the realms of hand-cut paper and community engagement to visualize hybrid identities or histories that confront the unsettling present. Bui’s identity as a queer, genderfluid, and Vietnamese American informs the way they employ beauty as a refuge for fellow marginalized communities.
moniquemeloche is pleased to present ALL THERE IS, an exhibition of new works by Cheryl Pope. Pope is an interdisciplinary visual artist whose intimate studio practice centers on textile “paintings.” Working with needle-punched wool roving on cashmere, Pope creates richly tactile works that translate the language of painting into fiber, using material, texture, and color to explore memory, relationships, and the poetics of everyday life. For the artist’s seventh solo exhibition at the gallery, ALL THERE IS debuts a new body of landscape works that explore the spiritual and emotional resonance of the land as a site of recollection, silence, and shared human experience.
The artist began this series after a residency at the Contemporary African Museum in Marrakech, Morocco, where travels to the Atlas Mountains and desert terrain evoked an immediate sense of recognition and belonging. Upon returning home, Pope continued her journey to the Abiquiú region of New Mexico, a site that carries familial resonance for the artist, where summers were spent by her father and grandmother. Together, these experiences, while separated by geography, awakened a mystical stillness inside the body, initiating a broader connection to the universality of the landscape. While Pope’s earlier works centered the physical body as a site of identity, vulnerability, and care, from her early work with underrepresented youth, to deeply personal reflections on love and family, to her celebrations of the female body, these new landscapes suggest the body has not disappeared but expanded, shifting from the visibility of the figure toward a more esoteric understanding of how human experience is embedded within the landscape.
Drawing from modernist painting, slow cinema, and contemplative poetry, the works approach landscape as a site where emotional, geological, and psychological states converge. Art historically, Pope draws from traditions that understand landscape not as scenery but as a living presence. Like Georgia O’Keefe, Pope’s landscapes strip away narrative figures to focus instead on the inner architecture of place. The compositional clarity of Pope’s landscapes also recalls Roger Brown’s distinctive visual language, particularly his use of stacked horizons, simplified forms, and rhythmic patterning. Materially and formally, the works embrace a process of attentive listening. Shapes derived from photographic studies are reworked through memory and intuition, becoming compositions that emphasize rhythm, vibration, and the relational nature of color and texture. Unfolding in undulating strata, layers of ochre, sand, umber, and clay mix with unexpected bands of lavender, pink, sage, and deep green, suggesting both environmental time and a thoughtful color sensibility. The artist describes the process as closer to composing music than painting: each mountain functions as an instrument, its tones and tactile surfaces forming part of a larger symphony of land, light, and archeological record. Here, Pope’s wool fibers act almost as sediment deposits, a buildup only achieved by slow labor – literal time embedded in material.
The title, ALL THERE IS, refers to a personal family story; words that were carved by the artist’s grandmother inside the wedding band of her grandfather. These words are a small but profound gesture that holds both intimacy and universality, and a candid confrontation to the bare truth of it all: that beneath the layers of narrative, culture, and history, the land remains vast, silent, and enduring. Here, Pope translates the emotional concerns that have long defined her practice, from intimacy, vulnerability, caregiving, and connection into geological form, where layered terrains become metaphors for the ways love accumulates, transforms, and endures.
Cheryl Pope, TEACH ME HOW TO BE VULNERABLE (detail), 2026
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Munroe is an interdisciplinary artist from Nassau, Bahamas whose work spans painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, collage, and assemblage. Working with an expansive range of materials including paint, cardboard, feathers, glass, found objects, textiles, newspaper, and discarded cultural artifacts, Munroe constructs richly layered worlds that merge folklore, spirituality, personal memory, and collective history.
Munroe’s exhibition emerges from research developed for The Bahamas Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia 2026, which recently opened to rave reviews, and centers on an intergenerational dialogue between Munroe and the late Bahamian artist John Beadle – who are both deeply shaped by Bahamian culture and particularly the traditions of Junkanoo, the national festival known for its processions, elaborate handmade costumes, music, improvisation, and collective production. Following Beadle's death in 2024, Munroe developed works that engage Beadle's legacy, incorporating aspects of his artistic philosophy, collected materials, sketches, and influence. DANCE WITH MY FATHER AGAIN extends Munroe’s ongoing exploration of posthumous collaboration while marking a deeply personal return to continue an unrealized project conceived with his late father.
Before his father's passing, Munroe envisioned a collaboration centered on the parachutes his father— a Junkanooer, fisherman, and boatsman—washed, repaired, and braided by hand. Recognizing their sculptural beauty, Munroe hoped to present the parachutes as artworks and respond to them through his own visual language, creating a dialogue between two makers connected by a shared understanding of material transformation. Although his father's death interrupted the project, the collaboration sustained as Munroe incorporated these objects into subsequent installations, sculptures, and drawings, allowing his father's presence to remain an active force within the work.
This exhibition marks a return to the origins of that conversation through a series of unstretched paintings on canvas. While earlier projects relied on inherited objects as collaborators, these paintings position memory itself as the medium of exchange for which the artist navigates loss, celebration, and lasting connection. Central to these works is the Bahamian tradition of shared mourning, where movement, coordinated dress, and united visual markers transform grief into a communal act. The figures depicted here are \"rushing\", a term associated with participation in Junkanoo processions moving through spaces that are at once celebratory and elegiac. Layers of Bahamian newspapers from 2024 to 2026 function as both historical record and a fragmented archive, preserving traces of specific moments that emerge and disappear beneath successive layers of paint, fringe, beads, sequins, and decorative elements derived from Junkanoo costume-making traditions. The surface feels simultaneously celebratory and weathered, echoing the handmade exuberance of Junkanoo while preserving the residue of lived experience and ritual.
Taken together, the works in DANCE WITH MY FATHER AGAIN revisit the relationship that first inspired Munroe's notion of posthumous collaboration. Here, Munroe deftly showcases painting as a space in which communication, remembrance, and artistic partnership can be shaped by the enduring presence of ancestors, community, and shared history.
Image: Lavar Munroe, DANCE WITH MY FATHER AGAIN (detail), 2026
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