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ABOUT SHEILA PEPE:
Sheila Pepe is best known for crocheting her large-scale, ephemeral installations and sculpture made from domestic and industrial materials. However, the exhibition Sheila Pepe: Hot Mess Formalism, curated by Gilbert Vicario for the Phoenix Museum of Art, and the catalog published with it, showed us that Pepe has built a more expansive and complex way of working since her start in the mid-1980s. For more than 30 years she has accumulated a family resemblance (see Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations) of works in sculpture—installation—drawing and other singular and hybrid forms. Some are drawings that are sculpture—or sculpture that is furniture, fiber works that appear as paintings, and tabletop objects that look like models for monuments, and stand as votives for a secular religion. The cultural sources and the meanings twisted together are from canonical arts of the 20th century, home crafts, lesbian, queer and feminist aesthetics, 2nd Vatican Council American design, an array of Roman Catholic sources as well as their ancient precedents. Pepe’s My Neighbor’s Garden, commissioned by the Madison Square Park Conservancy, will be on view through December 10th.
ABOUT LEX MORGAN LANCASTER:
Lex Morgan Lancaster (they/them) is a scholar and curator who focuses on queer, trans, anti-racist, and crip contributions to the field of contemporary art. The author of Dragging Away: Queer Abstraction in Contemporary Art (Duke University Press, 2022), Lancaster’s scholarship focuses on queer and trans approaches to abstraction and the politics of formal and material strategies in contemporary art. Lancaster is Assistant Professor of Art History at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.
ABOUT BEA SCACCIA:
Bea Scaccia (b.1978, Veroli, Italy) earned her BA and MFA at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome where she studied with the late Italian artist Gino Marotta. In her paintings, she reworks the elements that collectively give rise to illusions of beauty and constructions of appearance, compressing them on the canvas as surreal, uncanny marks of affectation. Investigating the cultural links between feminine splendor and monstrosity, she builds pictorial compositions that can be read as true parodies of bon ton. A trained realist painter, Scaccia’s method is more spontaneous rather than it is planned. She uses recurring visual tropes such as faux fur, jewels, wigs, cloth to signify darker psychological themes pertaining to female beauty. Pearls and hair clips become infestations; what was seen as well-ordered in the sensual hairdos of the Baroque and Rococo periods becomes unavoidably disturbing. The result is an over-the-top composition exemplifying an existential struggle to be contained.
ABOUT GIORGIO DI DOMENICO:
Giorgio Di Domenico is a Ph.D. student in art history at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, and a former research fellow of the Center for Italian Modern Art, New York. His research, supervised by Professor Flavio Fergonzi, focuses on the reception of Surrealism in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s. He interned at La Galleria Nazionale, Rome, and the Italian Cultural Institute, New York. In spring 2022, he was a visiting student at New York University’s Casa Italiana. He published essays on Jannis Kounellis (Studi di Memofonte, 2018; Paragone, 2022), Alberto Burri (Annali della Scuola Normale, 2022), and the connection between Burri and Robert Rauschenberg (Prospettiva, 2021). He is a contributing author to the forthcoming Robert Rauschenberg catalog raisonné. Currently, he is working on a monograph focusing on the 1970s Italian artists’ magazine La Città di Riga.
ABOUT KAMBUI OLUJIMI:
Kambui Olujimi was born and raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. He received his MFA from Columbia University and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His work challenges established modes of thinking that commonly function as “inevitabilities.” This pursuit takes shape through interdisciplinary bodies of work spanning sculpture, installation, photography, writing, video and performance. His works have premiered nationally and internationally at Sundance Film Festival, Museum of Modern Art, LACMA, Sharjah Biennial 15, 14th Dak’Art Biennale, and Kunsthal Rotterdam, among others. Olujimi has been awarded grants, fellowships and residencies from The Andrew Mellon Foundation, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Black Rock Senegal, MacDowell, and Yaddo.
ABOUT RUJEKO HOCKLEY:
Rujeko Hockley is the Arnhold Associate Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She co-curated the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Additional projects at the Whitney include Inheritance (2023), 2 Lizards (2022), Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing (2021), Julie Mehretu (2021), Toyin Ojih Odutola: To Wander Determined (2017) and An Incomplete History of Protest: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1940-2017 (2017). Previously, she was Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum, where she co-curated Crossing Brooklyn: Art from Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, and Beyond (2014) and was involved in exhibitions highlighting the permanent collection as well as artists LaToya Ruby Frazier, Kehinde Wiley, and others. She is the co-curator of We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85 (2017), which originated at the Brooklyn Museum and travelled to three U.S. venues in 2017-18. She serves on the Boards of Art Matters, Institute For Freedoms, and Museums Moving Forward, as well as the Advisory Board of Recess.
ABOUT JUAN SÁNCHEZ:
Born to working-class Puerto Rican immigrants in Brooklyn, NY, Juan Sánchez is an influential American visual artist, and one of the most important Nuyorican cultural figures of the latter 20th century. Maintaining an activist stance for over four decades, his art is an arena of creative and political inquiry that encompasses the individual, family, the communities with which he engages, and the world at large. While Sánchez first gained recognition for his large multi-layered mixed media collage paintings addressing issues of Puerto Rican identity and the struggle against U.S. colonialism, his work has evolved to embrace photography, printmaking, and video. His art is in the permanent collections of major museums in the United States, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. Sánchez is the recipient many awards and grants, including an Artist Legacy Foundation’s Artist Legacy Award (2022), a Latinx Artist Fellowship from the US Latinx Art Forum (2021), an Augustus Saint-Gaudens Achievement in the Visual Art Award from the Cooper Union Alumni Association (2020) and was inducted into The Cooper Union Hall of Fame. Juan Sánchez is Professor of Art at Hunter College, The City University of New York.
ABOUT ALEJANDRO ANREUS:
Alejandro Anreus was born in Havana, Cuba to a working class family. He went into exile at the age of ten with his mother, grandmother and two aunts, settling in Elizabeth, NJ. He received his BA in Art History from Kean College, where he was mentored by Marxist art historian Alan Wallach, and later his MA and PhD in Art History from the Graduate Center, CUNY. He was curator at the Montclair Art Museum (1987-93), and at the Jersey City Museum (1993-2001). From 2001-2023 he was professor of Art History and Latin American/Latinx Studies at William Paterson University. In Fall 2023 he was the Lauder Visiting Senior Scholar at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art. The author of seven books and over 60 catalog essays, his articles have appeared in Art Journal, Third Text, Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana, and Commonweal. As a scholar, Dr. Anreus focuses on art and politics of the 1920s and 30s, Latin American, Caribbean and Latinx Art.
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