ARTIST FEATURE: JOSÉ DURÁN

José Durán in his Bronx studio, wearing his own designs, in front of Charo, 2026. Photograph by Jonathan Carela.

José Durán arrived in New York from Moca in 1995, at sixteen. He grew up in a Bronx apartment where his mother covered the beds in faux satin and hung the windows with opulent curtains, so the rooms would suggest a baroque salon. Elena was a hairstylist who worked from home, and there were women in and out all day. The draping was for her, for her family, and for the women who came through.

Thirty years later, Durán has woven something taller than he is out of cut elastic bands, shaped like a body lying down. It is called Charo, and he made it after his friend Miguel died of AIDS, on the model of the AIDS Memorial Quilt. The shape is deliberate. “Under a sheet, a cover, a duvet,” he says. “Protecting the body.”

Nearly everything else he has made falls between those two acts. His first solo exhibition, curated by Orlando Isaac in Santo Domingo in 2023, was called Duvet. It contained his first textile: a pair of carved wooden legs lying on a plinth, the body above the waist covered by a length of woven black and white cloth. Among the paintings was one named for Dédée Bazile, the Haitian woman who gathered the dismembered remains of Jean-Jacques Dessalines from the street in 1806 and took them for burial. When Durán’s research into cotton led him to the Indian textiles traded for enslaved people on the West African coast, he responded by building tents for public space and wrapping a found chair in fabric. He has been doing versions of the same thing for as long as he has been painting, and what interests him is what a covering can do.

He brings three works to The Armory Show, all of them tracing back to one woman. In seventeenth-century Cartagena, one of the largest slave ports in the Americas, Paula de Eguiluz was the healer people came to. Born enslaved, free by her thirties, she sold remedies and love magic to the white women of the city, and the Bishop of Cartagena eventually became one of her patients. The Inquisition tried her three times for witchcraft, had her whipped, and sentenced her to death, a sentence the Inquisition’s council in Madrid overruled.

Durán painted Paula herself in 2023, and Ana and Juana take the names of her two sisters. The third work reaches Paula through the plants. She was a healer, and her knowledge of them became part of the record against her. Sábila is the Caribbean word for aloe vera.

Everything known about the two sisters comes from a single moment in Paula’s trial, when the tribunal asked her, as it asked every prisoner, to name her family. She said she had two sisters in Santo Domingo: Ana, who was free, and Juana, who belonged to a man called Antonio de Jaques. Nothing else about either of them was written down. Durán has given them a room to rest in.

Both women recline. At eight and a half feet tall, Ana is a rococo drawing room, a wedge of acid green driven down one side of the coffered ceiling, the mismatched checkerboard floor and every other surface built from short loaded strokes laid side by side, closer to mosaic than to brushwork. Ana herself is on a blue sofa in a patterned robe, plants at her shoulder, entirely at rest. Juana is the wider of the two, a glasshouse under an iron dome, agave throwing red flower spikes toward the glass, a tiger skin open-jawed on the floor by her daybed. Juana was the sister who was owned, and Durán has put her inside a building designed to hold displaced tropical plants alive in captivity. He says that was deliberate.

Sábila does the same thing with one plant. Across three sheets of deckled paper the aloe hangs from a bare branch, its leaves falling while the flower stems climb, orange spikes against a wash that shifts from coral at the foot to cold green at the top. The lowest sheet is all undergrowth, dry twigs and small bright scrub, a hummingbird at the edge of it. Aloe crossed the Atlantic with the people who knew how to use it. Durán uses it on himself for asthma, and has since childhood. He describes the three panels as ancestor, self and descendant.

The reclining posture is Elena’s, and so is the cigarette. He remembers his mother on the bed, smoking, receiving friends, and his 2024 exhibition at James Fuentes took her name. He puts nearly every woman he paints in the same position. The rooms come from her too. Durán builds his interiors out of Renaissance architecture and the décor of Black and Latino New York in the 1980s and 90s, which is what his mother was doing in the Bronx with faux satin and opulent curtains.

Until Elena died, he had never painted. His adult life had been fashion, then Taipei, where he learned Mandarin and took an MBA, with the plant research running underneath all of it. He picked up a brush to keep his mother present, working her image into his earliest canvases. Everything since is a version of that, including the three works he is taking to the Javits Center.

This is Durán’s first art fair, and for him it stands in for a Bryant Park runway he never got. He is presented at The Armory Show by Heliconia Projects, Santo Domingo, in Focus, the section curated by María Elena Ortiz of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, which this year centers artists working across the Caribbean and its diasporas. The fair runs September 24 to 27, 2026 at the Javits Center, New York, with an invitation-only preview on Thursday and public days Friday through Sunday. Durán has shown solo at Centro Cultural de España in Santo Domingo, Good Children in New Orleans, and James Fuentes and Hannah Traore in New York.

Juana, 2026. Acrylic on linen, 60 × 80 in. Photograph by Jonathan Carela.

JOSÉ DURÁN IN CONVERSATION

Interview by Marc Sifuentes

The Armory Show marks an important moment in your development as an artist. What does participating in the fair mean to you?

What makes this experience especially meaningful is this year’s focus on the Caribbean and its diaspora, curated by María Elena Ortiz. My Caribbean background is deeply connected to my identity and to the inspiration behind my work. I explore history, migration, culture, memory, identity, and the ways Caribbean people have shaped and reimagined their lives across different places. To see these conversations taking place within such an important international art fair makes the experience feel very personal.

I also see this moment as an opportunity to show that Caribbean art is not confined to one visual language or history. My work moves between textiles, sculpture, painting, fashion, and research, reflecting the complexity and hybridity of the Caribbean experience.

For me, The Armory Show is not simply about reaching a larger audience. It is about entering a larger conversation and seeing how my own experiences, research, and imagination can contribute to the evolving story of Caribbean and diasporic art.

This is my first time participating in an art fair. When I first entered the art world, The Armory Show felt like something very far away, a goal I hoped I would one day reach.

In many ways, it reminds me of what it felt like to dream of showing a fashion collection during New York Fashion Week in Bryant Park, when the shows were held there. As a fashion designer, that was a dream I always hoped to accomplish but never had the opportunity to experience. Being here now, as an artist, feels like a full-circle moment in my creative journey. It feels as though one of those dreams I carried with me from my years in fashion has finally found its way into another chapter of my life through my art.

As my practice has developed, I have become more confident in my voice and in the importance of the stories I am trying to tell through my work. Being able to bring those stories to an international audience makes this experience particularly meaningful.

The three works you are presenting, Ana, Juana, and Sábila, are connected through ideas of healing, ancestral knowledge, memory, and the resilience of African and Afro-Caribbean women. Can you tell us about that connection?

The three works I am presenting at The Armory Show are connected through my exploration of healing, ancestral knowledge, memory, and the resilience of African and Afro-Caribbean women. Each work looks at the ways knowledge of plants, medicine, spirituality, and care has been passed from one generation to another, despite histories of displacement, colonialism, and the suppression of Indigenous and African-descended knowledge.

The paintings of Ana and Juana are inspired by the two sisters of Paula de Eguiluz. Ana was a free Black woman. Juana was enslaved by Antonio de Jaques. Both were born in Hispaniola, and both are connected to the same healing traditions Paula practiced. Rather than representing these women through the colonial narratives that attempted to define or criminalize them, I am interested in reclaiming their intelligence, strength, and relationship to the natural world. I place them within imagined environments filled with medicinal and botanical plants, creating spaces where they can exist with dignity, knowledge, and power.

I also use my imagination to create the work. I am sure that Paula de Eguiluz’s mother was also a healer, and that she taught her daughters her practice. On a research trip in Nigeria I sat with healers and asked them questions, and they had learned their practice from their families.

Sábila brings this historical research into a more personal and contemporary space. Aloe vera becomes a bridge between ancestral knowledge and my own lived experience. I have used aloe vera since childhood as part of my experience with asthma, so the plant carries a deeply personal meaning of healing and survival for me.

Together, these works create a conversation between past and present, ancestor and descendant, collective memory and personal experience. They ask us to consider whose knowledge is remembered, whose knowledge has been erased, and how healing traditions continue to survive through us.

Ana, 2026. Acrylic on canvas, 103.5 × 65.5 in. Photograph by Jonathan Carela.

When you look at these works alongside your earlier paintings, what do you recognize as continuous in your practice, and what feels genuinely new?

When I look at these works alongside my earlier paintings and even my work as a designer, I recognize that the research process has remained very consistent. From the beginning, I have always been curious and interested in looking deeper into ideas, histories, people, and experiences that have had an impact on me, my country, my culture, and the world around me. I am constantly researching, imagining, and asking myself how I can translate those ideas into a visual language.

What has genuinely changed is my understanding of what the work can do for me personally. When I first began painting, one of the main reasons was to find a way to process the loss of my mother. Painting her image in some of my earliest works became a way of connecting with her, keeping her present, and trying to understand something I could not fully understand at the time, her passing.

Creating art as a form of healing is relatively new for me. I have always used art to investigate history and culture, but I am now recognizing that the process can also help me understand my own experiences. In that sense, the work has become both research and a personal form of healing.

Your transition from fashion into visual art happened relatively late compared with the conventional trajectory of an artist. Did you experience that transition as a reinvention, or did you eventually realize that you had been building the same practice all along?

For me, the transition from fashion into visual art was definitely a reinvention. When I left fashion, I did not immediately know that I was going to become an artist. I moved to Taipei, learned Mandarin, and pursued an MBA. My original plan was actually to return to fashion.

When I came back to New York, the pandemic happened shortly afterward, and everything changed. But even before the pandemic, I had already started thinking about creating art. I had never painted before, so there was no conventional path or training behind it. During the pandemic, I began teaching myself how to paint, experimenting and learning through the process.

Looking back, I don’t necessarily think I was secretly building the same practice all along. I really did have to reinvent myself. But I also began to recognize that the skills and experiences I had developed through fashion, my understanding of materials, construction, color, composition, textiles, the body, and creating environments, were already part of the way I thought.

So the transition was a reinvention, but it wasn’t a complete departure. I brought everything I had learned with me. Fashion gave me a foundation, Taipei expanded my worldview, and teaching myself to paint gave me the freedom to discover what could come next.

I think that is still how I work today: I allow each chapter of my life to become material for the next one.

What did fashion teach you about art that you still use every day in the studio?

Always experiment, never be afraid of colors, and don’t follow any rules.

Your practice moves between painting, sculpture, furniture, fashion, and textiles. Do you ultimately think of these as separate practices, or as different manifestations of the same artistic language?

I see them as one artistic practice expressed through different mediums. Painting, sculpture, furniture, and fashion are different tools I use to explore the same ideas, beginning with research, curiosity, and personal experiences.

I let the idea determine the medium it needs to become, whether a painting, sculpture, textile, piece of furniture, or something wearable. Each medium allows me to explore different aspects of my creativity, while moving between them keeps my practice evolving.

Ultimately, I see myself as one artist with one evolving language expressed through different materials and forms.

Textiles have always been part of your creative language through fashion, but they have taken on a different meaning in your recent work. What brought you back to them, and how do you think about them now, as painting, sculpture, garment, architecture, or something else?

Textiles have always been part of my creative language, especially through my years as a fashion designer, but I returned to them at this moment for a much more personal reason. I wanted to create something that could physically express the ideas of protection, love, and remembrance.

The loss of friends to HIV/AIDS brought me back to the intimacy of fabric and the idea of a covering, something that can hold, comfort, and protect. Using woven elastics, canvas, and textiles from Dakar, Senegal, I wanted the material itself to become part of the memorial.

For me, returning to textiles has also been a way of returning to something familiar but seeing it differently. Fashion taught me how to construct with fabric, but now I am using textiles to explore grief, memory, healing, and love. This work has allowed me to understand that materials can carry not only physical form, but also emotion and history.

I think of the textile as something that exists outside those categories. It can be painting, sculpture, architecture, or even a garment, depending on how I use it. The scale gives the material an architectural presence, while the patterns, colors, and textures connect it to painting, and the physicality of the construction brings it into the language of sculpture. What I am really interested in is the ability of fabric to transform space and create a physical experience for the viewer.

You have researched the historical relationship between textiles and the transatlantic slave trade. Can fabric function as a form of historical archive? What can it preserve that written records cannot?

For me, discovering this history completely changed the way I look at textiles. We often associate fabric with beauty, fashion, domestic life, comfort, and cultural identity, but textiles also carry histories of labor, exploitation, migration, trade, and power. Learning that Indian cotton textiles were deeply connected to the networks that supported the transatlantic slave trade made me think about how an object can carry many histories at the same time.

So yes, absolutely. I believe textiles can function as a form of historical archive because they can preserve stories in ways that traditional historical records often cannot. A document can tell us what happened, but a textile can tell us how something felt, how people lived, what they valued, what they wore, how they cared for one another, and how they carried their culture from one place to another.

Fabric can preserve personal and collective memories through patterns, colors, techniques, repairs, stains, embroidery, and the hands that made and used it. These details can reveal histories that may never have been written down, particularly the experiences of women, enslaved people, migrants, and communities whose voices were often excluded from official records.

This is one of the reasons textiles are so important to my practice. I am interested in what fabric can remember. When I work with textiles, I am not only thinking about their physical qualities; I am thinking about the people, journeys, and histories embedded in them.

For me, a textile can become an archive that is alive. It can be touched, transformed, carried, worn, inherited, and reinterpreted. It allows history to exist not only as information, but as something emotional, physical, and deeply human.

Your recent textile work is connected to friends you lost to HIV/AIDS and to the AIDS Memorial Quilt. How does physically constructing something to remember or protect another person change the meaning of the work for you?

Physically constructing something to remember or protect another person changes the meaning of the work for me because the act of making becomes an act of care. Every movement, every woven elastic, and every piece of textile becomes part of the process of remembering. I am not simply creating an image about loss; I am physically spending time with that memory.

The work was created in response to losing close friends to HIV/AIDS, particularly Miguel. The idea of creating a covering came naturally to me because a covering can represent protection, comfort, and love.

At the funeral, his mother pulled me aside. We were both looking at him in the casket. She told me he had been waiting for me at the hospital, that he wanted to see me. I could not make it on time. I will never forget that.

This textile piece was created for him, to cover him and protect him.

I think about the people I lost as people who deserve to be held and remembered, not defined only by how they died.

The connection to the AIDS Memorial Quilt is important because it transforms individual loss into collective remembrance. My work continues that idea, but through my own personal experience and material language.

In making the piece, grief becomes something I can physically work through. The textile becomes a memorial, but it also becomes a form of healing for me. I am creating something that symbolically continues to hold and protect the people I can no longer physically protect.

Charo, 2026. Elastics, textile, canvas and acrylic, 110 × 60 in. To be shown in the exhibition of GLAAD’s third Equity in Media and Entertainment Initiative cohort, advised by Mickalene Thomas. Photograph by Jonathan Carela.

Your first solo exhibition was called Duvet, and it included a painting named for Dédée Bazile, who gathered Dessalines’ body out of the street and buried him when the soldiers who killed him had dared anyone to try. You have made tents for public space, wrapped a found chair in fabric, and now woven a covering for Miguel. Is covering something you think about deliberately, or is it a thread you only recognize looking back?

Yes. I am always researching powerful women, learning about them and placing them at the forefront of my practice, naming the pieces they inspired me to create so that their names will never be forgotten in history.

With my work I want to protect these women. I paint them in resting poses, in beautiful interiors, always relaxing and most of the time having a cigarette. I see these women as my mother. I see them like my mother: powerful, caregivers, revolutionaries.

And the textile for Miguel, yes. Under a sheet, a cover, a duvet, protecting the body.

Black women have been central to much of your earlier work and to your understanding of beauty, labor, aspiration, and history. How has your thinking about the Black feminine changed as your practice has expanded into textiles, sculpture, and more abstract forms?

My thinking about the Black feminine has changed as my practice has expanded. Earlier in my work, I was very focused on representation, placing Black women into spaces that were never intended for them, and allowing them to occupy spaces of beauty, luxury, power, and aspiration.

I wanted to create the images I rarely saw: Black women not as subjects defined by struggle, but as people who could simply exist, rest, dream, and take up space.

As I moved into textiles and sculpture, that idea of representation began to evolve into something more physical and intimate. I became interested not only in placing Black women within these spaces, but in creating things that could hold, cover, shelter, and protect them.

Textile became particularly meaningful because of its relationship to the body and to acts of care. A blanket, a covering, or a shelter can communicate protection in a way that an image alone cannot.

My work has therefore moved from asking, “How do I represent Black women?” to asking, “How can I create a space or object that cares for them?”

The materials allow me to explore beauty, labor, history, vulnerability, and protection simultaneously. I think of the work as creating a world in which Black women are not only seen, but held.

Nearly every painting you make carries a woman’s name. Glenda, Gloria, Nanny Queen, Marie Kingue, Rosa Elegni, Mama Eddy, Elena, and now Ana and Juana. Where do the names come from?

The names come from women I admire, sometimes friends and sometimes important Black Caribbean women. My last two works, Ana and Juana, were the names of Paula de Eguiluz’s sisters.

Sábila, 2026. Triptych, gouache, acrylic and watercolor on paper, 90 × 22 in. Photograph by Jonathan Carela.

You have maintained long relationships with artists including Mickalene Thomas, Kehinde Wiley, and Derrick Adams, dating back to your years in fashion, and you began painting after spending time at Black Rock, the residency Wiley founded in Dakar. What did those relationships, and that time in Senegal, teach you that formal art education could not?

I met Mickalene Thomas, Kehinde Wiley, and Derrick Adams when I was in fashion school, at a time when I was still thinking of myself primarily through fashion. Kehinde was especially important in introducing me to the art world around 2004 and helping me understand that there was a place for me within it.

Those relationships have influenced me far beyond the creative side of my practice. They have also been important in my personal life and have taught me the value of community, mentorship, curiosity, and continuing to learn.

Through them, I learned that being a great artist is not simply about having talent or making objects. It is about being deeply engaged with the world around you.

They taught me the importance of research, of understanding history, asking questions, looking beyond what is immediately visible, and knowing where your ideas come from. They also showed me the importance of education as something that never really ends. You continue learning from artists, museums, books, conversations, travel, and from the people around you.

Most importantly, those relationships taught me that you do not have to build an artistic life alone. Community can challenge you, educate you, inspire you, and help you see possibilities in yourself that you might not have recognized yet. That has become an important part of how I approach my own practice today.

When I travel to Senegal I buy textiles. I am connecting the transatlantic textile trade with my own textile practice.

What are you investigating now that you could not have investigated five or ten years ago?

I have been researching plants for about fifteen years. I was investigating plants for medicinal purposes while I was in Taipei, and even before Taiwan. But what I am investigating now is something I could not have understood five or ten years ago: the use of plants as sources of medicinal knowledge, healing, and love-attraction practices, and the cultural histories carried through that knowledge.

Traveling to Cartagena, the Dominican Republic, Senegal, and Nigeria and speaking with healers about the ways plants are used was a magical investigation for me. I was not simply researching plants as botanical objects; I was learning about the knowledge, rituals, beliefs, and histories connected to them, and how that knowledge has been passed from one generation to another.

These conversations made me think differently about the relationship between nature, the body, spirituality, and cultural memory. They also made me more aware of how much knowledge exists outside of formal institutions and how easily that knowledge can be overlooked or lost.

This research is now entering my visual practice through painting and textiles. I am interested in plants as vessels for memory and as witnesses to migration, colonialism, healing, desire, and survival.

What began as research has become a way for me to reconnect with histories and forms of knowledge that feel both deeply personal and much larger than myself.

When someone encounters your work without knowing your biography, what do you hope they understand through the work itself?

Before someone knows anything about me or my biography, I hope they can feel my respect for beauty and for women through the work itself. I want the viewer to sense that the women I portray are being honored, celebrated, and given space to exist with strength, dignity, and beauty.

I also hope they recognize my love for detail, color, materials, and the environments I create. I want the work to invite people into a world that feels both familiar and imagined, a place where beauty can coexist with history, memory, and cultural identity.

Ultimately, I hope the work communicates a sense of admiration, care, and respect.

José Durán in his studio, the Bronx, New York, 2026. Photograph by Jonathan Carela.

ERIK BERGRIN: THE 8 DISSOLUTIONS EXHIBITION

Dissolution 8 – Emptiness – One starts to become conscious again, the clear light of death manifests. This appears as a clear vacuum-like empty sky. “I visualize the vastness of traveling through space. An open vacuum of blackness with shining stars and colorful nebulae, harnessing the energy of the sun in order to be reborn.”

Morris Museum Announces Fiber Sculpture Installation by Artist Erik Bergrin Exhibition on View January 28 – July 10, 2022

The 8 Dissolutions is a fiber-sculpture installation by New York City-based artist and costume maker Erik Bergrin. A student of Buddhist philosophy, Bergrin explores the transience of the human body and the eternity of the mind in this new collection of work. The exhibition takes its name from the eight dissolutions, a Tibetan Buddhist meditation practice that visualizes one’s mortality in the recurring cycle of death and rebirth on the path to enlightenment. The costumes are entirely handsewn, made from fabrics created by Bergrin using traditional techniques such as weaving and felting, as well as grown from unusual materials such as seaweed, fermented tea, and crystallizations. Some include integrated drums and rattles. A video monitor documents a performance with the costumes making musical sounds with each movement, revealing the multidisciplinary nature of Bergrin’s artistic approach.

“The 8 Dissolutions,” is a Buddhist death process in which the senses and elements shut down in 8 stages. There is a visualization meditation that guides you through the 8 stages. Dissolution 1 starts with the earth element dissolving, as well as your sight. Dissolution 2, is water and sound, etc. I practiced this visualization repeatedly to imagine the pieces. To create the visceral textures that I was seeing, I experimented with developing new kinds of textiles. I developed fabric made of sodium alginate seaweed, spent a year growing leather like materials from kombucha scobies, growing crystals on fabrics, embedded handmade drums in pieces, making bioplastics from seaweed, and melting bismuth to make colorful crystals, along with weaving, coiling, and felting. During the visualization, my hands always wanted to move a certain way, which is why each piece is associated with a mudra, or hand gesture. Each of these mudras is photographed and printed on fabric that was sewn into dresses which will hang behind each piece to act as a shadow. The show has a video component of people wearing the pieces, along with a teacher showing the mudras to each model. Each piece is also associated with a sound that will build up one by one and will play throughout the gallery to accompany the video.

Dissolution 1: Earth and Sight – The element of earth dissolves. The eye sense power deteriorates. The person ceases to see clearly, unable to open or close their eyes. As the earth element dissolves it evokes the experience of the dying person being buried beneath the earth. The visualization of this dissolution brought forth imagery of straps crossing and binding over my body as my arms hung lifeless at my sides sinking back.

In Tibetan Buddhism, meditating on the eight dissolutions, or eight stages of death, allows the practitioner to prepare their consciousness to move into the cycle of rebirth without fear. Erik Bergrin first experienced this visualization meditation at a monastery in Nepal, where he was struck by imagery of colors and textures. Through repeated practice, clear visualizations of each dissolution emerged with a corresponding symbolic hand gesture known as a mudra. Each of the pieces in this exhibition is a representation of Bergrin’s visualizations realized. “Meditating on your own death is a way to realize how precious your life is.” -Erik Bergrin

Dissolution 2: Water and Sound – The element of water dissolves. The ear sense power deteriorates. The person can no longer hear sounds. The body can no longer feel the three types of feeling: pleasure, pain, and neutral. The fluids from the body dry up: urine, saliva, blood, and sweat. The burning heat of red pain creeps up one arm and the uplifting icy blue creeps up the other, meeting at neutral at my neck. My body starts to shrivel and dry up, like a vacuum sucking away all the fluid leaving the fossilized bones remaining. What hangs in the center is the reminder of the sound of where water once was.

Sculptural Processes:

Kombucha Leather developed similarly to kombucha tea. Scobys (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast), water, sugar, and tea are brewed in a large container and fed once a week. The scobys produce a layer on top of the liquid as a way to protect themselves, which after a month is removed. This thick flat sheet of slime dries into a translucent piece of leather after a week. The leather is colored using different types of tea and food coloring during the growing process. It took almost a year to grow enough leather for the pieces in the exhibition.

Seaweed Textile developed from sodium alginate, glycerin, and water mixture then laid over wool roving and sprayed with calcium chloride to harden.

Grown Crystal Textile Pipe cleaners with rubber mat backing are soaked in a bath of borax and water to crystallize. The mixture is then sprayed with translucent tint spray.

Armature Wire and Wax Armature wire is hammered down and wrapped with wax thread to create strands that sound like water when a hand is run over them.

Drums Rawhide is soaked and stretched over a wooden frame and laced together in the back.

Bismuth Silver charms are dipped into melted down bismuth to create colorful bismuth crystals.

The exhibition is curated by the Morris Museum’s Ronald T. Labaco, Director of Exhibitions and Collections/Chief Curator, and Michelle Graves, Curatorial Assistant.

Founded in 1913, the Morris Museum is an award-winning, multifaceted arts and cultural institution serving the public through its exhibitions and performances, which strive to interpret the past and discover the future through art, sound, and motion. The Museum is home to the historic and internationally-significant Murtogh D. Guinness Collection of Mechanical Musical Instruments and Automata. The Museum’s Bickford Theatre is a 312-seat performing-arts facility, offering unique programming in film, jazz, and live performance through its innovative series, Live Arts. As New Jersey’s only Smithsonian Affiliate, it launched Spark!Lab, a dynamic, Smithsonian-created learning space which will inspire young visitors to create, collaborate, and innovate.

Morris Museum
6 Normandy Heights Road
Morristown, NJ 07960

Museum Hours:
Monday – Tuesday, Closed
Wednesday – Sunday, 11:00AM to 5:00PM
https://morrismuseum.org/

NFT COLLECTION OF RICHARD BERNSTEIN

The Estate of Richard Bernstein is proud to announce the first series in a new NFT program of rare and extremely collectible artworks by famed Pop Artist Richard Bernstein. In collaboration with digital art platform Culture Vault, Rory Trifon (president of the estate as well as the late artist’s nephew) has selected a small catalogue of digitally created works by Bernstein featuring subject Andy Warhol as well as Bernstein’s iconic 1984 cover of Grace Jones for Interview Magazine. The Richard Bernstein NFT Collection debuts on February 3rd, 2022, at www.culturevault.com.

It is likely that Bernstein would have thoroughly embraced NFTs were he around today as he was the first Pop Artist to use computer-generated graphics in the early 1980s to create fine art. Bernstein was the first to embrace digital technology which enabled him to distort and transform images which would then be combined with hand painting on oversized canvases.

Bernstein, often cited by Andy Warhol as his favorite artist, was commissioned by Warhol to create the iconic celebrity portraits for the covers of his Interview Magazine from 1972 to 1989. The NFT Collection is an opportune venue to celebrate the artist’s professional alliance in a new medium that both Artists would have surely embraced if they were around today.

The first NFT is titled “Andy Warhol with Red Paint” and features an image of a paint splattered Warhol with a yellow box and red paint splatter in 1990. This was Bernstein’s signature digital piece when it debuted at The Cornerstone Galleries in 1992, curated by Joan Quinn. This NFT will be an edition of 1 and will be accompanied with a framed one-off print as well as a copy of Bernstein’s out of print book and access to VIP events.
The second NFT is titled “Warhol Wallpaper” featuring one of Bernstein’s most famous images from 1973. Warhol is depicted as a floating head, varying in size in perspective and painted in his own silkscreen style. This NFT will be an edition of 10, in the varying colors Bernstein mocked up, and each token holder will receive entry to VIP events as well as a copy of Bernstein’s out of print book, MegaStar from 1984.

The third NFT is titled “Grace Jones”. Richard Bernstein’s contribution to iconic performer Grace Jones’ image cannot be overestimated. Designing the art for most of her album covers from the 70s and 80s, Bernstein alternatively played the role of stylist, confidante, and friend. This image, created for Jones’s 1984 cover of Interview Magazine, brilliantly captures the groundbreaking image Bernstein and Jones created together. This will be an edition of 50 and each token holder will gain access to VIP events including a New York print exhibition in May 2022.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT MAURICIO PADILHA Mauricio@MaoPR.com

SK Manor Hill

Clothing by SK Manor Hill (Fall/ Winter 2019)

Photographer: Jason Rodgers @jasonrodgersphoto
Art Direction: Paul Hamann @pablomoses
Styling: Ian McRae @iannxo
Hair and Grooming: Matthew Tuozzoli @tuozzoli
Featuring: Alioune Badara Fall @aliounebf
Amber Chandler @ambermchandler
Dominic Sondag @skminorhill
and Garfield

Clothing by SK Manor Hill (Fall/ Winter 2019)

CONGO TALES BY PIETER HENKET

The World’s Attention is Brought to the Earth’s Other Amazon Rainforest – Africa’s Congo Basin – in Congo Tales (Random House / Prestel, November 15, 2018)

Adapted for Congo Tales by Congolese philosopher S.R. Kovo N’Sondé and award winning author Wilfried N’Sondé, and put in print (in English, French and Lingala) for the first time in Congo Tales.

In the deep heart of Africa lies a tropical rainforest second only in size to the Amazon – the Congo Basin. It measures 500 million acres, spans 6 nations, and is home to some of the largest swaths of intact tropical rainforest in the world, with the pristine Odzala Kokoua National Park as crown jewel.

Known to ecologists as the world’s second lung, the Congo Basin is the Earth’s other Amazon – as vital to preventing runaway Climate Change as the Brazilian rainforest and as vulnerable to deforestation and abuse. Yet the Congo Basin falls far short of the Amazon when it comes to the world’s awareness of it as a major player in the global environment, a cathedral of nature’s treasures, and a stopgap against looming ecological catastrophe.

Congo Tales (Prestel, November 15th, 2018) is intended to help solve this lack of awareness, and help create a conservation infrastructure for this critical pillar of the world’s fragile ecological balance.

Upturning the traditional conventions of fear-based environmental messaging and the portrayal of Africa solely as a place of plague and war, Congo Tales takes a completely different approach to communicating the urgency of conservation efforts in this region.

In this groundbreaking photo series that was 5 years in the making, national Congolese who live in the Mbomo district of the Congo Basin staged their never-before recorded mythology for fine art portrait photographer Pieter Henket (Lady Gaga, Eddie Redmayne, Mary J. Blige). Henket’s portraits – of dozens of children forming the shape of an Mbomo (or Boa Constrictor); of over a hundred Congolese women assembled at the border of the forest; of Congolese men on the hunt for a mythical bird – make the Congolese, their myths, and the rainforest the stars of Congo Tales, and communicate the magic and mystery of this little understood place, and its incalculable value to the planet.

In the book, editors Eva Vonk (who spent 3 years working closely with people in the Mbomo district to record their mythologies) and Stefanie Plattner (who produced the project) delve into and reveal the wealth of the Congo Basin and its people, illustrating both with Henket’s cinematic and surreal portraiture of the Congolese depicting their legends, tales and lore under the canopy of ancient rainforest from which they sprang.

Channeling the primal heartbeat of one of the world’s most powerful ecosystems and the people who call it home, the mythological tales of the Congolese – of supernatural forces in control of life and death, of ritualistic initiations into adulthood, of the laws of nature that lie outside the laws of people – are revealed as a treasure trove of universal wisdom that is both existential and pragmatic, with the unspoiled Odzala Kokoua National Park as stage and actor.

A groundbreaking book of scholarly anthropology that calls on the work of Joseph Campbell and the Brothers Grimm, and a captivating work of art and photography, Congo Tales is a feat of innovative environmental messaging and cross-cultural and cross-continental collaboration intended to both prevent the loss of this all-important bastion of nature, and reveal its priceless value to the world and our communal future in it.

Henket’s signature style takes inspiration from the use of light in 17th Century Dutch Golden Age painting, known best by Rembrandt’s The Night Watch. Henket, who grew up in The Netherlands, used powerful battery- powered strobe lighting in the rainforest to evoke a similar effect, thus rendering a surreal finish appropriate to the mythology of the Congolese. Proceeds from the sale of Henket’s Congo Tales photographs at Christie’s in January, 2019 go back to supporting the recording of Congolese legends and lore, and to similar story-telling projects in other unsung parts of the world through Tales of Us.

HIROKO KOSHINO: A TOUCH OF BAUHAUS

Please join us on Thursday, November 1^st from 6 to 8 PM at WhiteBox in NYC and meet Hiroko Koshino at the opening of her exhibit, Hiroko Koshino: A Touch of BAUHAUS.

A Touch of BAUHAUS, curated by Kyoko Sato, is part of the WhiteBox Prime SAS (Seminal Artists Series), which honors artists of great repute. Past participants of the WhiteBox Prime SAS include Carolee Schneemann: More Wrong Things, Michael Snow: Snow Alert, Naoto Nagakawa: XXX-1960’s, Vienna Actionists Hermann Nitsch and Günther Brus, Hyman Bloom, Braco Dimitrijevic and Aldo Tambellini to name a few.

Post-World War II Japan found itself in the midst of rapid economic and cultural transformation – one in which growing industries such as technology and fashion shot to the forefront. It was amidst this landscape that a group of young people began rebelling by sporting a preppy, Ivy League look that broke stride with propriety-and time-honored traditions, and celebrated individualism. Known as the “Miyuki Tribe”, with Hiroko Koshino at the helm, talented young fashionistas began reinterpreting traditional Japanese artistic elements through a personalized and radical lens.

Visual artists began to be influenced by various new incoming art notions culled from Abstract Expressionism and Land Art, paralleled by the indigenous and subversive Gutai movement. This fresh shift in artistic perspectives made way for a wave of artistic leaders that included Hiroko Koshino. Building on her belief in the unity of all forms of art-a Bauhaus tenet- the classically trained Koshino used key elements to inform her paintings and sumi-ink masterworks as the basis for her stunning fashion designs, resulting in her recognition as one of the foremost couturiers in Japan.

HIROKO KOSHINO: A Touch of BAUHAUS will, for the first time in New York, reveal how Koshino’s visual artworks inform her high fashion designs. Curated by Kyoko Sato at WhiteBox, the exhibition will include Koshino’s most inventive runway pieces, side-by-side with her signature abstract paintings and sumi-ink works, including-in WhiteBox’s project space-a site-specific eighty-foot-long ink scroll that epitomizes her brilliant combination of art and design as Gesamtkunstwerk, the Bauhaus approach towards a total artwork.

After years of creating riveting artworks inspired by key painters ranging from Jackson Pollock to Gustav Klimt, as well as the Lyrical Abstraction and Tachism movements, Koshino began experimenting with the connection between art and fashion in the serene studio created for her by her colleague, genius architect Tadao Ando, in Ashiya. There she was able to deeply connect with her love for Mother Nature, free from the hustle and bustle demands of Tokyo, while infusing her paintings with a deeply Japanese attitude.

Koshino’s innovative design techniques, based on painting with sumi-ink directly onto the fabric, were the essence of many of her innovative fashion creations. In an essay on Koshino and her works, critic Anthony Haden-Guest writes, “Hiroko’s Sumi-Ink works are wholly beautiful, but not so much so as to overwhelm. They do not exclude, they embrace.”

Early in the history of Japanese art, Nihonga, tradition-based Japanese paintings, used to be exhibited in separate spaces from yōga, or artwork with Western influences. A push for change and a reconciliation of the two energies was beginning to happen. Thus Haden-Guest points out that while Hiroko’s work is “delicate, forceful and remarkably various … it embodies this accommodation, in her fashion, as in her art,” fusing the two styles.

In 1977, Hiroko joined the cutting-edge group “TD6” (Top Designers 6), presenting her fashion collection in Tokyo for the first time. Since, she has been showcasing twice a year. In 1978, she became the first Japanese designer to join Alta Moda in Rome, a sensational show earning her a thirty-page article in the Italian edition of Harper’s Bazaar.

In 1982 Hiroko Koshino created International Inc., leading the “Designer’s Character Brand” boom that turned fashion into a top industry in Japan. Subsequently, she debuted her brand and her signature prêt-à-porter collection at the Paris Fashion Week, to great acclaim.

Koshino considers herself an artist since childhood. She got started drawing characters from Manga and Anime, attending Kabuki plays regularly, influenced as well by the Bunraku national puppet theater of Japan. Six decades later, Koshino unabashedly continues her painting career, having created, by now, well over 1,900 paintings using a wide variety of techniques and inventive, unorthodox paint applications.

Her artwork continues as a wellspring of inspiration flowing right into her fashion design. “I can continue designing because I paint,” Koshino explains. Indeed, her paintings frequently function as brainstorm-drafts for what will later become one of the extraordinary design creations that she refers to as “the architecture of the body”, all along carrying as part of her signature, the elemental Japanese sense of sculptural ‘high volume’ in her couture.

Although her artwork and design are deeply intertwined, Koshino explains there is a definite separation between the two camps. “The process of production in fashion and art is very different,” she says. “When I make art, I can express my spirit directly. It is very personal. When I create fashion, I need to think about what people want, and I need to design what people will buy, so it unequivocally contains a business aspect.”

–Kyoko Sato

Koshino’s works will be showcased at WhiteBox with an opening reception from 6 to 8 p.m. on November 1st. The exhibition runs through December 1st.

“I can continue designing because I paint,” Koshino says. “Both design and art are my creation, and I cannot divide them.” This thought reminds people of Bauhaus-style “total work of art” (Gesamtkunstwerk), which became the title of her New York debut exhibition at the WhiteBox [HIROKO KOSHINO: A TOUCH OF BAUHAUS (329 Broome Street); Curator Kyoko Sato (Nov. 1-Dec. 1, 2018)]

FASHION INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY LECTURE BY HIROKO KOSHINO

Thursday, November 1, 2018 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM

Fashion Institute of Technology

227 W 27th St, New York, NY 10001

Feldman C501

About WhiteBox:
WhiteBox, on its 20th anniversary remains a non-profit art space aiming for total invention catalyzing the tenor of the times. It serves as a platform for contemporary artists to develop and showcase new sitespecific work, and is a laboratory for unique commissions, exhibitions, special events, roundtables, and arts education programs, providing an opportunity to experience an artist’s practice in a meaningful way, socially inspired free from market constraints. WhiteBox artistic vision provides hard to pigeon-hole artists with sustained exposure, creating an ideal environment for more in-depth interaction between sophisticated as well as community-bound New York audiences and artists’ practices. It achieves this by inviting local and international emerging and established artists to respond to its exhibition space with leading-edge interventions, performances, and developing long-term inspired programming that allows them to develop projects and engage with audiences. The artists who exhibited at WhiteBox tend to defy easy categorization.

Special thanks to The Costume Institute, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and Nao Takekoshi.

CELAYA BROTHERS GALLERY

Celaya Brothers Gallery (Mexico City), in collaboration with INEZ SUEN (Brooklyn) is pleased to announce its first participation in TX Contemporary Art Fair

Celaya Brothers Gallery is presenting a selection of artworks by Agostino Iacurci (Italy), Camila Rodrigo (Peru), Josh Reames (USA), Juan Carlos Coppel (Mexico), and Mathew Zefeldt (USA) at Booth 517 at George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, Texas October 4-7 with special exhibitions by Houston’s own, Rene Garza (USA). TX Contemporary will begin with the Opening Night Preview (Thursday, October 4, 6-10pm) and will open to the public October 5-6 (11am-7pm) and October 7 (12-6pm).

The exhibition pieces discuss the relationship between man and nature by way of still lifes, burning landscapes and eroded mountains. The artists explore -in various disciplines such as photography, sculpture, and painting and in a wide range of styles – how capitalism has driven societies to perceive progress as a (de)construction and to understand humanity as the opposite of nature.

Agostino Iacurci – Through his work with synthetic forms and bright colors, by means of an essential language, Agostino Iacurci is able to manage multiple layers of interpretation. This approach sets his tales on the perennial threshold between innocence and artifice, serenity and catastrophe; on a magnetic tension that is the interpretative key to our very existence. His recurrent themes include self-perception, uncertainty, imagination, and play. His work has a cynical and critical vision of reality —pessimistic at times— setting the stage for drama, and at the same time sublimating it, alleviating it. Iacurci’s work challenges the limits of sinuosity by presenting an image that seems familiar and innocent but is, fundamentally, malicious. And in that uncertainty lays its richness, a half-open door that leads to other interpretations.

● Agostino Iacurci’s work has been exhibited at the MACRO Museum in Rome, Italy; the Italian Cultural Institute of New York, USA; the Media Library of Orly in France and the Biennial of Urban Art in Moscow, Russia.
● Has collaborated with Adidas, Urban Outfitters, Penguin Books, La Repubblica, TBWA, Mailchimp, Laterza, Minimum fax, Herman Miller, L’ Unità, Orecchio acerbo, Sugar Music, Edizioni Lapis, , Cielo Tv, Smemoranda, WALLS_Contemporary Public Art, Rat Creatives, Roma 3 University, B5 Production and more.

Camila Rodrigo works with photography, sculpture and installation to reflect on the effects of erosion and wear, focusing on the idea of progress as a (de)construction, a contrast between past and future. Her images examine the passage of time, the transformation of the natural space parallel to the reorganization of society.

● Finalist in the 2010 Lacoste Elysée Prize
● Exhibited at the National Museum of Lima, Peru; the Museum Rosphoto in St. Petersburg,  Russia; the Musée de L’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland; and the Palais de l’Árchevéché in Arles,  France
● Part of several private collections such as Juan Mulder (Lima, Peru), Eduardo Hoeschield (Lima,  Peru), Jorge Villacorta (Lima, Peru), Fola (Buenos Aires, Argentina)
● Published in: 77 Artistas Peruanos Contemporáneos by Mario Testino, YOUTH by: Prestel  (Random House), Re Generation: tomorrow photographers today (Aperture foundation), and E l Placer es más importante que la Victoria (Tasneem Gallery), among others.

Josh Reames’ paintings use contemporary tools available on the Internet to create surreal patchworks of contemporary signs and symbols that portray the flattening of artistic hierarchies in our postmodern world. Reames employs computer drawing applications and Google images to create assemblages of “modern hieroglyphs.” His work considers abstraction and painting in relation to the Internet and is informed by the strange, new space where a majority of viewership takes place: online through blogs and websites. His conceptual framework functions as a kind of filtration device for cultural byproducts and its attending relativism, flattening signs, text and symbols, cultural objects and icons to the same-level composition, thereby removing their hierarchy.

● Represented by industry leading galleries.
● Named one of the 30 Emerging Artists During Frieze Week by Artsy
● Juror’s pick in the 2011 New American Paintings, Midwest Edition #95
● Was artist-in-residence at Ox Bow (funded by Joan Mitchell Foundation)
● Exhibited at the Museo Di Capodimonte in Naples, Italy; Urban Institute of Contemporary Art in  Michigan; Luis de Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles, The Hole in New York, and Guerrero Gallery in  San Francisco, among others.
● Published in Artcritical, Artnews, Artsy, Hyperallergic, New American Paintings, Chicago Tribune,  Chicago Art Review, among others.

Juan Carlos Coppel  The burning of tires is a practice carried out by farmers to raise the temperature of the fields and avoid the crops to frost during the winter preserving months of work, one of the main economic activities of the state. This procedure poses an ethical and environmental problem related to the ecological devastation of the agricultural field, even in the context of a rationalized production. The images, taken in a field to the north of Sonora, play ironically with the nineteenth-century painting by pondering, on a romantic mood, a concern of our time.

● Took specialized courses in photography with Jay Dickman (Pulitzer Award winner) at the National Geographic, in Paris with Manuel Abellán and at the International Center of Photography in New York.
● Won the Acquisition Prize in Fotoseptiembre and the Acquisition Prize in the XV Bienal de Artes Visuales del Noroeste.
● Exhibited in the National Center for the Arts CENART (MX), Sonora Museum of Art MUSAS (MX), the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (USA), among others.
● He was invited to the 4th edition of Salón Acme (MX), the XVII Biennial of Photography in Centro de La Imagen (MX), the VII Biennial of Visual Arts MIRADAS in Tijuana (MX), Guatephoto (GT) and Foto España (SPA).
● He was member of the 2016-2017 Young Creators Program of the National Fund for Culture and Arts FONCA and the Contemporary Photography Program in North Mexico.
● He is part of the private collections of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California and the Sonora Museum of Art in Mexico.

Mathew Zefeldt – His work uses representational imagery as an element within a larger composition. It’s less about what the repeated image represents necessarily, but rather the interplay and relationships of the parts to the whole, and each other— reflecting the pluralist landscape we find ourselves in today. Zefeldt uses images from our life and culture, to reproduce them in an almost lifeless, systematic way. His interest in the aesthetics of digital collage is addressing the multiple visual languages and bringing them together in one plane, creating an overlay of styles and gestures that echo the fragmented, heterogeneous nature of contemporary reality.
● One of two national recipients of the Dedalus MFA Fellowship in 2011
● Exhibited at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, the Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis, the  Minneapolis Institute of Arte, the Minnesota Museum of American Art, the Marin Museum of  Contemporary Art, Circuit 12, Joshua Liner Gallery, and Lisa Cooley among others.
● Published in LA Times, Art Ltd., New American Paintings, and Art Fuse, among others.

Rene Garza is a New York based Artist that is in residency in Houston, TX where he was raised. Garza has spent over 15 years as a fashion and celebrity stylist traveling the world in a business ruled by visceral aesthetics. Using this time to create a body of work that reflects his long standing love of conceptual art. As an artist in many mediums, Garza notes his inspirations usually comes from travel, minimalism, geometry, dark gothic and romanticism. Garza currently has a public art installation in Houston, Texas called “A Moment” that covers an entire building’s facade and is meant to inspire calmness in our busy lives. “A Moment” follows up the exhibition of a drawing of graphite on paper at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

ABOUT Celaya Brother Gallery – IG @celayabrothers

Celaya Brothers Gallery (CBG) is a unique space that challenges the creative limits of the participating artists. A contemporary art gallery with a proactive offer that invites international artists to develop unique concepts and defy the parameters of their time.

ABOUT INEZ SUEN – IG @inezsuenart

INEZ SUEN is a multi-service international creative company for a changing art market. INEZ SUEN offers a wide range of services such as strategic planning, advising and consulting, and art exhibition production.

ABOUT TX Contemporary

Texas Contemporary, Houston’s leading contemporary and modern art fair, brings top galleries to the area’s discerning collector base. Now going into its seventh edition, Texas Contemporary 2018 will feature 65 exhibitors and an innovative program of special projects and public installations.

RAUL DE NIEVES

Among a menagerie of rainbow-hued, glittering, plastic beaded life-sized figures, standing like a proud father overlooking his artistic creations, the charmingly unique Raúl de Nieves shares his artistic rituals with us in his cathedral of creations.

Photography by Tiffany Nicholson | Interview by Mariana Valdes Debes

Blending the lines between the human and the artificial, Raúl de Nieves’ instantly recognizable shoes, masks, and humanoid figures are at once fantastical, desirous art pieces, yet remain relatable and human. Located in the heart of Bushwick, Brooklyn, NY, de Nieves has created a studio filled with beads, fringe, ephemera, and anthropomorphized beings who appear to dance and interact with each other.and it is within that studio where we met the artist and sat down to discuss his art and unique perspective.

Born in Michoacan, Mexico, immigrating to the United States at the age of nine to California, and following the winding path to New York City, Raúl has made a name for himself and cut a swatch of color through the country. In our current state of political turmoil, climate change, and war, it is a breath of fresh air to see the talent that emanates from each piece of art that de Nieves creates as well as from the artist himself.

Here, Mariana Valdes Debes, an international art promoter of Mexican artists, sits in conversation with Raúl for Iris Covet Book.

Hello Raúl!

Hi Mariana, it’s nice to talk to you.

Nice to talk to you as well, I think your work is amazing! I want to start from the beginning and ask how growing up in Michoacan, Mexico influenced your decision to enter into the world of art?

Growing up in Mexico, especially in Michoacan, was really enriching through the different cultures, craftsmen, and artisans. My family was always really pushing for us to see what Mexico had to offer. I remember seeing artisans working in their community, and I came to the United States with that knowledge and those memories. I’m not trying to emulate what I saw, but I am creating these narratives through performances and storytelling, painting, installation, and at the end it’s about creating experiences for yourself and for others to be part of.

Your exhibition last summer “El Rio” was an analysis of the western cultural view of death and the antithetical idea of death as an “ecstatic mystery of life” – how did that concept come to fruition?

I’ve experienced a lot of death in my family, with my friends, and it’s something that we all have to face at one point. My father passed away when I was very young, and it helped me understand that it’s a part of life. Obviously we mourn when someone passes away, but how do we continue to celebrate their lives and what does that mean? To understand that they are not physically here, but emotionally they are closer to me now than ever. Having a really close family member pass away is one of the scariest things, yet it’s also like becoming closer to that person. It’s something that I had to experience and move past.

The majority of your body of work is comprised of fantastical humanoid creatures made of glued beads and other miscellaneous non-traditional material— how did the decision of using these materials come about?

The bead has been utilized by many cultures, but somehow we forget that it’s this beautiful little piece of material that can transform in so many different ways. I went to New Orleans during Mardi Gras and came back with a suitcase full of beads. From then on it just made a lot of sense. All of a sudden they just started to appear more and more in my life.

Well the beaded shoes you created in your earlier work are really just to die for. Every time I see them I just wonder what it feels like to wear them.

They are actually really uncomfortable. I think that’s the best part about it—they are beautiful objects of desire, but when you actually put them on they hurt. When I wear these objects in my performances, it becomes part of this struggle to portray myself as this specific character. I don’t know, it’s kind of magical. Sometimes we want these beautiful objects, but they are obviously not the most practical things we should long for, but we still do.

In an interview with MoMA, you stated that one sculpture, Day(Ves) of Wonder, took you seven years to complete but you never gave up on it. How does the process of creating each labor-intensive sculpture strengthen or teach you as an artist, and do you think that the number of years changed the idea behind the piece over time?

The work is made completely of beads and was a very complicated piece to build. I started to make these huge sculptures and was fantasizing about what it would be like to create a full, life-size figure out of beads. It took me so long because there was a lot of trial and error. The piece spoke back to me and taught me that every time I felt like I was failing, there was a possibility that it could continue to work as long as I had the ability to go forward. Till this day, it’s one of my favorite works. Day(Ves) of Wonder derives from my mom’s daycare called “Days of Wonder”, and I was thinking how interesting it is for my mom to have these small periods of time with these kids as they grow up. I think this piece had this same idea of learning from each experience. I don’t know when I’ll have another moment to work on something for that long, or if I need to, but it really gave me so much understanding to know that every time I went back and started working on the piece, it was teaching me something in return. Maybe that’s why that piece is so celebrated, because people feel that energy within its expression and within its movement.

You never gave up and you went through stages creating the piece, becoming a master of the process.

Yeah, exactly! There’s beauty in creating this object that doesn’t have a moving life or a soul. Through our emotions and the experiences that we project into these objects, the energy that resonates with the viewer creates the idea of a life behind it. To me, the sculpture is of a seven year-old child because of the time that I spent with it and how I saw myself growing. It was an ambitious task to take on and I don’t want to reproduce another one because this piece lives on to be a celebration of an experience and a time. I still question what that piece actually continues to mean to me. That’s the beauty of art, you can work on something forever. As humans we’re constantly doing that; we’re always working on who we are and trying to figure out what it means to be human.

That brings me to my other question. Surrounded by these figures every day, do they develop personalities and life stories of their own as you become attached to them?

Yeah, of course! It’s amazing to build each piece with its own identity, and this identity can be processed through the relationship of the other works next to one another. I like to believe that we live in a fantasy world and we should give ourselves some freedom; life doesn’t necessarily always have to be so concrete. As children, we get this beautiful time of our life to dream and imagine, and then we get to a certain age and give up on that. I constantly imagine myself to be this fantastical person, even if it’s just for a moment.

The performance aspect of my work allows me to tap into these roles that I can’t necessarily inhabit on an everyday basis. It’s a great gift to be able to perform these silly experiences or cathartic moments through these characters, and there’s comfort in putting on a mask and allowing yourself to not really be seen as human, but to be something fantastical. Having this ability to tap out is really cool and I think that’s why a lot of cultures use costumes and perform these beautiful dances, plays, and fables to tap out.

I want to ask about your use of vibrant colors. How did your very maximal use of colors develop over time?

Colors can create very emotional experiences, and I guess that’s why I tend to use so many bright hues of colors. I’m trying to learn how to really control what the color can do, what it means, and what it can put out into the world. In a way, color is like language, it allows for people to feel a certain way. The simplicity of these tools that we already have and putting them into artwork is not necessarily about following rules but following common sense and what feels natural.

Like just going toward the aesthetic of it, the feeling and the emotion that comes through the first time.

Yeah, for awhile my least favorite color was red, so for a year I only wore red to understand why. I had so many different experiences with strangers asking me why I was wearing all red. People would come up to me and try to tell me what they felt red meant to them. It was really interesting to do this exercise for a year, but I’ll probably never do it again.

Well that must have felt like a performance. Yeah, exactly. I wasn’t really intentionally trying to make it a performance, but it was a very interesting exercise. As a Mexican-American artist, how do you feel about the political climate in both countries? Do the current political events inspire or influence your work?

The current President having these views towards Mexico is very archaic. But I realize it’s been happening since the beginning of time, as hard as it is to believe. I try not to be too political about it, because I know it’s not just the United States versus Mexico; it’s the world against one another. When will it end? Who knows? You would think by now we could unite and make this place even better than it is. We are made of the same matter; we need to understand that we will be stronger together. The idea of immigration is beautiful. It has allowed me to believe in acceptance for all. It is beautiful to know that you can somehow be who you are and be accepted and be part of a new nation. That idea has influenced a lot of my work. Everyone has a different experience with immigrating, and in the end I am thankful that I was accepted into a new culture, and that maybe I can influence more people to believe that this is a positive possibility.

A quick scroll through your Instagram reveals an interest in religion and historical references. Where does this interest come from?

Well, I’m a spiritual person. I have a lot of faith, and not just in history or the idea of religion. I like feeling that there is a higher power, or that perhaps believing is what creates a higher power. For me, spirituality is a way of life and it helps to ground myself and cope with all of these catastrophes happening around us.

What do you view as your biggest personal accomplishment to date and why?

Self-acceptance. I’ve been able to really accept myself, and not just myself, but also the people around me. In a way, that’s a huge accomplishment. I think it’s self-love and acceptance that’s made me as open as I am, and as a result I can be my true self.

What can we expect next from you?

I’d like to make art more accessible, to create more experiences that can be accessible not just inside the art world, but also outside. I don’t know whether that means creating public artworks, or if that even changes anything, but I just want to really feel like there is more openness to everything.

And in 10 years?

In 10 years? Maybe I’ll have a dog.

CIRCADIAN LANDSCAPE BY JESSICA ANTOLA

Jessica Antola’s debut monograph is set in contemporary Sub-Saharan Africa and debuts with Damani Books. For the project, Antola traveled mostly by car to capture everyday life in Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Senegal, and Ethiopia from 2011 to 2014. Each image reflects the astonishing variety of ways people create and define themselves daily through dress and ritual, work and play.

The photographs follow a nonlinear path and trace the variety of ways people live their lives. None of the images were posed; none of the backgrounds were created — there are two men dressed head-to-toe in elaborate African wax textiles who share a motorcycle; a gold jewelry-clad Kumasi king performs a warrior dance; and a girl in an oversized straw hat steers a boat affixed with a patchwork sail.

Tofinu Girls, Benin 2014

“The Tofinu people of Ganvie built houses on stilts in Lake Nokoué during the 16th and 17th centuries to escape capture by Fon warriors and avoid being sold to European slave traders. This location provided a safe haven for the Tofinu people, who still live here and use boats for transport.”

Lundi and His Shoes, Burkina Faso 2014

“We drove deep into Burkina Faso to visit the Lobi people, ‘the children of the forest.’ Their strong ties to the spirit world were evident from the shrines around their clay homes. Lundi, who was born on a Monday, was wearing an oversized patterned shirt that had been carefully repaired several times. I felt his pride in his clothing and indestructible shoes.”

Brothers at the Mami Wata Festival, Benin 2014

“African and Dutch wax textiles are important to West African history, folklore, tradition, and identity. Numerous times I saw a mother with her children all dressed head to toe in the same print. Bridal dowries often include several symbolic wax fabrics to ensure desirable things for a marriage, such as fertility, prosperity, and love.”

Egungun Child Spirit, Benin 2014

“The Egungun masquerades represent the spirits of the departed Yoruba ancestors, but locals say that they actually are the deceased. During this Egungun ceremony in the Dassa region, spectators immediately collapsed as if they had died when spirits touched them. Moments later, they were resurrected to rejoin the celebration.”

African Soil, Ghana 2014

“This photograph was taken on a road in rural Ghana that was under construction by a Chinese company. The earth was being leveled and red dust blanketed the landscape. The first time I visited Kenya, the rich, red soil stained the white soles of my running shoes. I liked carrying this physical reminder of Africa with me once I returned home.”

Hamar Woman, Ethiopia 2013

“Around 430 BCE, the Greek historian Herodotus wrote of Libyan women in garments of goat leather with hair “fringed at the edges, and colored with vermilion.” I was reminded of this in the Omo Valley when I saw Hamar women with their hair covered in a mixture of red ocher and ghee wearing beaded goat skins.”

Khat Market, Ethiopia 2013

“Ethiopia has dangerous roads and thus sometimes apocalyptic scenery, like overturned cargo trucks with blood on the driver’s seat and bees swarming the crushed produce in the back. The faster the trucks move, the more money the drivers make. Khat, a legal narcotic and major cash crop in Ethiopia, is used heavily by truck drivers and contributes to the carnage.”

Circadian Landscape by Jessica Antola is available for purchase at Damiani Books