Exhibitions
RAMEKON O’ARWISTERS: SCHISM
September 10, 2025
Following the success of the solo exhibition HOUSE OF (2024–2025) at the Craft Contemporary Museum in Los Angeles, Patricia Sweetow Gallery presents SCHISM through October 18, 2025, marking Ramekon O’Arwisters’ first solo exhibition at the gallery in Downtown Los Angeles.
The term schism, by definition, refers to fracture, division, dissonance within the systems of beliefs and rules that structure relationships, politics, religion, and community. The choice of this title does not so much evoke an inner conflict within the artist, but rather acknowledges the chaotic shifts and fluctuations affecting notions of safety and predictability. For the African American community, systemic targeting, excess, and coded languages are hardly new: the core of this exhibition lies in the necessity, as a Black and queer subject, of navigating a landscape filled with hazards and transforming it into an unstable terrain of coded abstraction.
On view are the iconic bound leather sculpture Black on Black, tapestries from the Bound in Black series, and a selection of black-and-white self-portraits. Through these works, O’Arwisters probes the tension between abyss and beauty: rounded leather pouches, torn fabrics, ceramic shards, and black zip ties combine to form cultural totems that embody drag couture, the memory and imagination of Black culture, African American quilting, and the symbolic language of religion.
The Bound in Black tapestries articulate a narrative that is both personal and historical, rooted in the dramatic history of the Underground Railroad. The escape from slavery required a rigorously codified system of shared signals: indicators of safe houses, detours, alerts of danger, and assurances of protection. Through railroad terminology, agents along the route were instructed by conductors to expect “packages, Bound in Black,” often hidden in wagons in plain sight, beneath boards and rags. The network of the Freedom Train undertook this perilous historic journey, contributing to the salvation of over one hundred thousand lives.
O’Arwisters’ biography is rooted in a childhood spent in the segregated South during the Civil Rights Movement. In that hostile context, quilting with his grandmother represented a place of refuge, where he felt “embraced, important, and special.” These memories inspired the series Mending (2016), hybrid crochet/ceramic sculptures created with ordinary household ceramics, which marked the beginning of his artistic practice.
With the series Cheesecake (2019), the artist transformed his work from broken fragments into fully conscious and determined sculpture. The semantic complexity of the term “Cheesecake,” used to objectify sexualized and attractive bodies, did not escape him: O’Arwisters embraced it, subverting its derogatory connotation and turning it into a declaration of identity. In these works, embroidered and embellished fabrics intertwine with ceramics donated by students and faculty from California State University at Long Beach, giving rise to sculptural hybrids in which danger and seduction coexist in a bold process of self-affirmation.
BLACK on BLACK #3 | 2025 | leather, zip ties, assorted metalic objects, ceramic | 40 x 14 x 18
inches | RO 108
Bitten (2022) continues and expands on the reflections of Cheesecake and Flowered Thorns (2020–21). In the latter, sharp ceramic shards evoke biblical references to Adam and Eve, symbols of original sin derived from sexual pleasure. Bitten amplifies this language, intertwining soft and sharp elements with instruments of punishment and threat — black zip ties, ropes, clamps — in a tight dialogue between attraction and danger. O’Arwisters thus recontextualizes the dimension of risk as an erotic entanglement of fantasy and play, situating sculpture on a new metaphorical plane.
Born in Kernersville, North Carolina, O’Arwisters earned a Master of Divinity from Duke University Divinity School in 1986. He has participated in numerous residency programs, including the McLaughlin Foundation Award (2021) for The Project Space at Headlands Center for the Arts, the Artist-in-Residence program at the de Young Museum, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Recology San Francisco Artist in Residence Program, and the Vermont Studio Center.
He has received major grants and awards, including a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2020/21); Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue (New York); the San Francisco Foundation; the Cultural Equity Initiatives program of the San Francisco Arts Commission; the Black Artists Fund in Sacramento; and the Eureka Fellowship awarded by the Fleishhacker Foundation in San Francisco.
Recent museum exhibitions include House of (Craft Contemporary Museum, Los Angeles, 2025); Crafting Radicality: Bay Area Artists from the Svane Collection (De Young Museum of Art, 2023); FIGHT AND FLIGHT: CRAFTING A BAY AREA LIFE (San Francisco Museum of Craft and Design); Making in Between: Gender Identities in Clay (MIB:GIC) (American Museum of Ceramic Art, AMOCA); Queer Threads (San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles); and the solo exhibition Freeform and Razor Sharp (Museum of the African Diaspora). Upcoming projects include Unbound, Art Blackness and the Universe, curated by Key Jo Lee, at MoAD; and EnMasse, Accumulation & Abundance in Contemporary Sculpture at the Fuller Craft Museum in 2026, curated by Beth McLaughlin.
His practice has received wide critical attention, with articles and features in Hyperallergic (2025), Artillery Magazine (“Artist Takeover,” 2025), Essence Magazine (2025), as well as the video production In the Studio by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Ramekon O’Arwisters