Elisa D’Arrigo

Elisa D’Arrigo’s work begins with an array of hollow, mostly cylindrical and rectilinear forms hand-built from clay slabs — basic forms that she manipulates wet in a period of intense improvisation. The “postures” that result allude to the body in a gestural and even visceral manner, exuding a figural presence. Their necessary hollowness conjures an animation from within, conflating color, surface and sculptural form within the context of the glazed ceramic vessel. D’Arrigo’s process is one of excavation and discovery — improvisation reveals forms that are oddly familiar, attached to distant memories, or tied to an intrinsic humor. In her 2019 catalogue essay for Elizabeth Harris Gallery, esteemed writer Nancy Princenthal described D’Arrigo’s work as “a series of alarmingly potent little ceramic figures that engage our propensities for reverie, humor and perhaps most satisfying, deep human recognition.”

D’Arrigo was born and raised in the Bronx (b. 1953) and lives and works in New York, NY. Her work is held in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Everson Museum of Art, The Mead Art Museum, The High Museum of Art, The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, and The Weatherspoon Art Museum. Recent exhibitions includes, Shapes From Out of Nowhere: Ceramics from the Robert A. Ellison Jr. Collection. Her work is currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of their permanent collection. D’Arrigo’s work has been reviewed in Hyperallergic, Two Coats of Paint, The New York Times, Art in America, Artnews, Sculpture Magazine, Partisan Review, Art Papers, Art Spiel, Too Much Art and The New York Observer, among others.

Pilar Agüero Esparza

Pilar Agüero-Esparza is recognized for her installations, paintings, and objects reflecting the palette and politics of skin tone, specifically Brown and Black skin. The gallery recently exhibited her paintings, which are a hybrid of formal, hard-edged geometric abstraction, accentuated by her coded color palette, intersecting with her family’s tradition of huarache-making (woven leather Mexican sandals). The paintings assume the direct, flat linear approach of geometric abstraction, but with a palette describing hierarchies of color, mitigated by gridded intersecting leather strips. She extolls the craft and indigeneity of her family’s Mexican history, electrifying disparate and formidable concepts. In lesser hands, the collision of material, practice, heritage, and aesthetics might implode, but instead the elegant grace of the woven and the symmetry of the hard-edged present a striking attunement—a singular approach to how Agüero-Esparza navigates the politics of color.

Pilar Agüero-Esparza received a BA in Art from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an MFA in Spatial Art from San Jose State University. In 2025, she will receive the prestigious Eureka Fellowship Award from the Fleishhacker Foundation in San Francisco. Agüero-Esparza has exhibited her work in institutions including the San Jose Museum of Art, Triton Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, the De Young Museum, and the Montalvo Arts Center. In 2017, her work was featured in the exhibition “The U.S.-Mexico Border: Place, Imagination, and Possibility” at the Craft Contemporary Museum, Los Angeles, as part of the Getty Foundation Southern California initiative Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, an ambitious exploration of Latin American and Latino art. In 2019, the U.S.-Mexico Border exhibition traveled to Lille, France, as part of the Eldorado Lille 3000 arts festival. In 2022, as an artist-in-residence and Lucas Artist Fellow, she was commissioned to create a large-scale outdoor work for the exhibition “Claiming Space: Refiguring the Body in Landscape” at the Montalvo Arts Center.

Wakana Kimura

Wakana Kimura is a painter whose subjects are traditional Buddhist Mandala paintings found throughout Japan, of which there are thousands. While Wakana’s large-scale paintings are bold and spectacular, the act of making and reinterpreting a Mandala made only by male priests is a subversive act since, as a woman, she is not allowed to paint Mandala’s with Buddhist iconography. Before beginning her practice of painting her contemporized, graffiti-like Mandala’s, she considered studying the restoration of Japanese Mandala’s, only to be shut out of the field because of her gender. So begins the fascinating journey of Wakana Kimura’s recondite painting practice.

“Out of a swirling mass of black ink brushstrokes appears a fearsome blue figure, with bulging eyes and fangs, wielding a sword in one hand and a rope in the other. This is Fudō Myō-ō, “The Immovable One,” a powerful and beloved deity in Japanese Buddhism. One of the five Kings of Mystical Knowledge and the wrathful counterpart of the Cosmic Buddha, Fudō symbolizes firmness of spirit and the determination to destroy evil.

In this new work, LA Mandala, as in all her Buddhist paintings, Wakana Kimura portrays Fudō according to iconographic conventions but adds her own youthful, dynamic style. Traditionally Fudō is surrounded by a halo of flames. Here Kimura sends flame-like jets of red pigment stabbing outward into the darkness, where they intersect with delicately drawn gold wave patterns, lotuses, and other traditional Japanese motifs. The overall effect is a tornado-like artistic mash-up, both abstract and figural, Western and Eastern, old and new.

In her 2016 painting One trifle-beset night, t’was the moon, not I, that saw the pond lotus bloom (whose title references a poem written by the Japanese Buddhist priest Saigyō [1118–1190] and translated by David McLeod), a Buddhist deity is almost concealed within Kimura’s vividly colored abstraction. At the heart of the four-panel horizontal painting is the bodhisattva Samantabhadra (in Japanese, Fugen) astride an elephant. Fugen is considered by many Buddhists to represent action and practice, while his brother, Manjushri, who rides a lion, represents spiritual insight. Here, amid strong black calligraphic lines and washes of turquoise and lapis pigment, Kimura outlines the details of the elephant, the deity’s robes, and the striations of the lotus petals on his throne with the painstaking precision of ancient Buddhist temple artists. But she covers the creature’s head and legs in tiny dots and embellishes his body with lotus flowers, transforming the elephant and deity into ghostlike elements within an abstract composition.

To create these works, Kimura undergoes a sort of mixed-media meditation. As her ritual tools she uses marker pens and sumi ink, watercolor, vinyl, and acrylic on washi paper. Beginning at the center of the paper and then working outward, she builds up the image layer by layer. “Each mark has its own unique identity,” she explains, “and each mark interacts with another mark in its own unique way. All of the marks together represent an individual conceptual structure.” Her placement of the various motifs and patterns evolves naturally as the image expands outward from the central sheet in a sort of ripple effect. “As with drops of rain in a pond, each drop forms a concentric circle that joins with another concentric circle. Each mark enables communication and creates conversation.”
— Meher McArthur, Power and Pattern: The Dynamic Buddhist Paintings of Wakana Kimura, 2023

Wakana Kimura was born in 1978 in Izu, Shizuika, Japan. She lives and works in Los Angeles and Japan. She received her MFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 2011 and a BFA from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2002. Kimura is the recipient of the 2023 COLA Independent Artist Project, Los Angeles; 2017-2020 Robertson Recreation Center mural from the Department of Cultural Affairs, Los Angeles, and in 2013 received a commission from the Los Angeles Metro, Through the Eyes of the Artist. Museum exhibitions include RSVP Los Angeles: The Project Series at Pomona, Pomona College Museum of Art, Claremont; IMA, Hinokisoken, Museum Meiji-Mura, Aichi, Japan, and Invoke, Udatsu no Kogei Kan Museum, Fukui.

Reyah

Reyah’s nude self-portraits are classic compositions, until the viewer registers yards of manipulated rope coursing round their body. Dre Hudson is an artist and bodybuilder, who gave agency to his nonbinary alter ego Reyah, releasing Hudson from binary gender assumptions in the studio. Reyah composes, costumes, and photographs themself using rope as regal motifs of pageantry. Reframing rope from its legacy of violence and restraint liberates the artist from it’s historical weight. Alone in their studio, Reyah takes agency with all aspects of their process, constructing the rope costumes, lighting their body, and finally exposing the shot. Reyah advances a seductive coming of age story, Becoming Reyah.

We’re honored to debut the stunning series of archival pigment prints from Reyah, a self-taught artist, at Untitled Art 2023. Reyah’s body of work in self-portraiture represents a multi-year timeline of building knowledge and experience with their medium-format camera.

Felicita Norris

Several years ago I had the pleasure of a studio visit with Felicita Norris, she was an MFA candidate at Stanford University. Her paintings were dark, sensual, bold – and could she paint!! I took two life size paintings to an art fair that same year, “Not White Enough” and “Thank You for the Worthless Day.” Those paintings were uncompromising as they stripped down the politics of a brown woman’s body in somber sensual tableaus.

Now, fast forward to the present. I have the immense pleasure of presenting the extraordinary talent of Felicita Norris in her first exhibition at the gallery, this September 2023.

Constructing a personal narrative fraught with psychological force, Felicita Norris provokes examination and interrogation. As a woman, and more specifically a BIPOC woman, she’s aware of the overt sexualization of women of color. Her paintings depict a conflicted, unvarnished sexuality, assigning tropes of fantasy to the pain of objectification, assumption, and trauma. While exploring self-portraiture, the paintings also include family and close friends who’ve agreed to act in her high-octane melodramas. While addressing psychological states, Norris’s paintings are also meticulously detailed, from the rendering  of spider veins and crumpled textiles, to a wallpaper motif reflected in a mirror. Her attention to minutiae delivers an unapologetic honesty to her work.

Felicita Norris received her BFA in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, California, in 2013, and her MFA in Art Practice from Stanford University, in 2015.

Christopher Miles

Christopher Miles’ sculptures suggest the architecture of biological systems, with mysterious interstitial passages forming mutable interior and exterior contours. His painterly glazing presents an amalgamate of thick, fleshy colors, dipped, poured, oozing over and through the clay body. With elongated trunks and spreading appendages, the sheer physicality and balance of the forms is striking. With influences as diverse as Lynda Benglis, Lee Bontecou and Ruth Duckworth, Miles has carved out an ambitious sculptural practice, pushing material limits with a conceptual rigor uniquely his own. Contrary to strict formality, his objects are rife with eloquence, wit, humor and pathos. The exhibition includes several new sculptures hot from the kiln.

Christopher Miles is an artist, curator, writer, and educator who has been on the faculty of the School of Art at California State University Long Beach since 1998. Since 2016, he has served as head of the CSULB Ceramic Arts Program, and he is the Director of the CSULB Center for Contemporary Ceramics.

Patricia Sweetow Gallery first presented Christopher Miles in a two-person exhibition in January of 2020 in San Francisco. Earlier in his professional life, Miles focused as a curator and writer of art journalism and criticism. Between 1995 and 2010, he was published in numerous journals, including American Ceramics, Art & Auction, Artforum International, Art in America, Art Lies, Art Nexus, Art Papers, Artext, Artweek, dArt, Flash Art, Flaunt, Frieze, LA Weekly, Los Angeles Times, Tate Etc., Tema Celeste, X-TRA and other publications. He’s contributed catalog and exhibition essays for projects at venues including the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Las Vegas Art Museum, the Luckman Art Center at Cal State LA, the Montgomery Gallery at Pomona College (now the Pomona College Museum of Art), the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt. Chris received a 2004 Penny McCall Award for his work as a writer and curator, and received a 2005 award for “Best Thematic Exhibition Nationally” from AICA-USA, the United States chapter of the International Association of Art Critics, for the Hammer Museum’s survey exhibition THING: New Sculpture from Los Angeles, which Chris co-curated with James Elaine and Aimee Chang. In 2010, Chris worked with co-curator Kris Kuramitsu to organize the Los Angeles participation in the 2010 ARCOmadrid International Contemporary Art Fair, and the exhibition L.A. Invisible City at the Instituto Cervantes in Madrid.

John Paul Morabito

Transdisciplinary weaver John Paul Morabito engages queerness, ethnicity, and the sacred through the medium of tapestry reimagined in the digital age. Their work outputs woven forms, moving images, and relational actions that look toward a future-past horizon where one can exalt queer grace.

“I am defiantly a weaver. Through this position, I reconsider tapestry as a modality in which image, matter, technology, and embodiment provide productive conflicts for constructing form. Drag, in all its bombastic and glittering glory, is a guiding sensibility which I engage as a queer methodology to decadently retrace (and undo) faith, history, and legacy. Here, I employ digital interfaces in concert with improvisational handwork to mutate relics, devotional images, and ritual matter into opulent woven memorials that twist time. This temporal folding is further explored by drawing live weaving into videos and performances that engage time-based media through the linear logic of weaving. The resulting objects, videos, and performances are unbound from chrononormativity to rest, uncomfortably, within queer temporality. Released from the tyranny of the present, my work looks toward a future-past horizon where one can exalt queer grace”.    ​

– John Paul Morabito

Tapestries were one of the more effective propaganda tools of early church and state. John Paul Morabito’s tapestries enlist this same methodology to contort the tropes of faith, bequeathing Queer assignation to sacred church Renaissance paintings in the series Magnificat. Morabito grew up in the Catholic Church, a second-generation Italian American who is gay. John Paul employs Goth overtones to deftly reframe the stigmatization and hypocrisy of the Catholic Church toward Queer communities and culture. By changing the intention and material of early devotional paintings, they deliberately stage a Queer melodrama with a subtle but explicit intervention, cloaking the paintings of Madonna and Child in Drag – a Queer allegory turning sacred to Camp. Draped in saturated color, beaded and swathed in gold, their tapestries are a tribute to Queer life and community.

The series For Félix (love letter), is an homage to Félix González-Torres, who succumbed to AIDS in the ’90s. Morabito’s series is a corollary to the exquisite homoerotic beaded curtains of González-Torres, a powerful metaphoric veil between sex, life and death. Morabito’s beaded tapestries offer a ravishing tribute to González-Torres, but also deliver a celebratory fist to subsequent Queer generations. Like González-Torres’, Morabito’s art is a protest against religious and institutional policies as the guiding moral orthodoxy. Their subtle but powerful interventions in For Félix (love letter) reinterpret sanctity with a seductive queer protest. Beading the long strands of thread is analogous to the beaded Rosary, only instead of contrition, Morabito’s act is erotic, lacing their tapestry with desire, intimacy, exaltation, and remembrance.

Amalia Galdona Broche

In Amalia Galdona Broche’s first exhibition with the gallery (2020), she wove, stitched, and braided “Companions of Concealment,” a hybrid of female and animal forms – a supernatural cosmology of ancestral beings who are intermediaries between humans and the spirit world, in death, birth, healing, and conflicts. For her second exhibition, “Vestments of Time,” Galdona Broche considers the effects and duration of her immigration: “I was a child of the Cuban Revolution during the Special Period, a time of extreme economic adversity. Through sculpture and time-based media, I explore the fluid nature of identity, faith, memory of identity, transculturation and immigration, highlighting labor-intensive processes such as collecting, tearing, breaking, joining, weaving, knotting and assembling textiles and found materials. Referencing Spanish, as well as West African belief systems, rituals and imagery, I navigate the complex and fluid nature of history and identity.”

Galdona Broche has spent equal time living in both Cuba and America. Childhood and adolescent memories recede as American culture ascends, a confusing and mournful loss for the artist as she confronts cultural accommodation. Galdona Broche’s observations and questions regarding the lived experience of immigration drive her new series of standing floor sculptures and mixed media wall works. On view in this exhibition are five, five foot, fleshy, corporeal forms, painted to mime bronze memorials and nine resin/textile wall works. The statuaries are genderless, but they assume aspects of the female form that suggest carriage – what is retained and released from birth to death. The sculptures are painted in code, dashes and circles, signifying the relentless nature of impermanence. Each sculpture is laden with multiple layers of folding skin and dredged faces, some sloughing off and regressing; others fresh, smooth, and ascendant. All the voluptuous, ponderous strata represent who we are, were, and are becoming – a brew of Dorian Gray complexity.

AMALIA GALDONA BROCHE ONLINE 2023 EXHIBITION CATALOG
(Click for full screen, Press Escape to return to page)

Amalia Galdona Broche was recently named Assistant Professor of Art in the Textiles Department, Rhode Island School of Design. She received her MFA from the School of Art; Visual Studies, University of Kentucky in 2021. Galdona Broche was awarded the prestigious International Sculpture Center’s Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award for 2021. Residencies include MASS MoCA Studios/Assets in 2019 as well as the New York Academy of Art in 2015.

Sarah Amos

“I wanted to use the thread like a web, sending out information while connecting both the print below and the drawing above… After working on large felts, I realized that the thread had replaced the drawing material and the felt had replaced paper. A new direction that I had always sought was amassing in front of me.” —Sarah Amos

Upon first glance it’s easy to mistake Amos’s 2D works for paintings, but upon close inspection they quickly dissolve into deeply textured, layered textile works. Defying classification, Sarah Amos’s large-scale mixed media works are more than the sum of their parts. A complex brew of dying, printing, stitching, sewing and layering – impossible for those less skilled, but in her hands, masterfully combined. She mimes the realm held sacred for painters, deftly composing mixed media works that found early inspiration from Hokusai’s ghost prints, Kabuki Theater, African ritual dress and sacred objects. Her innovation in print media has allowed Sarah to pursue media outside the constraints of a single-minded approach.

Chalk Lines, originally exhibited at the CUE Art Foundation, was reviewed by John Yau for Hyperallergic in November 2019.

“Amos’s work may be labor-intensive, yet it conveys neither labor nor the consumption of time, but a meditative joy. In this, you sense her rejection of the art world’s alignment with capitalism, and its use of outsourcing, infinitely repeatable means of production, and the exploitation of others to carry out one’s “ideas.” Again, I would stress that what transports the artist’s labor to another level is her chimerical ingenuity with her materials and painstaking processes. The ordinariness of her stitches becomes extraordinary in their configurations.”

— John Yau, Poet/Art Critic, Hyperallergic, Nov. 2019

Sarah Amos was recently awarded the prestigious 2024 Vermont Prize. The Hall Art Foundation, Burlington City Arts (BCA), The Current, and The Brattleboro Museum and Art Center (BMAC) collaboratively launched the Vermont Prize in 2022. The Prize is an annual award given to a Vermont visual artist juried by a representative from each institution along with with an invited juror.  In 2024,  Phong H. Bui, artist, curator, and co-founder and publisher of The Brooklyn Rail was the invited juror. Amos also received the 2020 Joan Mitchell Center Artists-in-Residence, rescheduled to 2021; and the 2020 Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant. Recent and past exhibitions include the CUE Art Foundation, New York in 2019; the Huntington Museum of Art, West Virginia; Fisher Museum of Art, University of Southern California; Penn State University, Pennsylvania; and Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.

Originally from Australia, Sarah Amos lives and works on the East Coast. She left Australia to attend the Tamarind Institute of Lithography in New Mexico where she became a certified Tamarind Master Printer in Lithography. In 1998 Sarah became the Master Printer for the Vermont Studio Center Press, a position she would hold for 10 years. Amos was an Adjunct Professor at Dartmouth, Williams and Bennington Colleges teaching Printmaking and Drawing. Press include Hyperallergic, Artforum, Art & Object, Art New England and Widewalls

Lien Truong

Fragmenting historic paintings, art, film and the gaming industry, Lien Truong’s mixed media paintings inform “our collective notions of heritage.”

Creating a powerful fictive of female authority, Lien Truong presents Asian female protagonists who are forceful, autonomous counterpoints to Western misogyny. Four new paintings – a segue from Truong’s “From the Earth Rise Radiant Beings,” exhibited at Van Every/Smith Galleries, Davidson College in 2021 – will be on view in our Inaugural Exhibition. Continuing her focus on the generational trauma and resilience of Asian women lived and portrayed throughout history, the new paintings address the mythical stature of archetypes – more specifically, The Maiden, The Mother, and The Crone. Truong employs herself and her family matriarchs from Vietnam as symbols, through figure, landscape and objects, in the new works – “details that consider the magical, resilient nature of the Asian female body, that has had to endure war and trauma.” In her manifestations, resilience is inherited, adapted, and resistant to prevailing cultural alienation.

In addition to large canvas works, Truong took on six double-sided paintings that present as cultural opposition to American dogma: “The smaller works take two images that critically look at the culturally complex inventions within American soil, alongside ingrained white supremacist ideologies, memory, with a focus on ritual, magic, masquerade, and fire.”

Truong’s oeuvre can be viewed as Asian Futurism, born from the violent histories descended from Orientalist ideologies. Her work tests the hybridity and historic hierarchies of global painting techniques, materials and philosophies as she fragments paintings, art, film, and family. She subverts color and values, staging a background layered with singed panels of painted floating silk and blended gestures of oil paint, amidst interpretations of historic textile patterns, and emblematic and hegemonic iconography.

Lien Truong is an Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She graduated with a BFA in 1999 from Humboldt State University and an MFA from Mills College, Oakland in 2001. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery; North Carolina Museum of Art; Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston, Texas; the National Centre for Contemporary Arts in Moscow; Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA; Nha San Collective, Hanoi, Vietnam; Art Hong Kong; S.E.A. Focus, Singapore; and Southern Exposure, San Francisco, CA. She is the recipient of several awards including the Joan Mitchell Fellowship, Whitton Fellowship, and fellowships from the Institute for the Arts & Humanities and the North Carolina Arts Council. Residencies include the Oakland Museum of California and the Marble House Project, Vermont. Public collections include thethe Weatherspoon Art Museum, NC; Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University Art Museum, CA; Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC;  Van Every Smith Galleries at Davidson College, NC; Linda Lee Alter Collection of Art by Women at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; DC Collection (Disaphol Chansiri, Chiang Mai, Thailand); North Carolina Museum of Art  and the Post Vidai and  Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (Vietnam).