Work
Press Release
Ramekon O’Arwisters: SCHISM
Please mark your 🗓 for this special exhibition!
Exhibition Dates: 13 September – 18 October
Reception for the artist: Saturday, Sept. 13th, 3:00 – 5:30 pm
RAMEKON O’ARWISTERS | SCHISM
Following the successful 2024-2025 solo exhibition of HOUSE OF at Craft Contemporary Museum in Los Angeles we’re excited and honored to present SCHISM, Ramekon O’Arwisters’ first one-person exhibition at PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY in DTLA!
SCHISM, by definition, is a fracture, division, disharmony in beliefs or rules by which we live and understand relationships, politics, religion, community. The choice of SCHISM as a title is not so much a reflection of discord within O’Arwisters but an acknowledgement of chaotic shifts and swings in predictability and safety. Targeting, overreach, and coded responses are not new to Black Americans; finding ways to navigate between the hazards is the theme of the upcoming exhibition, a watery ground of coded abstraction. On view in the exhibition will be the artists’ iconic sculpture, Black on Black; tapestries from the Bound in Black series; selections from their B&W self-portraits; and new textile sculptures!
The exhibition promises to be breathtaking and groundbreaking!!
Ramekon O’Arwisters recent press includes Hyperallergic 2025, “Artist Takeover”, Artillery Magazine 2025, Essence Magazine 2025, “In the Studio”, a video production of the Fine Arts Museums San Francisco, plus more. O’Arwisters is the 2021 recipient of the McLaughlin Foundation Award for The Project Space at Headlands Center for the Arts, Artist-in-Residence program, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant for 2020/21, the de Young Museum Artist in Residence; The Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA; the Djerassi Resident Artists Program; Recology San Francisco Artist in Residence Program and the Vermont Studio Center. Grants and Awards include Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue, NY; the San Francisco Foundation; the San Francisco Arts Commission Cultural Equity Initiatives Program; Black Artists Fund, Sacramento; and the Eureka Fellowship awarded by the Fleishhacker Foundation in San Francisco. Museum exhibitions include House of, Craft Contemporary Museum Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Craft and Design, FIGHT AND FLIGHT: CRAFTING A BAY AREA LIFE; American Museum of Ceramic Art (AMOCA), Making in Between: Gender Identities in Clay (MIB:GIC); and San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles, Queer Threads. Born in Kernersville, North Carolina, O’Arwisters earned a M.Div. from Duke University Divinity School in 1986.