Untitled Art Miami Beach
Press Release
Untitled Art Miami Beach
With great pleasure, we announce our participation in Untitled Art Miami Beach 2024. Each year, new and long-standing exhibitors are selected by Untitled Art’s evolving curatorial team for their artistic integrity and international reach. Untitled Art will take place Wednesday, December 4 through Sunday, December 8, 2024, with a VIP and Press Preview Tuesday, December 3rd.
PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY will present three artists: fiber paintings from Australian/American artist Sarah Amos; from the San Francisco Bay Area, the glitter works of Jamie Vasta; and from New York, the mixed media sculpture of Linda Sormin. Artist PDF’s follow below
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Address: Ocean Drive and 12th Street, Miami Beach, Florida
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VIP and Press Preview: Tuesday, 3 Dec 10am-7pm
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Opening Hours:
Wed, 4 Dec 11am-7pm
Thurs, 5 Dec 11am-7pm
Fri, 6 Dec 11am-7pm
Sat, 7 Dec 11am-7pm
Sun, 8 Dec 11am-5pm
Artist Page
Ferne Jacobs: A Poetry of Thread – A Pioneer in the American Fiber Arts Movement
Press Release
Ferne Jacobs: A Poetry of Thread
A Pioneer in the American Fiber Art Movement
Exhibition Dates: January 18 – February 21, 2025
Reception: Saturday, January 18th from 3:00 pm – 6:00 pm
PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY is excited and honored to feature Los Angeles-based artist Ferne Jacobs in her First Los Angeles gallery exhibition! The gallery’s focus on artists who engage in material practices coincides with Jacobs’ laudable career.
Ferne Jacobs’ sculptures have been included in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Art and Design, the MFA Boston, the MFA Houston, the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the De Young Museum, and many more over several decades. Recently, Jacobs was a finalist for the prestigious 2024 Loewe Craft Prize. Currently her work is on public view at the MFA Boston and the Lenore G. Tawney Foundation.
At 82 years old, Jacobs is a ground-breaking pioneer in the International Fiber Art Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. She continues her daily studio practice today, intuitively coiling and twining compelling abstract forms that infer historical provenance beyond their making.
On view will be coiled and twined free-standing sculpture and wall work, including new as well as work spanning over her 50-year career.
Jacobs is recognized for her technical mastery of material and process. Reinventing and advancing traditional techniques used for basketry and inventing countless other methods along the way, Jacobs has generated an entirely fresh format for sculptural art. Her acute sense of color melded with her poetic and intuitive approach are characteristic traits. Each piece begins with an idea, a dream, a story, or a picture in Jacobs’ mind, but it grows and takes on its own form over the months in which she shapes the artwork.
Jacobs plays with duality in terms of textures, contrast of color, interior and exterior, solids and voids. In terms of concept, she investigates the significance of masculinity and femininity, spirituality and religion, and the destruction of the natural world… Her pieces are meditations on the fiber of society and the nature of humanity in the modern world.
– Emily Zaiden, Essay: Connected Cells, Breathing Forms, Craft in America Exhibition, 2022
When I begin a piece, I create a line by wrapping thread around a cord with a color that has been in my mind. From then on I live in a mystery, creating each cell (wrap) and connection, of what I hope is a living form. The cells make up a body, and I have no idea about what it will become until it is finished. There is no direct intention, only a hope that it has life and through that, is moving in some way.
– Ferne Jacobs, from Connected Cells, Breathing Forms, Craft in America Exhibition, 2022
John Paul Morabito: TAKE ME TO HEAVEN
Press Release
John Paul Morabito
Take Me To Heaven
Exhibition Dates: January 18 – February 22, 2025
Reception: Saturday, January 18th from 3:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Events: TBA
Take Me to Heaven, Sylvester (1984, excerpt)
All I wanna know
Do you wanna rock me
The lights are low
And you know where to go
So baby, let’s hit the floor
Won’t you take me to Heaven
Take me to Heaven
Oh, take me to Heaven
PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY is thrilled to present the dazzling woven, beaded tapestries of John Paul Morabito in their first one-person exhibition with the gallery. The title of the exhibition, Take Me To Heaven, references the famed Black, Queer, disco icon of the 70’s and 80’s, Sylvester! Sylvester’s music, lyrics, and gender fluid persona gave voice to the cultural and political shifts in America when sexual energy pulsed in clubs throughout urban centers, where seduction, drag, sparkle, protest, coming out, demands for equal rights and decriminalization began ripping through the hetero-normative walls of the United States. Morabito’s luminous tapestries tower as a metaphoric rallying cry, “This is a retracing of the queer resistance born in urban discos of a prior generation. As social and political forces once again seek to eradicate queer people, I, like those who came before me, reach for the promise of queer futurity.”
Improvisation guides Morabito’s woven abstactions; bold intersecting geometry with electrifying gold and hot neon colors are the intuitive gestures of “the body pulsing to the rhythm of the beat.” Morabito’s work delivers “a spark of divinity,” reaching back in time to the cultural zenith that celebrated queer spaces. However, citing health as the orthodoxy of reason, AIDS provided political heft for the erasure and censure of queer public centers. Morabito’s unabashed emphasis on metaphor, beauty, and sensuality fuels the recovery of queer identity, community, and place—”finding space for the viseral, where glamour, glitter, sweat, and low light are mediums for something greater than yourself.” Glass beads, hand-dyed wool, and cotton in the hands of Morabito become the sacrament of possibility.
In our first group exhibition with Morabito, (A Chorus of Twisted Threads, 2023) the gallery presented selections from For Félix (love letter), an homage to Félix González-Torres, who succumbed to AIDS in the ’90s. This series was a corollary to the exquisite homoerotic beaded curtains of González-Torres, a powerful metaphoric veil between sex, life, and death. Morabito’s beaded tapestries offered a ravishing tribute to González-Torres but also delivered 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.
John Paul Morabito was awarded the prestigious United States Artists Fellowship in January 2024. They are Assistant Professor and Head of Textiles at Kent State University in Ohio. From 2013 to 2022 they were on the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies. They hold a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
In tandem with their studio, John Paul Morabito pursues a practice-led scholarship that positions weaving as a critical platform of cultural production. Their writing has been published in Art China, The Textile Reader 2 (China Academy of Art), The Journal of Textile Design Research and Practice, Textile: Cloth and Culture. They are the editor of Weaving Beyond the Binary, a special issue of the international peer reviewed journal, Textile: Cloth and Culture. Their work has been included in museum exhibitions, including the Art in Embassies Program, Washington, DC; The Threads We Follow, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA), Winston-Salem, NC; Queer Abstraction, curated by Jared Ledesma, Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA, and Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Arts, Zhejiang Art Museum, Hangzhou City, China. Their tapestries are included in public and private collections, with a recent placement at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh.
Artist Page
Pilar Agüero Esparza
Press Release
Pilar Agüero-Esparza
Exhibition Dates: March 8 – April 12, 2025
Reception: Saturday, March 8th from 4:00 pm – 6:30 pm
Events: TBA
PSG is excited to present Pilar Agüero-Esparza in her first one-person exhibition with the gallery. Our first presentation of Agüero Esparza’s work was in The Calligraphy of Absence in the spring of 2024. Pilar is recognized for her installations, paintings, and objects reflecting the palette and politics of skin tone, specifically Brown and Black skin. Her paintings 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 woven leather. She extolls the craft and indigeneity of her family’s Mexican history, electrifying disparate and formidable concepts. In lesser hands, the collision of material, tradition, practice, heritage, and aesthetics might implode, but instead the elegant grace of the woven and the symmetry of the hardedged 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.