ART CITIES:N.York-Even There, There Are Stars

The exhibition “Even there, there are stars”, is the winning selection from the CUE Art Foundation’s, 2019-20 Open Call for Curatorial Projects. The proposal was unanimously selected by a jury comprised in line with CUE’s commitment to providing substantive professional development opportunities, panelists also serve as mentors to the exhibiting artists, providing support throughout the process of developing the exhibition.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: CUE Art Foundation Archive

The group exhibition “Even There, There Are Stars” celebrates visions and dreams of possible, and more just, futures arising in dialogue with visionary fiction, and explores pathways that might help us get there. These futurities are generated by and sustain queer and trans people, femmes, and people of color: those of us who have learned to live by and through our longings; those of us who were never meant to survive and do, by our collective resilience and our collective dreams.  The works included in this exhibition, take up these tactics to help us be bold, center pleasure, and stay connected and interdependent so as to be able to live guided by our wildest dreams of liberation. The exhibition features more than 25 works ranging from large-scale textiles and works on paper to prints, video, and sculpture. New works include a 25-foot site-specific mural by Emily Oliveira, an archival digital print by Chitra Ganesh, and a newly commissioned illustration by Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski featured in the accompanying exhibition catalogue. The exhibition follows the work of Walidah Imarisha in “Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements” (2015) in understanding visionary fiction as that which has “relevance toward building new, freer worlds [rather than] the mainstream strain of science fiction, which often reinforces dominant narratives of power” and that which “encompass[es] all of the fantastic, with the arc always bending toward justice”. Sometimes, bringing more just and free worlds into our imaginations is a process of visioning something new, something utterly different than what and where we find ourselves to be now. And, sometimes it’s a process of remixing, of starting where we are, even if that is within a narrative that reinforces dominant powers, and fucking that shit up! Chitra Ganesh is a visual artist who lives and works in Brooklyn. Ganesh’s drawing-based practice brings to light narrative representations of femininity, sexuality, and power typically absent from canons of literature and art. Her wall installations, comics, animation, and mixed media works on paper often take historical and mythic texts as inspiration and points of departure to complicate received ideas of iconic female forms.
Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski is an interdisciplinary artist whose work reimagines femmes of color as protagonists of historical, spiritual, and religious narratives that make up the foundation of today’s societal beliefs and culture. Whether through drawing, video, performance, or installation, DeJesus Moleski experiments with how to name the conflation of celebration and mourning when being racialized, liminal, and alive. DeJesus Moleski grew up moving from city to country to city in the American East Coast, South, and Midwest. Spending her most formative years in a constantly shifting landscape has tethered her work to interests in multiplicity, belief systems, and bewilderment. She has an ongoing practice of tending to the in-between, and those that know the trouble and pleasure there. Employing flamboyance as an exercise in utopic fantasies for the future, her work is a dream sequence triggered by our current time. Emily Oliveira is an interdisciplinary artist and performer. She uses textiles, sculpture, video, and installation to explore narratives of communion and disruption in a queer, sci-fi utopia. Tuesday Smillie is a visual artist working in a variety of mediums including textiles, collage, printmaking, and watercolor. At the core of her work is a question about the individual and the group: the binary of inclusion and exclusion and the porous membrane between the two

Participating Artists: Chitra Ganesh, Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski, Emily Oliveira, and Tuesday Smillie.

Photo: Tuesday Smillie, A Slow and Arduous Progression, 2016, Print on paper, polymer plate, and watercolor, 11 1/4 x 14 1/4 inches, Courtesy of the artist and CUE Art Foundation

Info: Organizer: Allie/A.L. Rickard, Mentor: Daniel J Sander, CUE Art Foundation, 137 West 25th Street, Ground Floor, Between 6th and 7th Avenue, New York, Duration: 14/1-17/2/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-17:30, https://cueartfoundation.org