Grace Rosario Perkins: Hermit’s Lamp
September 10–October 29, 2022
Grace Rosario Perkins in conversation with Theadora Walsh
Thursday, October 27, 6:30pm, doors 6pm
Theadora Walsh is a writer and poet based in Oakland, California who makes texts, essays, and videos. Her art criticism has been published in Artforum, BOMB, Hyperallergic, Los Angeles Review of Books, Art in America, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Brown University and teaches interdisciplinary writing.
Forgiveness, 2022, 46 x 62″
Acrylic, spray paint, ink, bingo cards, bumper sticker
Grace Rosario Perkins renders maximalist, color-driven paintings in acrylic, spray paint, and collage on canvas. She is a free-stylist, working from intuition, and quickly; her marks are malleable, and subject to near-perpetual change as paintings materialize. The works map relationships between colors, forms, feelings, people, peoples, the past and present. They are landscapes between the mind and the world, streams of consciousness preoccupied with the ways in which life overlaps with other life.
Perkins’ iconography is informed by sources as varied as bad graffiti, the NBA, and local antique malls in downtown Albuquerque, where she lives and works. She has recently incorporated family photographs, bingo cards, bumper stickers, cut remnants of past paintings, and more, forming a collage of signifiers. The works are not private, but intimate, suggesting that closeness is not only a series of codes, but its own code, both personal, familial, and complex.
Hermit’s Lamp, Perkins’ first solo exhibition in San Francisco, is comprised of brand-new work.
Grace Rosario Perkins (b. 1986, Santa Fe, NM, lives and works in Albuquerque) is a self-taught Diné/Akimel O’odham painter interested in disassembling her personal narrative through layered words, objects, colors, and signs. Her first solo museum exhibition, The Relevance of Your Data (curated by Laura Copelin), is presently on view at MOCA Tucson and features large-scale paintings alongside contributions from Lonnie Holley, Fox Maxy, Olen Perkins, and Eric-Paul Riege. It was nominated for a Queer|Art|Prize award. Additional sites of engagement include the Oakland Museum of California, ONE Archives (Los Angeles), Residency Art Gallery (Los Angeles), Law Warshaw Gallery (Saint Paul, MN), Jack Barrett Gallery (New York), and Unpaved Gallery (Yucca Valley). Perkins most recently served as an Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing at Mills College.
