Dreaming in Black & White
Deep Pool at Real Art Ways

Real Art Ways presents a solo exhibition of recent work by 2021 Real Art Award recipient Deep Pool.

“Precious and dark, Dreaming in Black & White reckons with maternity, unrequited feelings, and personal understanding of femininity. Combining digital imaging, screen shots, video stills, and both analogue and cell phone photography, the work presents echoes of the past, and ellipses into the future. These small portals resist resolution, embracing dissonance and generative confusion.

Dreaming in Black & White is a compilation of monochromic images spanning from a seven year archive (2016–2022). Often re-visited and re-mixed, Dreaming in Black & White is an homage to my photographic background, (short) life span of ritual, and ultimate effort to reconcile with my past, while acknowledging its inherent ephemerality.” – Deep Pool

Download a PDF of the show publication HERE. Featuring an essay by poet Morgan Võ.

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About the Artist:

Deep Pool (b.1997) is an image maker and self-identifying “trans-disciplinary” artist. Informed by their upbringing as a transcontinental adoptee and their current gender transition, Deep Pool makes meaning with the reality of one’s identity being undetermined and in flux. The moniker “Deep Pool” is a rough English translation of their given name at birth, “Ji Tan.”

Most notably, Deep Pool is the recipient of the 2022 New York Community Trust Van Lier Fellowship at Wave Hill. They have exhibited in Richmond, VA; New Brunswick, NJ; Berlin, Germany; and have a forthcoming solo show in the Bronx, NY. Deep Pool graduated with a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, and currently lives and works out of Queens, NY.

About the Real Art Awards:

The Real Art Awards is an annual opportunity for emerging artists living in New England, New Jersey, or New York. The open call, offered with no entry fees to artists, attracts hundreds of applicants each year, of which 6 artists are chosen. Selected artists receive a solo exhibition, with a commissioned essay, professional documentation, and a cash prize of $2,500. The 2021 Real Art Awards was juried by artist and writer Kameelah Janan Rasheed; Hasan Elahi, artist and Director of the School of Art at George Mason University; and Real Art Ways Executive Director Will K. Wilkins. The 2021 Real Art Awards is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Photo Credit: John Groo

Real Art Ways presents damnNation, a collection of mixed media works by artist Traé Brooks and part of the Real Wall series.

“I have always had a great fascination with history. Whether through studying the subject in school, or learning about the complexities of my genealogy and familial relationships, I find history to be a supremely powerful component of our lives that provides structure and purpose. This series expresses my relationship with American history and the constant struggle to reconcile being a POC in America while criticizing much of the “American Dream” and customs that simply do not resonate with my experiences. My goal as an artist is to create work that both embodies my personal history and comments on the present. With this body of work, I hope to demystify some of these American symbols and transform them into something that reflects an honest and direct attitude towards “Americana.” After all, is being critical and downright angry with one’s nation not the ultimate form of patriotism?”

Real Wall is a series of wall-mounted exhibitions taking place in between formal gallery spaces. Artists are invited to experiment with the space in short-run exhibitions.

About the Artist:

Traé Brooks is a fine artist from Windsor, Connecticut. He studied painting at the University of Hartford, earning a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Art. Brooks is primarily interested in ideas and themes related to family and personal identity. Through his work, Brooks examines where he comes from, processing family history in order to better understand himself in relation to the world. Brooks has shown at Windsor Art Center, Farmington Valley Arts Center, and Kehler Liddell Gallery, among other venues. Currently, Brooks works as a gallery employee at WORK_SPACE in Manchester.

Real Art Ways presents a solo exhibition of recent work by 2021 Real Art Award recipient Merik Goma.

In Your Absence Is My Monument, photographer Merik Goma explores loss through implied narrative and surreal atmosphere. Of the work on view, the artist shares:

“After the loss of a close friend and then my grandmother, I came face to face with a new understanding of absence in my life. Grappling over this concept and my internal dialogue, I wondered if there is ever room for absence to exist. And by invoking the presence of absence, does something else take its place? Looking at the climate of this moment, this idea resonates with how so many of us are without family, stability, and certainty on a massive scale. Reflecting on my narrative practice of set building and re-examining contemporary themes, it feels urgent to bring this work into a public space.”

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About The Artist:

Merik Goma is a New Haven-based photographer and recent graduate of the NXTHVN Studio Fellowship Program, an arts incubator founded by renowned artist Titus Kaphar. Goma builds intricate sets within his studio that he uses both as subjects of tableaux and as backdrops for narrative portrait photography. His technique is painterly in execution, with close attention paid to color and lighting. His work has been shown by Tilton Gallery, and is in the collection of Yale University. In 2021, Goma was selected as the Joyce C. Willis Artist in Residence by the Amistad Center for Arts & Culture at the Wadsworth Atheneum. As part of the residency, Goma will present a solo exhibition in 2023.

About the Real Art Awards:

The Real Art Awards is an annual opportunity for emerging artists living in New England, New Jersey, or New York. The open call, offered with no entry fees to artists, attracts hundreds of applicants each year, of which 6 artists are chosen. Selected artists receive a solo exhibition, with a commissioned essay, professional documentation, and a cash prize of $2,500. The 2021 Real Art Awards was juried by artist and writer Kameelah Janan Rasheed; Hasan Elahi, artist and Director of the School of Art at George Mason University; and Real Art Ways Executive Director Will K. Wilkins. The 2021 Real Art Awards is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Welcoming You Back Safely:

As you return to our physical space, your health and safety is our top priority. To learn about all the steps we have taken to prepare and our new procedures visit our Welcoming You Back page.

Photo Credit: John Groo

Real Art Ways presents an exhibition by New Orleans-based artist Tina Freeman.

Over the past seven years, Tina Freeman has photographed the wetlands of Louisiana and the glacial landscapes of the Arctic and Antarctica. In Lamentations, Freeman pairs images from these dissimilar regions in a series of diptychs that function as stories about climate change, ecological balance, and the symbiotic relationship between disparate environments over time. Each pairing is chosen for the ways in which they relate, aesthetically and practically, demonstrating how rising sea level along the coast of Louisiana is both visually and physically connected to melting glaciers at the poles, despite the separation of vast distances. The large, color photographs in Lamentations make plain the crucial, threatening, and global dialogue between water in two physical states.

Organized by the New Orleans Museum of Art.

The presentation of Tina Freeman: Lamentations at Real Art Ways is made possible by support from Agnes and Billy Peelle.

Text courtesy of Tina Freeman, artist and Russell Lord, Curator of Photographs, NOMA.

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About the Artist:

For the past forty-five years, Tina Freeman has focused on revealing interior subjects through the exploration of physical environments and natural light. In addition to architecture and interiors in her native New Orleans and around the United States and Europe, Freeman’s subjects include urban warehouses and Louisiana’s natural landscape and backcountry swamps.

Freeman’s photographs have been published by The New York Times Magazine, Art and Antiques, Connoisseur, House & Garden, Elle Decor, and Architectural Digest. In addition to receiving an “Art in Public Places” commission from National Endowment for the Arts, Freeman’s work has been exhibited in New Orleans, New York, Los Angeles, London and Moscow, and is included in permanent collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Paris), the National Media Museum (Bradford, UK), the New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Luciano Benetton Imago Mundi Collection in Italy. In the 1970s, Freeman photographed Andy Warhol in New York and Paris, capturing the image of Warhol used for the cover of the French edition of his book, Ma Philosophie de A à B.

Welcoming You Back Safely:

As you return to our physical space, your health and safety is our top priority. To learn about all the steps we have taken to prepare and our new procedures visit our Welcoming You Back page.

Photo Credit: John Groo

Real Art Ways presents a two-person show of work by artists Peter Waite and Ken Morgan.

After four decades of friendship, Waite and Morgan are exhibiting together for the first time. Morgan shares a poetry series completed during quarantine, as well as abstract works from 2020–2021. Waite presents his School Studies series produced from 2018–2021. Through the works on view, both artists express a desire to return to a childlike sense of freedom and play, while grappling with themes of time, memory, and loss. Teeter/Totter was curated by Maria Porada, and first organized as a one-night event at the Arts Industry Gallery in September 2021. Real Art Ways is pleased to be giving the exhibition a longer run.

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About the Artists:

Ken Morgan has shown his work in gallery shows, exhibitions, and permanent collections across the country thanks to his efforts to continually create and share. Morgan is most proud of his past longstanding affiliation with the OK Harris Gallery, as well of his current representation by Exhibitions 2d in Marfa, Texas. He is honored to be included in the Connecticut Collection as well as being supported in the past by the National Endowment for the Arts, The Berkshire Taconic Foundation, The Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and The Connecticut Commission for the Arts.

Peter Waite was born in North Adams, MA and currently works and resides in Connecticut. He received a BFA from the Hartford Art School, University of Hartford, in West Hartford, CT, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has received many awards including from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Gottlieb Foundation, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Pollock-Krasner Fellowship. Waite’s works have been featured in the New York Times, Art New England, BOMB, Harper’s, and Time Out New York. Waite’s paintings are in many public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, the Williams College Museum of Art, and the New Britain Museum of American Art. Some of his commission work includes projects for the University of Connecticut; the NASA Art Program in Washington, DC; Pacific Enterprises in Los Angeles; the Waterbury Criminal Court in Waterbury, CT.

Welcoming You Back Safely:

As you return to our physical space, your health and safety is our top priority. To learn about all the steps we have taken to prepare and our new procedures visit our Welcoming You Back page.

Photo Credit: John Groo

Real Art Ways presents a solo exhibition of recent work by 2021 Real Art Award recipient Elizabeth Flood.

Through her ongoing practice of painting outdoors in the elements, Flood surveys complex layers of extraction, violence, and expression within the American landscape. The artworks in the exhibition were made at Civil War battlefields in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania and Chancellorsville, Virginia, and at the U.S. Capitol. These works commune with and bear witness to the land: they look at past scars to grieve, to learn, to forecast future impact, and to keep watch over a country and land in crisis.

Battlegrounds is built around a body of work made over the last year and a half, comprising six paintings and eighteen drawings. Together, these artworks express the chaos of our current national landscape and the emotional weight of the charged terrain Flood depicts. The black and white ink drawings are tangled and urgent, each a watchful and restless representation of the battlefields as they exist today. The paintings are atmospheric and embodied, drawing color from witness boulders, local flora, and the earth itself. Their surfaces are gritty reliefs, connoting calluses, cast iron plaques, or imagined burials for those who perished nearby. Flood’s largest painting, “Battlefield (Chancellorsville, summer),” consists of nine separate panels and incorporates grasses from the battlefield into humid August greens. Combining different vantage points and elevations into one turbulent cycle, it grapples with a painful past and present.

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About The Artist:

Elizabeth Flood was born on Long Island and grew up in Stafford, Virginia. She studied History, Religion, and Studio Art at the University of Virginia where she earned her BA in 2014. Flood attended Boston University for graduate school where she earned her MFA in Painting in 2019. She attended the Mount Gretna School of Art in 2014-2015 and taught painting there during the summer of 2020 while she was on faculty at Colgate University (2019-2021). In 2019, Flood was a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and was an artist-in-residence at the Studios at MASS MoCA. She is currently a 2021-2022 fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA where she will have a solo exhibition in March. Her work is currently on view at Exeter Gallery in Baltimore in a two person exhibition with Bradley Milligan and has been exhibited in several group exhibitions throughout the Northeast. Flood is the recipient of several grants and awards including the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Graduate Fellowship, and the John Walker Alumni Award at Boston University.

About the Real Art Awards:

The Real Art Awards is an annual opportunity for emerging artists living in New England, New Jersey, or New York. The open call, offered with no entry fees to artists, attracts hundreds of applicants each year, of which 6 artists are chosen. Selected artists receive a solo exhibition, with a commissioned essay, professional documentation, and a cash prize of $2,500. The 2021 Real Art Awards was juried by artist and writer Kameelah Janan Rasheed; Hasan Elahi, artist and Director of the School of Art at George Mason University; and Real Art Ways Executive Director Will K. Wilkins. The 2021 Real Art Awards is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Welcoming You Back Safely:

As you return to our physical space, your health and safety is our top priority. To learn about all the steps we have taken to prepare and our new procedures visit our Welcoming You Back page.

Photo Credit: John Groo

Real Art Ways presents Reclamation, an installation by Connecticut-based artist Sydney Morris and part of the Real Wall series.

Of the use of photographic chemistry in this recent body of cyanotype works, Morris notes: “these pieces are unique in the fact that they are ever-changing. Much like ourselves, their colors may change, become brighter, or slowly fade over time. They age, grow, and adapt to the environment around them. While some pieces may have been made from the same cloth, no two are entirely uniform. They are each as powerful on their own as they are together.” The installation opens Thursday, January 20, and will be on view for one month.

About the Artist:

Sydney Morris is an alternative process photographer, website developer/designer, and digital media marketing manager. In 2012, she attended the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City with a concentration in Photography; continuing on to receive her BFA from the Hartford Art School at the University of Hartford in 2015. Morris has exhibited at Five Points Gallery in Torrington, CT, the Niche Gallery at Middlesex Community College, and Rowayton Arts Center, among other venues.

Welcoming You Back Safely:

As you return to our physical space, your health and safety is our top priority. To learn about all the steps we have taken to prepare and our new procedures visit our Welcoming You Back page.

Real Art Ways is proud to partner with Visual AIDS for Day With(out) Art 2021 by presenting ENDURING CARE, a program of seven new videos highlighting community care within the ongoing HIV crisis.

For one week starting Wednesday, December 1st (World AIDS Day), Real Art Ways will show the ENDURING CARE program as a looping presentation in our video room.

To watch the program online, please visit: visualaids.org/enduringcare

Visual AIDS presents ENDURING CARE, a video program highlighting strategies of community care within the ongoing HIV epidemic. The program features newly commissioned work by Katherine Cheairs, Cristóbal Guerra, Danny Kilbride, Abdul-Aliy A. Muhammad and Uriah Bussey, Beto Pérez, Steed Taylor, and J Triangular and the Women’s Video Support Project.

From histories of harm reduction and prison activism to the long-term effects of HIV medication, ENDURING CARE centers stories of collective care, mutual aid, and solidarity while pointing to the negligence of governments and non-profits. The program’s title suggests a dual meaning, honoring the perseverance and commitment of care workers yet also addressing the potential for harm from medications and healthcare providers. ENDURING CARE disrupts the assumption that an epidemic can be solved with pharmaceuticals alone, recasting community work as a lasting form of medicine.

Welcoming You Back Safely:

As you return to our physical space, your health and safety is our top priority. To learn about all the steps we have taken to prepare and our new procedures visit our Welcoming You Back page.

Real Art Ways presents a solo exhibition of new work by 2020 Real Art Award recipient Anne Wu.

In A Dream Walking, five vibrantly hued sculptures reference familiar architectural forms that evoke both a sense of place and no place at all. A railing grows from the ground, emerging upward before reaching an abrupt end. A door opens, or closes, to nowhere in particular. Stripped of specific characteristics, the forms become framing devices for ornamental objects such as plastic packing rope, incense sticks, garden wire, and cast items. Tied, placed, or held by tension, these elements create patterns against the skeletal structures that suggest themes of growth, ascension, and time. The sculptures signal viewers to walk under, toward, alongside, and around, providing a set of directions that eventually disappears, as if trailing off mid-sentence. While tethered to the existing space, the works simultaneously point elsewhere as they imagine a dimension beyond the purely visible and physically tangible.

Download a PDF of the show publication here. Featuring an essay by curator and writer Danni Shen.

Lisa Young of “The Here and There Collective,” interviewed artist Anne Wu on Instagram Live. You can listen to the full conversation HERE.

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About The Artist:

Anne Wu is an artist working primarily in sculpture and installation. She received a BFA from Cornell University in 2013 and an MFA from Yale University in 2020. Her work has been shown at The Shed (New York, NY), NARS Foundation (Brooklyn, NY), Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon (New Lebanon, NY), and New York Public Library (New York, NY), among others. She was an artist-in-residence at the BHQFU Residency in 2015 and the NARS Satellite Residency on Governors Island in 2020. Currently, she is a 2021-22 Studio Artist at Smack Mellon (Brooklyn, NY).

About the Real Art Awards:

The Real Art Awards is an annual opportunity for emerging artists living in New England, New Jersey, or New York. The open call, offered with no entry fees to artists, attracts hundreds of applicants each year, of which 6 artists are chosen. Selected artists receive a solo exhibition, with a commissioned essay, professional documentation, and a cash prize of $2,500. The 2020 Real Art Awards was juried by artist and educator Mary Mattingly, Director of the Laundromat Project Kemi Ilesanmi, and Real Art Ways Executive Director Will K. Wilkins. The 2020 Real Art Awards is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts and an Excellence in the Arts award from the Edward C. and Ann T. Roberts Foundation. Visual arts at Real Art Ways is supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for Contemporary Art.

Welcoming You Back Safely:

As you return to our physical space, your health and safety is our top priority. To learn about all the steps we have taken to prepare and our new procedures visit our Welcoming You Back page.

Photo Credit: John Groo

Real Art Ways presents a solo exhibition of new work by Norwalk-based artist Kenny Martin.

Taking its title from the Latin word for ‘shipwreck’ or ‘wreckage,’ Naufragium sees Martin create large, immersive drawings based on first-hand encounters with regional shipwrecks. Using charcoal, chalk, pastels, and adhesive marks atop sculpturally layered, recycled paper, Martin depicts images of submarine wreckage and obstructions he observes while freediving. Freediving, Martin shares, “means breath-hold diving—using a snorkel and mask, wetsuit and fins, descending for a few minutes each dive.” The resulting drawings are recollections of forms and underwater environments that the artist desires to revisit.

As Martin notes, “the images produced are abstracted by time and perspective, by the ocean current and fluctuation of light, by movement and memory. The drawings are textural and structural.” Naufragium recalls Martin’s visits to often dark, submarine locations of the Long Island Sound and Northwest Atlantic, some forgotten to the human world. These topical locales—‘shipwrecks’ or abstract piles of aged iron—appear as anthropomorphic behemoths and frail vestiges, all laying as motionless bastions of gravity and time.

About the Artist:

Kenny Martin is an artist and art educator based in Norwalk, CT, where he lives with his wife and son. Martin holds a BFA in Sculpture from Syracuse University, and has exhibited artwork in various mediums across the Northeast, as well as in the New York metropolitan area, Florence, and Madrid. His work invokes a physical connection to the ocean’s depths.

After years spent freediving from Maine to Carolina, and regularly working charters aboard the Bandit, out of Bay Shore, NY, Martin is now featured at Real Art Ways for his first solo exhibition. Initiated while working with Professor Peter Waite of Wesleyan University, Martin’s recent body of work is an extension of his independent study through the Graduate Liberal Studies Program.

Welcoming You Back Safely:

As you return to our physical space, your health and safety is our top priority. To learn about all the steps we have taken to prepare and our new procedures visit our Welcoming You Back page.

Photo Credit: John Groo

Real Art Ways presents to phone a friend, an installation by Connecticut-based artist Maxim Schmidt and part of the Real Wall series.

Artist Statement:

“to phone a friend is a self-portrait of loneliness and not-belonging. It is a collection of memories I hold dear or hardly remember, trinkets and treasures alongside testaments to unwavering sadness in the form of crumpled unlove letters. The piece embodies the feeling that I am explosively everything, yet also culminating into nothing. I am so trapped inside of myself that the longest reach to form some sort of connection outside of myself is doomed to fail. I am a moment that never comes, as is my relationship with the world and those around me. I feel so marred by my subjectivity and obsession with small, strange objects that I forget (or neglect to try) to help myself. I ignore the fact that maybe someone, somewhere, wants to properly know me, so as to escape the inevitable pain that accompanies a close connection with any other person. I am a museum without visitors, stuffed to the brim with otherwise-nonsense objects and ideas that no one will see. The idea of calling a friend is a hypothetical I do not have.”

About the Artist:

Maxim Tobias Schmidt (he/they) is a multidisciplinary artist working out of Meriden, CT. In May 2019, he graduated with his BA in Art Therapy from Albertus Magnus College. Schmidt currently serves as the gallery coordinator and curatorial assistant for the Ely Center of Contemporary Art in New Haven, and has had a longstanding relationship with ECOCA. He also works as a Program Director for the Institute Library’s latest initiative, the Social Justice Readers Program. As a young trans masculine artist, much of Schmidt’s work is informed by his growing up in queerness, in both overt and less obvious ways. His work also reflects his love of collecting and finding objects. Schmidt yearns to attach deeper meaning to what is otherwise considered uninteresting or disposed. His work has been displayed at the Ely Center and Artspace New Haven, and has been published in Yale’s The Perch creative arts journal.

Welcoming You Back Safely:

As you return to our physical space, your health and safety is our top priority. To learn about all the steps we have taken to prepare and our new procedures visit our Welcoming You Back page.

Real Art Ways presents a solo exhibition of new work by 2019 Real Art Award recipient Seunghwui Koo. 

Drawing from meditative experiences in nature, Koo creates meticulous resin, acrylic, plaster, clay, and mixed media works inspired by the daily happenings and intricate moments of her life in New York City. Her work is a commentary on the lives of her fellow New Yorkers, as she has witnessed them. Koo was born in South Korea, where she first experimented with combining the forms of the pig’s head and the human body. The significance of the pig’s head in Koo’s work plays on differing symbolic meanings in Eastern and Western cultures. Good fortune (Eastern) and greed (Western)—two very different connotations of the pig—are prominent themes, in tension with the textural and organic qualities of the pieces on view.

About the Artist:

Seunghwui Koo studied sculpture in South Korea, earning a BFA from Kyungpook National University. She has shown her work with a number of arts institutions including the Monmouth Museum, NJ; Newark Museum, NJ; Main Line Art Center, PA; and Kunstenfestival Watou 2017, 37th Edition, Belgium. Koo was a winner of the Exhibition Award in 2014 and 2017 at the Korean Cultural Center in New York and Los Angeles, and the 2015 Meyer Family Award for Contemporary Art at the Main Line Art Center in Philadelphia, PA. She was also a 5-year artist-in-residence at the Chashama organization from 2013 to 2017.

About the Real Art Awards:

The Real Art Awards is an annual opportunity for emerging artists living in New England, New Jersey, or New York. The open call, offered with no entry fees to artists, attracts hundreds of applicants each year, of which 6 artists are chosen. Selected artists receive a solo exhibition, with a commissioned essay, professional documentation, and a cash prize of $2,500.

The 2019 Real Art Awards is supported in part by:

An award from the National Endowment for the Arts and an Excellence in the Arts award from the Edward C. and Ann T. Roberts Foundation. Visual arts at Real Art Ways is supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for Contemporary Art.

Welcoming You Back Safely:

As you return to our physical space, your health and safety is our top priority. To learn about all the steps we have taken to prepare and our new procedures visit our Welcoming You Back page.

Photo Credit: John Groo

Real Art Ways presents a solo exhibition of new work by 2020 Real Art Award recipient Chantal Feitosa. 

Chantal Feitosa’s exhibition, Can You Repeat the Question?, utilizes the aesthetics of elementary school education and classrooms to explore complicated racial identities in Brazilian culture. Feitosa’s work uses a 1976 survey of Brazilian households to inform its content. When given the opportunity to self-identify their skin color and identity, Brazilians across the country came up with 136 unique labels and definitions, many of which are names of foods. Feitosa has taken this list and created decks of flash cards, video, drawings, and an interactive website allowing viewers to engage in her ideas as if they are her students in a classroom setting.

Artist’s statement:

“The projects on view blend contrasting cultural references tied to race relations within Brazil, the United States and the first generation immigrant experience. The exhibition’s central video piece, “Brown Bag Lunch,” merges early childhood learning, a 1976 Brazilian survey documenting the population’s nuanced descriptions of race, and a re-staging of Modesto Broco’s 19th century painting “Ham’s Redemption.” The characters displayed across the drawing series, “Mind Maps,” are modeled after the Brazilian Namoradeira doll and depict bodies that are free to wander physically, emotionally, and mentally. These figures refuse to be easily legible or digested for the pleasure of outsiders.

This is for all the slow thinkers and classroom daydreamers who watched from the window side of the classroom. It is for all who watched in confused spite as white boys were granted extended time to breeze by all the ivory pages of standardized exam booklets. I broke the arms off all the clocks, so your mind can wander all day until you’re ready to respond.”

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About the Real Art Awards:

The Real Art Awards is an annual opportunity for emerging artists living in New England, New Jersey, or New York. The open call, offered with no entry fees to artists, attracts hundreds of applicants each year, of which 6 artists are chosen. Selected artists receive a solo exhibition, with a commissioned essay, professional documentation, and a cash prize of $2,500. The 2020 Real Art Awards was juried by artist and educator Mary Mattingly, Director of the Laundromat Project Kemi Ilesanmi, and Real Art Ways Executive Director Will K. Wilkins. The 2020 Real Art Awards is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts and an Excellence in the Arts award from the Edward C. and Ann T. Roberts Foundation. Visual arts at Real Art Ways is supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for Contemporary Art.

Welcoming You Back Safely:

As you return to our physical space, your health and safety is our top priority. To learn about all the steps we have taken to prepare and our new procedures visit our Welcoming You Back page.

Photo Credit: John Groo

Real Art Ways presents a solo exhibition of new work by 2020 Real Art Award recipient Daniela Puliti. 

There were no casseroles… explores multiple forms of communal grieving and funerary traditions, using her personal narrative as a means to connect with the universal experience of death. Puliti’s use of textiles references her experience with neurodivergence (anxiety, ADHD, etc.), weaving materials together in complicated and almost obsessive means. The large scale woven tapestry You, Me, and Jesse’s Ghost, serves as the main component of the installation. It also functions as a memorial for Puliti’s partner, who suffered an anoxic brain injury in January of 2019 and passed away mid-pandemic in 2020, unable to have a funeral. In addition to the gallery exhibition, the public is invited to submit their recipes for comfort for an ongoing publication and future interactive performance. To learn more and submit a recipe, click here.

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About The Artist:

Daniela Puliti studied painting at Montclair State University (BFA, 2011) and The Savannah College of Art and Design (MFA, 2015). Puliti manipulates craft-based materials with an intuitive painter’s sensibility; creating installations, paintings, and mixed media works about gender, sexuality, vulnerability, and mental illness. She identifies as a gender-questioning femme, forever evaluating the shifting ideals around intersectional feminism within structural misogyny. She has participated in short term residencies at The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (NYC), Vermont Studio Center, The Wassaic Project and ChaNorth. Puliti is an alumna of the A.I.R. Gallery Fellowship Program in Brooklyn, NY (2017-2018), which granted her first solo exhibition in NYC in February 2018. Puliti received a 2021 Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

About the Real Art Awards:

The Real Art Awards is an annual opportunity for emerging artists living in New England, New Jersey, or New York. The open call, offered with no entry fees to artists, attracts hundreds of applicants each year, of which 6 artists are chosen. Selected artists receive a solo exhibition, with a commissioned essay, professional documentation, and a cash prize of $2,500. The 2020 Real Art Awards was juried by artist and educator Mary Mattingly, Director of the Laundromat Project Kemi Ilesanmi, and Real Art Ways Executive Director Will K. Wilkins. The 2020 Real Art Awards is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts and an Excellence in the Arts award from the Edward C. and Ann T. Roberts Foundation. Visual arts at Real Art Ways is supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for Contemporary Art.

Welcoming You Back Safely:

As you return to our physical space, your health and safety is our top priority. To learn about all the steps we have taken to prepare and our new procedures visit our Welcoming You Back page.

Photo Credit: John Groo