20 Jay Street, 7th Floor, Brooklyn NY, 11201
For the closing of its Spring 2018 Season, TCC will visit Angela Fraleigh, Derek Fordjour, and Narcissister at the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, 20 Jay Street, Brooklyn, NY. Please, arrive on time and meet us on the 7th Floor! From there, at 8:30 PM, we will come together for a social hour at our usual address, at the 68 Jay Street Bar. The studio tour will be led by Monika Fabijanska.
Angela Fraleigh explores narratives of women and marginalized female figures in art history. In her monumental paintings, she has incorporated women painted by Baroque and Rococo painters such as Francois Boucher and Francois Lemoyne: posed odalisques, goddesses, nymphs, and allegories, now free from their assigned, often ambiguous roles sit together reassembled by Fraleigh in imagined circles of shared-knowledge, which has been passed down to us in sanitized fairy tales. Currently, Fraleigh is working on a series of site-specific paintings for Edward Hopper House Museum in Nyack, NY, inspired by the work and relationship of Edward and Jo Hopper, and addressing the role of muses in male artists’ lives.
Angela Fraleigh earned her MFA from Yale University. Her solo exhibitions include those at the Vanderbilt Mansion, Hyde Park, NY (2015), Inman Gallery, Houston, TX (2014), and University of the Arts, Philadelphia, PA (2011). She has also exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, TX, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO, P.P.O.W Gallery and Massimo Audiello Gallery, NYC. Fraleigh is a professor and the department chairperson of the Moravian College art department, and is represented by Inman Gallery in Houston.
Derek Fordjour’s images draw upon a variety of sources, including sporting imagery, board and card games, carnival motifs, and the circus, to explore ideas of vulnerability. He uses the economic, political and psychosocial implications of games to discuss the power structure that exists around rewards and sanctions, merit and punishment, both within the game and as an allegory for the broader human experience.
Derek Fordjour was born in Memphis, TN to parents of Ghanaian heritage. He earned his MA in Art Education from Harvard University and MFA in painting from Hunter College CUNY. His works have been exhibited at Galerie Lelong, New York, NY, The Taubman Museum, Roanoke, VA, and Galleria Monica DeCardenas in Switzerland, among others. Fordjour was awarded an MTA commission for permanent art for the 145th Street station in Harlem. He is represented by Night Gallery in Los Angeles and Josh Lilley Gallery in London, which will present his solo installation at Art Basel Miami 2018.
Narcissister employs a spectacle-rich approach to explorations of gender, racial identity, and sexuality. Humor, pop songs, elaborate costumes, contemporary dance, and her trademark mask are her tools in deconstructing stereotypical representations. By opening up and turning against themselves what Stuart Hall calls "fixed and closed stereotypical representations” Narcissister exposes in live performance, video and photography, the practice of representation itself, and challenges the audience to question its own attraction and repulsion.
Narcissister is a Brooklyn-based artist and performer. Wearing a mask and merkin, she works at the intersection of performance, dance, art, and activism. She has presented her work at The New Museum, MoMA PS 1, The Kitchen, Abrons Art Center, and at many nightclubs, galleries, and alternative art spaces. Questioning the divide between popular entertainment and experimental art, she appeared on America’s Got Talent in 2011. Narcissister is a 2015 Creative Capital Fellow, a 2015 Theo Westernberger Grantee, and a 2015 United States Artists Fellow.
Photo: Angela Fraleigh in her studio at the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Brooklyn, NY, March 2018, photo Monika Fabijanska