Featuring RENEE STOUT and MERRITT JOHNSON with works also available by JUDY PFAFF and GINA ADAMS

ART ON PAPER FAIR - Booth 907 (Mezzanine Level)

March 6-10, 2019
299 South Street - Pier 36, Downtown Manhattan

BOOTH 907 (Mezzanine Level)
 
VIP preview 
Thursday, March 7 from 6pm to 10pm

Regular Hours
Friday, March 8, 11am to 7pm
Saturday, March 9, 11am to 7pm
Sunday, March 10, 12pm to 6pm


ARTISTS

Merritt Johnson’s work is a navigation of periphery, intersectionality, separation and connection.  Her multidisciplinary works are containers for thought and feeling. For two decades Johnson’s work has insisted on facing and destroying the oppression of bodies, land, sex, and culture. Her practice is a synthesis of necessity, a refusal of binaries, fractions of division and control. She embraces peripheral overlap and the impossibility of disentanglement. Johnson is pan-sexual cis-gender woman of mixed descent, she is not claimed by, nor a citizen of any nation from which she descends. The multiplicity of materials and processes Johnson employs embody her insistence that a multiplicity of tools is needed to destroy oppressive systems and survive them. She creates tools for critical thought and action: seed baskets woven in the shapes of hand-grenades and a portable oxygen tank, wearable bolts cutters, a tin can telephone to listen to land, a basket to translate a heartbeat to a love song, paintings mapping invisibility, and instructional videos to exorcise America from our bodies, land and water. Johnson is the mother and stepmother of 6 children, and holds a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh) and an MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (Boston). She lives and works with her family on Lingít Aani, her partner’s home territory, in Sitka Alaska.

***
 
Renée Stout grew up in Pittsburgh and received her B.F.A. from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1980. Originally trained as a painter, she moved to Washington, D.C. in 1985 where she began to explore the spiritual roots of her African American heritage through her work and eventually became the first American artist to exhibit in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art.  Inspired by the African Diaspora, as well as everyday life in her DC neighborhood and current events, she employs a variety of media, including painting, drawing, mixed media sculpture, photography and installation in an attempt to create works that encourage self-examination, introspection and the ability to laugh at the absurdities of life and ourselves.

Stout has been the recipient of awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Bader Fund, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. She was also the recipient of the Driskell Prize, awarded by the High Museum of Art and the Sondheim Award. Stout’s work can be found in many museum and private collections throughout the United States and in The Afrika Museum, Berg en Dal, Netherlands. She has had solo exhibitions at the Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton, NY; the Kalamazoo Institute of Art, Kalamazoo, MI; the Beach Museum of Art, Manhattan, KS; National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Pittsburgh, PA and American University, Washington, D.C. among others. Her traveling museum exhibition, Tales of a Conjure Woman, which originated at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, College of Charleston, SC was accompanied by a major monograph and was named one of the top 10 exhibitions of 2015 by Hyperallergic (catalog available). In 2016 her work in exhibition RAGGA NYC,: All the threatened and Delicious Things Joining Into One Another at the New Museum in New York was reviewed in The New Yorker and in Artnet.  

Her work is included in the many major public collections: The National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill, NC; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; University Of Tucson Art Museum, Tucson, AZ; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA and The Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS; Saint Louis Museum of Art, Saint Louis, MO; The Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE; Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University, Wichita, KS; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN; The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI; San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, TX; Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Fort Wayne, IN; The Flint Institute of the Arts, Flint, MI; The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, KS; The Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; The National Museum of African American History & Culture, Washington, DC; The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston, TX. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC.