Charisse Pearlina Weston. | Courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery
CONCEPTUAL ARTIST Charisse Pearlina Weston is now represented by Jack Shainman. The New York gallery has an international roster of nearly 40 artists recognized for exploring social and cultural issues in their work, including Nina Chanel Abney, El Anatsui, Nick Cave, Kerry James Marshall, Meleko Mokgosi, Toyin Ojih Odutola, and Lynette Yiadom Boakye. The representation is in collaboration with Patron Gallery, which began working with Weston in December 2023.
Jack Shainman has included Weston in recent group exhibitions: “This Tender, Fragile Thing” at The School (Kinderhook, N.Y.) in 2022; and “We Buy Gold:SEVEN.” (Chelsea) in 2023. Last week, her work was featured in the gallery’s booth at Frieze Los Angeles (March 1-3, 2024).
Weston expresses herself through sculpture, writing, installation, and photography, and often works with glass. She is a Studio Museum in Harlem artist in residence and her work is currently featured in “And ever an edge: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2022–23,” a three-artist show at MoMA PS1 in New York, through April 8, 2024.
“I am extremely honored to join Jack Shainman Gallery and be amongst a roster of artists whose work actively puts pressure on systems of oppression and erasure. Furthermore, I have been deeply inspired by a
number of these same artists as I’ve developed my practice so it is truly incredible to share space with them now,” Weston said in the representation announcement.
“I am extremely honored to join Jack Shainman Gallery and be amongst a roster of artists whose work actively puts pressure on systems of oppression and erasure.” — Charisse Pearlina Weston
CHARISSE PEARLINA WESTON, “the lime green flourescent tint edge of bitter (let’s straighten it out),” 2023 (inkjet print on Hahnemühle canvas etched with glass from collapse, frit, blown glass, and resin). | Image courtesy MoMA PS1 and Studio Museum in Harlem. Photo by Kris Graves
Her statement also included a description of her practice. “I am invested in exploring the generative possibilities housed within the intimate poetics of Black interior life; for me this is a space of agency wherein the modes and instances of illegibility are chosen instead of imposed,” Weston said. “My artistic endeavors are concerned, foremost, with understanding, and then implementing, enfoldment, repetition, and concealment, methods which I term ‘Black tactics of refusal,’ as strategies for conjuring a spatial and temporal otherwise which counters and dismantles the ongoing threat of anti-Blackness.”
She added: “Ultimately my work is imagining what worlds are possible if our present symbolic order is flipped on itself; what new movements and sightlines could arise if the valve of our systems of meaning, the fuel of our present infrastructures of exploitation, is shut off or, better yet, obliterated? These are the possibilities I’m pursuing through my work.”
WESTON WAS BORN AND RAISED in Houston, Texas. Now based in Brooklyn, N.Y., her academic background includes an MFA in studio art, with an emphasis on critical theory, from the University of California at Irvine (2019); a masters of science degree in modern art history, curating and criticism from the University of Edinburgh’s Edinburgh College of Art; and an undergraduate degree in art history earned at the University of North Texas.
In 2021, Weston won the Burke Prize from the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. The $50,000 prize recognizes an artist age 45 or under for work with glass, fiber, clay, metal, or wood. In her artist statement, she said in part: “I utilize glass to conceptually embody both the everyday risk of anti-black violence and the precocity and malleability of blackness in the face of this violence.”
Weston’s first solo museum exhibition, “of [a] tomorrow: lighter than air, stronger than whiskey, cheaper than dust” (2022-23), opened at the Queens Museum on Oct. 2, 2022. A couple of weeks later, the Studio Museum announced her selection as a 2022-23 artist-in-residence.
An alum of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program (Studio, 2020), Weston is among the artists participating in the Whitney Biennial 2024, which opens March 20. This fall, Weston will be in residence at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas.
“I have been aware of Charisse’s work for some time now and have been consistently impressed by the innovation and depth to her practice… Her manipulation of materials alone is so strikingly idiosyncratic, and when you further delve into the thought processes behind these methodologies you cannot help but be absolutely spellbound.” — Jack Shainman
Installation view of “And ever an edge: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2022–23,” MoMA PS1 (Nov. 16, 2023-April 8, 2024). Shown, Works (4) by Charisse Pearlina Weston. | Image courtesy MoMA PS1 and Studio Museum in Harlem. Photo by Kris Graves
“| have been aware of Charisse’s work for some time now and have been consistently impressed by the innovation and depth to her practice,” Gallery Founder Jack Shainman said in the announcement.
“There is always a lot to consider when you deliberate working with a new artist, and for me the foremost factors are if it is work that I believe in, and if the artist has their own distinct means of approaching their subject matter. Right from the beginning it was clear that Charisse more than excelled in these spheres. Her manipulation of materials alone is so strikingly idiosyncratic, and when you further delve into the thought processes behind these methodologies you cannot help but be absolutely spellbound. I could not be more excited to be working together, and to see how her practice continues to grow and evolve.” CT
FIND MORE about Charisse Pearlina Weston on her website
Charisse Pearlina Weston in her studio talks about the issues that activate her practice and explains the works she is presenting at MoMA PS1 in the exhibition “And ever an edge: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2022–23.” | Video by MoMA PS1
BOOKSHELF
“Whitney Biennial 2024: Even Better Than the Real Thing” was published to document this year’s biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Charisse Pearlina Weston is among the 71 artists and collectives invited to participate in the exhibition. “Awaiting” was published by Weston in 2023. The volume is described as “part autobiography, part play, part fictive dream as long poem.”
