Little Italy, New York
Group Exhibition
Oh the Way a Mineral Fractures
Astor WeeksCecilia Caldiera Keli Safia Maksud Renee Gladman "Oh the way a mineral fractures Can sometimes help identify it" —Bernadette Mayer This show is about language’s capacity to do more than describe and our ability as viewers to do more than interpret. In her poem, Geology Night Sky, Bernadette Mayer transforms the technical language of geological formations into the components of a cosmic love poem. Through this alchemical affair, Mayer sidesteps the trappings of identification. What if something had to be ruptured, fragmented in order for a process of understanding to begin? The three artists in this show favor modes of storytelling rather than mere naming; means that function in the temporal realm of the allegorical rather than the fixed one of the symbolic. Cecilia Caldiera is a New York City–based artist working across sculpture, drawing, and printmaking. Rooted in research around urban planning, waste, and ritual, her practice investigates how these systems choreograph the movements of bodies—both individual and collective—through public space. Her work traces the ways in which space shapes identity, and in turn, how communities imprint themselves back onto the built environment. Cecilia graduated with an MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts in 2023. She recently had solo exhibitions at Astor Weeks in 2023 and Subtitled NYC in 2024. Cecilia was a Neiman Center Fellow from 2021-2023, an Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program Fellow for the 2023-2024 session, and a resident at the Hercules Art Studio Program from 2023-2025. She was awarded a grant to attend Anderson Ranch in 2022. Cecilia currently teaches at Pratt Institute and the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. Renee Gladman is a writer and artist preoccupied with crossings, thresholds, and geographies as they play out at the intersections of writing, drawing and architecture. She is the author of numerous books, including a cycle of novels about the city-state Ravicka and its inhabitants, the Ravickians, as well as three collections of drawings, Prose Architectures (2017), One Long Black Sentence (2020), and Plans for Sentences (2022). Recent essays and visual work have appeared in The Architectural Review, Poetry, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and e-flux, in addition to several artist monographs and exhibition catalogs. Since 2017, Gladman has exhibited her works on paper in galleries in the U.S. and across Europe. She has been awarded fellowships and artist residencies from the Menil Drawing Institute, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, among others, and received a Windham-Campbell prize in fiction in 2021. She makes her home in New England. Keli Safia Maksud is an interdisciplinary artist and writer working in sound, sculpture, installation, printmaking, and embroidery. Concerned with histories of colonial encounters and the effects of these encounters on memory and identities, Maksud’s practice favors the space of in-between and its threshold — working toward destabilizing received histories in order to expose fictions of the state. Maksud earned a BFA in Painting from the Ontario College of Art and Design University, a Diploma in Art and Curatorial Studies at the New Centre for Research and Practice, and an MFA in Visual Arts at Columbia University. Her work has been shown at The CCS Hessel Museum of Art at Bard, CUE Foundation, Salon 94, Huxley Parlour, the Bamako Biennial, the National Museum of Contemporary Art – Seoul, Galería Nueva, and the Biennial of Contemporary Art Sesc_Videobrasil. Maksud has been awarded fellowships and grants from Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Council for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. Her writing has been published in and for OCULA Magazine, the Swiss Institute, Leap Magazine, and A Space Gallery.