FROM PRESS RELEASE, 2022:
MOCA Tucson is proud to present The Relevance of Your Data, an exhibition featuring ten new large-scale paintings by Grace Rosario Perkins commissioned by MOCA for her first solo museum exhibition. Perkins invited a group of artists close to her to participate in the show through artworks and performances––Lonnie Holley, Fox Maxy, Olen Perkins, and Eric-Paul Riege. Connected by friendship, kinship, and process-based creation, Perkins and her collaborators approach artmaking as a path to collective healing.
The exhibition’s title refers to the insidious ways personal data is used to categorize an individual’s identity in order to ascribe value or erase relevance––practices that are particularly harmful to people of color. The artists in the show seek to build solidarity between Black and Indigenous makers, and use techniques like abstraction, collage, and improvisation to rewire reductive categories.
Perkins’ vibrant paintings will hang throughout MOCA’s space, creating surfaces that support other artists’ work. The paintings are heavy and layered with readily available materials like fabric, spray paint, tape, and paper. Perkins incorporates family photos and found objects as well as phrases like ‘I love you’ or symbol-rich imagery like spiderwebs into the work. She uses autobiographical content but scrambles the information by covering or erasing elements of the paintings, refusing legibility to sustain privacy.
Spiderwebs appear in many of Perkins’ paintings, and are emblematic of the exhibition’s overall approach. Webs are adaptive and expansive; like webs, her paintings create structures that connect artworks. For example, Eric-Paul Riege uses Perkins’ paintings as raw material for new soft sculptures and as a site for performance. Riege’s work centers weaving––his fiber-based objects and wearable sculptures honor generations of weavers in his family and express his own stories. Fox Maxy’s film Maat densely collages fragments of personal footage, recordings of activists, and rapid-cut sequences of land, digital space, and the border wall. One of Perkins’ paintings acts as a screen for Maxy’s film, echoing their mutual support of each other’s work.
Olen Perkins, Grace’s father, shows a series of sculptures rendered from mesquite branches and aluminum cans collected in the Gila River Indian Community, where the artist lives and works. The gilded staffs build rhythm in their iterations, and act as guideposts that connect land and family. Lonnie Holley transforms found materials into sculptures layered with meaning. With a multivalent creative practice revolving around improvisation, Holley contributes five major sculptures to the show, and will stage a performance and series of workshops later in fall 2022. His vertical, post-like assemblages visually frame Perkins’ paintings, reflective of Holley’s longtime mentorship and friendship with the artist.
Together, these interconnected artworks operate outside of any singular category, creating a generous conversation about identity, land, and collectivity. Through friendship and collaboration, the artists produce a web of support to create space for an expanded sense of self and community.
Grace Rosario Perkins: The Relevance of Your Data is organized by Laura Copelin, Curator-at-Large, with Alexis Wilkinson, Assistant Curator, MOCA Tucson.
The exhibition is supported by VIA Art Fund and Wagner Foundation; Vantage West Credit Union; Desert Diamond Casinos & Entertainment; Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/ New York/ Tokyo; Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona; The Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University; Public & Applied Humanities at the University of Arizona; and MOCA Tucson’s Board of Trustees, Ambassador Council, and Members.
