Figuring the Floral
Glyndor Gallery, Wave Hill
The Bronx, New York
July 21 - December 1, 2019

please see catalogue below for full captions and credits. installation Images by Stefan Hagen.

A flower’s life cycle of budding, blooming and pollinating, as well as the process of decay, strongly echoes the human condition. The exhibition Figuring the Floral features artists who apply this symbolism to their work— touching on race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, aging and other facets of identity. Exhibited amid Wave Hill’s flourishing gardens, the artworks on view resonate with the living flora on the grounds—enhancing the exhibition with visible and tangible connections. While floral imagery is often associated with decorative art and femininity, Figuring the Floral subverts these notions. Instead, artists complicate such limiting interpretations by relating these natural forms to deeper reflections on self and society.

In the north gallery, Sanford Biggers, Ebony G. Patterson, Simonette Quamina, Lina Iris Viktor, and Saya Woolfalk unpack relationships dealing with colonial and social histories, personal memory, fantasy and the otherworldly. Also touching on these themes, Christopher K. Ho and Kevin Zucker’s work is installed in the reception area stairwell. In the middle gallery, Christian Ruiz Berman, Cecile Chong, Diana Sofia Lozano, Lina Puerta, Bundith Phunsombatlert, David Rios Ferreira, and Katherine Toukhy visualize immigrant experiences and aesthetics of cultural uprootedness or cross-pollination. Chong’s large-scale sculptural installation is on view in the stone circle down the hill from Glyndor House. In the south gallery, Derrick Adams, Nicole Awai, Bahar Behbahani, Max Colby, Abigail DeVille, Valerie Hegarty, Natalia Nakazawa, Alexandria Smith and William Villalongo use floral imagery to explore various topics including class, gender identities, domestic spaces and the aging human body.

For thousands of years, across cultures, meanings have been attributed to flowers in art and language, from Persian miniatures to the Christian bibles. The Turkish custom of sélam was a method of coded communication used by harem women, based on rhyming words with objects. Victorian-era floriography was rich in metaphor: daffodils symbolized new beginnings, daisies signaled innocence and tussie-mussies held pointing downward were a sign of rejection. With a strong influence of Calvinism in 
the seventeenth century, Dutch vanitas paintings featured a variety of objects symbolizing the fragility of human life and inevitability of death. Promoting a moral code in opposition to earthly pleasures, vanitas pictures often featured beautifully rendered flowers with subtle signs of impending decay. This exhibition brings together artists who create new symbolism, some using flowers to alter or obscure the human form and others working in more abstract or literal modes of depiction. The work includes collage, drawing, painting, photography, sculpture and an outdoor installation amidst the living foliage of the gardens.

Though employing different strategies in object creation, these contemporary artists utilize flower imagery and floral metaphor to explore the struggles and transformations of the human condition. Experienced collectively in the context of Wave Hill’s lush, summer gardens, these works cultivate new, significant narratives of identity.

Exhibition Catalogue
Press Release