New Exhibit at Shirley Fiterman Art Center: Works by Melissa Marks

The Shirley Fiterman Art Center invites you to our upcoming artist exhibit:

Volitia Turns Herself Inside Out in Order to See the World
Works by Melissa Marks
On view: June 6 – August 3, 2024
Artist Reception: June 26, 2024 from 6-8 p.m.

The show is an installation comprised of framed color drawings and black and white paintings created directly on the walls of the gallery. The show will open while Marks continues to work on the wall paintings, which will ultimately stretch from the South Gallery (facing onto the World Trade Center) through the corridor to the North Gallery.

Viewers will have the opportunity to watch Marks as she transforms the space over the course of several weeks. Engaging directly with the architecture and space of the Fiterman Art Center, Marks’s installation will be performative and monumental, as well as ephemeral, as the murals will be painted over at the exhibition’s end.

Marks’s work centers on an abstract entity named Volitia (a character that has “volition”— the power of self-determination). Despite being an abstraction, Volitia is self-aware and invested with humanism, as well as agency. In many ways, she is an alter ego that Marks has willed into being. The series follows Volitia’s various adventures that unfold through a series of imagined scenarios and escapades, following the visual movement of a narrative, much like a comic book without words.

The Shirley Fiterman Art Center is located at 81 Barclay Street in BMCC’s Fiterman Hall. The gallery hours are Wednesday through Saturday from 12 to 5 p.m. and by appointment.

For viewing appointments or more information, please contact ShirleyFitermanArtCenter@bmcc.cuny.edu.

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