Installation by Melissa Marks “Interacts Fully” with the Architecture and Space of the Shirley Fiterman Art Center

Melissa Marks, Boomerang, 2023/24, color pencil on paper, 22” x 28”
Melissa Marks, Boomerang, 2023/24, color pencil on paper, 22” x 28”

May 28, 2024

The Shirley Fiterman Art Center, 81 Barclay Street in lower Manhattan, on the first floor of Fiterman Hall at Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC/CUNY), has presented over 50 exhibitions since 2013.

Emerging and established local, national and international artists have been featured in a diverse array of gallery programs that have highlighted contemporary art and investigated its role in society.

Now the exhibition “Volitia Turns Herself Inside Out in Order to See the World” will open a window on the art making process itself.

In addition to presenting a series of framed works throughout the exhibition, the artist, Melissa Marks, will create black-and-white original works by applying black paint directly onto the white walls of the space.

The large-scale wall paintings will stretch from the Fiterman Art Center’s South Gallery, which faces the World Trade Center, through the corridor to the North Gallery.

Viewers will have the opportunity to view this transformation of the North and South Gallery spaces over the course of several weeks, from June 6 through June 25, Wednesday through Saturday from 12 noon to 5 p.m.

“This installation by Melissa Marks interacts fully with the architecture and space of the Shirley Fiterman Art Center,” says Fiterman Art Center Director Lisa Panzera. “While the project is a monumental undertaking, it will also be fleeting, as at the end of the exhibition the work will be painted over.”

Framed color drawings together with the works painted directly on the walls of the gallery, will make up the overall installation.

An artist reception will take place Wednesday, June 26 from 6 to 8 p.m. in the Fiterman Art Center and the exhibition will be on view through Saturday, August 3.

Director Panzera explains more about the exhibition.

“Marks’s work centers on an abstract entity named ‘Volitia’—a character that has ‘volition,’ the power of self-determination,” Panzera says. “Despite being an abstraction, Volitia is self-aware and invested with humanism, as well as agency.”

She adds that the series of paintings “will reveal Volitia’s adventures through a series of imagined scenarios and escapades, following the visual movement of a narrative, much like a comic book without words.”

In addition, Panzera says, “While appropriating aspects of the gesture and scale of Abstract Expressionism with her large-scale wall paintings—huge black gestures on white surfaces–Marks counters the mythology of the heroic abstract painter by embracing the decidedly anti-heroic medium of color pencil, viewed in framed works, and pairing the two together.”

Marks also references early Renaissance fresco cycles, contemporary comics and Pop Art in her creation of a unique narrative form of a personified abstraction.

Melissa Marks received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Wesleyan University and an MFA in Painting from the Yale School of Art.

She has exhibited her work widely throughout the United States and Europe, with solo exhibitions in settings including the Planthouse Gallery, NY; Bloomberg Space, London; Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, NY; Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, CT and Joya: arte + ecología, in Almeria, Spain.

Her work has also been included in group exhibitions at PS1/MOMA, NY; Artspace, CT and The Drawing Center, NY, and she has held residencies with Residency Unlimited, Brooklyn, NY and Joya: arte + ecología in Almeria, Spain.

The Shirley Fiterman Art Center is located at 81 Barclay Street, New York, NY. 10007. It is open Wednesday through Saturday from 12 to 5 p.m. and can also be viewed by appointment, by contacting ShirleyFitermanArtCenter@bmcc.cuny.edu or (212) 776-5631. For more information, please visit Shirley Fiterman Art Center.

 

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

  • BMCC’s Shirley Fiterman Art Center presents the exhibition, “Volitia Turns Herself Inside Out in Order to See the World”

  • Visitors view framed works on paper, as well as watching artist Melissa Marks paint directly onto the walls of the North and South Gallery spaces, creating large-scale, black-and-white work from June 6 through June 25, Wednesday through Saturday from 12 noon to 5 p.m.

  • An artist reception will be held Wednesday, June 26 from 6 to 8 p.m. and the exhibition will be on view through August 3

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