January 6 – February 19, 2022
Presented at Kathryn Schultz Gallery & online
Curated by Juan Omar Rodriguez
Featuring artwork by:
Juan Arango Palacios • Maria Yolanda Liebana • Perla Mabel • Chloe Luisa Piñero • Ginger Q • Rixy • Moises Salazar • Jhona Xaviera
Online Panel Discussion: Exploring the Politics of Space in Vernacular Glamour: Recording coming soon
Watch the Curatorial Talk online!
About Vernacular Glamour
What is possible when glamour, grounded in quotidian experiences, is embraced, celebrated, and engaged critically? This exhibition brings together a cross-section of contemporary Latinx artists working with the visual vocabularies of camp, popular culture, high fashion, and baroque painting and architecture through vernacular idioms. Engaging the materials and forms of ball culture, advertising media, spiritual practices, and street art, the eight artists in Vernacular Glamour mobilize the artifice and exuberance of glamour to address the complexities of everyday life.
The artworks brought into conversation here reflect and reimagine what is familiar to queer, working class, and racialize peoples and often undervalued by majoritarian arbiters of taste. Vernacular Glamour focuses on figurative work to signal the ways in which the representation of certain bodies and experiences remains novel, controversial even. Through photography, painting, textiles, drawing, and video, the works in this exhibition unapologetically engage the experiences and desires of people who are Black and brown, curvy, fat, feminine, non-binary, and queer.
50 pages, published 1/25/2022
About the curator: Juan Omar Rodriguez
Juan Omar Rodriguez (he/him) is a curator of contemporary art. He is a Curatorial Fellow at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia, PA. Juan Omar’s recent projects include Linger and Flow at PAFA, TBD at Boston CyberArts in collaboration with the Boston LGBTQIA+ Artist Alliance, and SMFA at Tufts: Juried Student Exhibition 2019–2020 at the MFA Boston.
He received an M.A. in Art History and Museum Studies from Tufts University in 2019 and a B.A. in Neuroscience from Oberlin College in 2017.
Vernacular Glamour Curatorial Talk, with Juan Omar Rodriguez
Presented by the Cambridge Art Association, and featuring Vernacular Glamour creator and curator Juan Omar Rodriguez. Recorded on January 28, 2022, at the Cambridge Art Association’s Kathryn Schultz Gallery.
Press Coverage
2022 “Cambridge Art Association show probes queer, Latinx experiences”, Celina Colby, The Bay State Banner
2022 “Vernacular Glamour excavates the material world”, Cate McQuaid, Boston Globe
2021 “Raising their voices: Reclaiming Space and Celebrating Identities at CAA”, Claudia Fiks, Artscope
Thank you to our lead exhibit sponsor:
Thank you for additional sponsorship from:
CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE EXHIBITION PRESS RELEASE
Image in header courtesy of Chloe Luisa Piñero, Constellation