Recent and Upcoming
The Bone Magic of Joy Curtis
Curtis’s work is sensitive to matriarchal lineage: the gory miracle of birth, the fecundity of death, generational divide and transmission.
Click here: Brecht Wright Gander April 28, 2024
Joy Curtis
Night Hike and Ocean Grandma
Klaus von Nichtssagend
April 5 - May 11, 2024
Opening Reception : April 5, 2024 6-8 pm
Performances will be held at 2PM on April 13, April 27, May 4, May 11, and during the opening reception.
Performers: Jason Andrew (May 11), Dan Bainbridge (May 4), Olympe Gautier (April 5 + April 13), Aden Hardin (April 5 + April 13), Erin Lee Jones (May 11), Michael Mahalchick (April 27), Lizzie Scott (April 5)
Joy Curtis’s new show of immersive textile sculptures takes on a folkloric quality, addressing ideas of evolution, environmental history, continuity, and change. Curtis sculpts with fabrics dyed to align with multiple historical traditions. These soft materials are quilted and sewn onto wire armatures, assembled to imply animal and plant forms, yet veering into abstraction.
Roots, vertebrae, leaves, and organs drape from figurative or animaloid fabric structures, creating canopies with an ambiguous narrative. Curtis hand-dyes her cloth using techniques inspired by Nigerian (Yoruba) Adire and Japanese Shibori processes, employing natural hues such as amber, ochre, iron, and indigo. Some pieces incorporate synthetic elements, such as reflective discs sewn into the works, causing visual sparks or glimmers amidst the more subdued textiles. The mixture of materials creates rich textures, as well as both reflective and absorbent variations in the light.
Some sculptures are large and hang dramatically from the ceiling, allowing the viewer to walk underneath and between them. A series of smaller works hang on the walls, actively wearable as garments. When dressed on individuals, these sculptures transform the wearer into an extension of Curtis’s formal style. Throughout the show, performers will activate the works by wearing them in the gallery.Joy Curtis lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She has recently exhibited at the Museum of New Art in Portsmouth, New Hampshire; the Pelham Art Center; Ohio University Art Gallery; and Ceysson & Bénétière in New York. Her work was also included in the “Found Outside” exhibition at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. Her practice has been covered in the New Yorker, Hyperallergic, Time Out New York, and Artcritical.
Broken Open
An exploration of the body as a resource.
Bianca Beck • Joy Curtis • Jennie Jieun Lee • Brie Ruais • Aparna Sarkar
Museum of New Art, Portsmouth, NH
curated by Hilary Schaffner
April 19- September 25, 2022
The works in this exhibition are messy. The perfection of formalism is nowhere in sight. From Bianca Beck's rough hewn papier-mâché surfaces, to Joy Curtis's tattered fabrics, to Jennie Jiuen Lee's pours of glaze across her ceramic busts, to Brie Ruais's expansive stretched clay, and to Aparna Sarkar's scratched canvas, the markers of expression are ever present. The works are steeped in each artist's personal history as themes of gender, identity, and sexuality serve as guideposts from which they excavate. The body is messy as well; to inhabit one is a complex proposition made even more complex by the systems that try to define it. As the title implies, each artist has broken open their own systems of being. They are exploring the uncharted possibility of what it means to possess a physical form solely unto themselves.
Learn more here
On the Grounds:
Joy Curtis, Pam Lins, Christina Tenaglia
Upcoming tours:
August 16 - RSVP HERE
August 29–October 10 - RSVP HERE
River Valley Arts Collective is partnering with the Al Held Foundation to present outdoor sculptural installations by Joy Curtis, Pam Lins and Christina Tenaglia on the land beside Held’s studio complex in upstate New York.
This exhibition is a continuation and expansion of an ongoing collaboration between RVAC and the foundation to provide artists with opportunities to present their work in the architectural and landscape environment that Held created and inhabited from 1965 until his death in 2005.
For this project, Curtis, Lins and Tenaglia have used the context of an artist’s work space to make sculptures that are materially experimental, in collaboration with nature and the elements, and responsive to the location. This singular, intimate setting has allowed them to take risks and push the scale and scope of their practice.
Emerging from the woods at the edge of a field, Celestial Bodies, a textile and steel construction by Joy Curtis, stands over sixteen feet tall and moves with the winds that channel through the Catskills.
Puddles and Wedges by Pam Lins is an accumulation of hand built ceramic forms resting atop stones that surround the perfect oval outline of a now feral swimming pool.
On Untitled (Can’t hold onto it), Christina Tenaglia’s inverted architectural form that cantilevers from a steep hillside, clay forms cling to massive vertical slabs of oak that demark the walls of an implied shelter.
Unartisinal, an online exhibition
ABC NO RIO
Click HERE to view exhibition.
Curated by Yasmeen Abdallah and Vandana Jain
May 5 - June 6, 2021
"Unartisanal" is an online exhibition featuring artists working in traditional craft and will prioritize work that foregrounds the integrity of the maker, materials and methods; favoring quality, time, principle and labor over trend, style or aesthetic. Incorporating an array of techniques drawn from many traditions, these works slow down to a different wavelength. The practiced methods, steady hands, repetition, and focus required by craft are augmented by chance, whim and unconscious intent.
Reflections on the work of contemporary artists
POSTED ON MARCH 10, 2021 BY ETTY YANIV
Joy Curtis: With Every Fiber at Pelham Art Center
Click HERE to read article.
With Every Fiber
curated by Anki King
February 6 - April 3, 2021
Pelham Art Center, Pelham, NY
Animal Medicine and Ghost Dance, 2020. Installation view at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York, NY.
Skeleton Woman, Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery,
December 5, 2020 - January 9, 2021
Sculpture Alumnae from 1987-2012
Sept. 15 - Oct. 10, 2020
Ohio University Art Gallery, 536 Seigfred Hall, Athens, Ohio
Joy Curtis Open Studio
NY Textile Month V
September 12 and 13, 2020, 1-5 pm
Cult of the Crimson Queen
curated by Michelle Segre
February 05 - March 14, 2020
Opening on Wednesday, February 05, 6-8 PM
Ceysson & Bénétière is pleased to present Cult of the Crimson Queen, curated by Michelle Segre. Featuring works by Sarah Braman, Amy Brener, Sedrick Chisom, Kari Cholnoky, Joy Curtis, Nikita Gale, Naotaka Hiro, Michael Mahalchick, Sarah Peters, and Jennifer Sirey, this exhibition will be on view from February 5th through March 14th, 2020.
Cult of the Crimson Queen builds upon allusions to cult iconography, ritual practices, and music festivals to propose art as a healing force and palliative to the psychic and material toxicity of the Anthropocene era. The show addresses the connection between mind, body, and environment while also acknowledging the possible ominous implications of collective thinking. Works in the exhibition cultivate a sense of DIY and supernatural intervention, evoking the remnants of a ceremonial action. Found objects, natural materials, as well as seemingly toxic synthetic compounds come together to suggest an ancient-future landscape being rebuilt after a pending ecological collapse.
Couterpointe 7, organized by Jason Andrew and Julia K Gleich of Norte Maar
In collaboration with choreographer Janice Rosario
This Spring, Norte Maar brings forth CounterPointe 7, a collaboration between six female dance makers and six female visual artists. The performances will take place at downtown Brooklyn’s Actors Fund Arts Center from April 26-28.
Soul Shell
January 9 - February 10 2019
Opening Reception: Wednesday, January 9, 6-8PM
This January, Klaus von Nichtssagend will show three new sculptural works by Joy Curtis in the front gallery. Curtis uses hand-dyed fabrics inlaid with wire supports to create cavity-like forms alluding to bodies, skeletons, or armor. Their forms extend down from the walls to the floor in long strands. Within some of the fabric forms, bronze-cast objects hang suspended like talismans or organs.
Curtis’s work is informed by her studies of natural and synthetic dyes, and the historical and social implications associated with them. The pieces in this show are made with indigo and madder root dyes, which played a role in the African slave trade. Indigo is used in North and West African, South American and Indian cultures, while salmon and beige-toned madder root is native to many parts of Europe and the Middle East. Both were grown under colonial powers and are deeply tied to the commodification of agriculture and human bodies within mercantile economies. In one instance Curtis uses synthetically dyed fabric to represent inner body muscles, tendons, and ligaments. The invention of synthetic dyes, while challenging ecosystems, was instrumental in ending slave labor and other abusive labor practices globally.
Curtis’s sculptures look to vocabularies of anthropology and color to examine histories and past abuses. Through this work she hopes to foster some of the awareness and attention that healing requires.
Joy Curtis (b.1976) lives and works in Brooklyn. She holds an MFA from Ohio University, Athens. Her work was recently included in the “Found Outside” exhibition at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. Curtis's practice has been covered in Hyperallergic, Time Out New York, and Artcritical. This is her fourth solo show with Klaus von Nichtssagend.
For more information contact Ingrid Bromberg Kennedy at ingrid@klausgallery.com
Baggage Claim
Opening Reception June 29, 2017, 6-8 pm
Lisha Bai, Joy Curtis, Tamara Gonzales, Cheyenne Jackson, Michael Mahalchick, Kanishka Raja, David Scanavino, and Alessandro Teoldi.
Klaus von Nichtssagend 54 Ludlow Street, New York, NY 10002
Songs for Presidents is pleased to present:
Throat Chakra: Inna Babaeva, Joy Curtis, and Gail Fitzgerald
Curated by Christine Heindl
April 15 - May 7, 2017
Opening reception: Saturday April 15th 7 - 9 pm
Throat Chakra features three artists who engage in concrete wizardry - re-forming elemental material into transformative objects. Insistently abstract, these art objects are interventionist - protruding, bulging. They take up space.
Weight Over Time: Joy Curtis and Terence Hannum
Curated by Vincent Como, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, NY
April 1 - May 8, 2016
Reception: Friday, April 1, 2016 6-9 PM
ArtHouse Productions, Jersey City, NJ
The Exhibitions Program at Art House, in cooperation with The Dorado Project, proudly presents Ecco Domus from May 13 to June 26, 2016. Guest curator Enrico Gomez presents a selection of artworks from nine local, national, and international artists; Abdolreza Aminlari, Joy Curtis, Katherine Di Turi, Karl England, Emily Hass, Teresa Moro, Jeremy Coleman Smith, Kirk Amaral Snow, and Krista Svalbonas, engaging themes of replication, recombination, and repetition as found within the framework of architectural inspiration.
Rational Curves
Joy Curtis, Ryan DaWalt, Matt Phillips
Curated by Robert Otto Epstein
March 12 - April 3, 2016
Mattewan Gallery, Beacon, NY
Drawing for Sculpture, curated by Courtney Puckett
January 8 – February 14, 2016
Tiger Strikes Asteroid New York is pleased to announce the opening of its first exhibition of 2016, Drawing for Sculpture, a survey of drawings by forty-one sculptors:
Alice Adams, Margery Amdur, Rachel Beach, Charlotte Becket, Sarah Bednarek, Louise Bourgeois, Amy Brener, Amanda Browder, Nicole Cherubini, Lauren Clay, Diana Cooper, Petah Coyne, Joy Curtis, Kate Starbuck Elliot, Stacy Fisher, Martha Friedman, Rachel Higgins, Kristen Jensen, Katy Krantz, Denise Kupferschmidt, Emily Noelle Lambert, Katerina Lanfranco, Fabienne Lasserre, Elisa Lendvay, Jill Levine, Esperanza Mayobre, Shari Mendelson, Virginia Lee Montgomery, Megan Pahmier, Claudia Peña Salinas, Sheila Pepe, Meridith Pingree, Courtney Puckett, Carolyn Salas, Gabriela Salazar, Lisa Schilling, Judith Scott, Michelle Segre, Shinique Smith, Courtney Tramposh, and Eileen Weitzman.