Solo Exhibition Opens Oct. 27

Washington and Lee University’s Staniar Gallery is showcasing “Fragile Intangibilities,” a solo exhibition by New York-based artist Daphne Arthur. The exhibit will be on view from Oct. 27 through Dec. 12. Arthur will also give an artist’s talk on Nov. 11 at 5:30 p.m. in Wilson Concert Hall in the Lenfest Center for the Arts, followed by a reception.

The exhibition and reception events are free and open to the public.

For more information about the 2025-26 exhibition and programming schedule, visit |https://www.wlu.edu/ staniar-gallery|Staniar Gallery’s website|

From February 15th through April 27th, 2025, Project for Empty Space presented Fragile Intangibilities, a solo exhibition by 2023 - 2025 Artist In Residence Daphne Arthur at PES Ironside Newark (110 Edison Pl.)

Fragile Intangibilities comprised 11 hand-sewn silk organza camping tents. Each tent was suffused with ink drawings inspired by Arthur's interviews. Arthur, a Venezuelan-born immigrant, conversed with fellow first-generation immigrants and migrants in New York City and Connecticut.

These floating, translucent mobile homes depict the unique and personal stories as kaleidoscopic spectrums of amalgamated memories. They contain depictions of personal mythologies that families reproduce. Interrelated sequences do not merely establish human action in time; they also establish themselves in memory, which repeats and re-collects the course of events. Engaging the theme of movement and confronting these histories, the travelers’ retelling requires a return to the past, reformulating the story in the present, and bringing it forward to the possibilities of the future.

Each tent reaffirms diaspora as a living condition of resilience, family reunification, and sacrifices made in aspiring for viable futures. They propose that migration be a process that allows for a hybrid identity, not defined by a single location or by belonging to a monolithic group. The lack of a specific place to call home challenges the universal reliance on origin, nationality, and family as the only principles on which an identity can be based. Arthur’s work signifies how identity, thus, stops being something inherited or constructed based on an affiliation to a socially or geographically prescribed group. Instead, identity evolves in relation to movement through social and geographic spaces. Moreover, the self emerges as a result of the encounters with others that these spaces afford. The transitory and intangible nature of these homes is a metaphor for the memories we carry and conjure within our bodies, connecting sinews, grafted in our psyche, of site-specific occurrences that, beyond chronology, expand collectively into time immemorial.

Capturing migratory experiences, each tent reflects on the subject's views and interpretation of deterioration, transformation, and the stakes of historical change. Echoing recent and contemporary patterns of gentrification, the works re-focus on the corrosion of marginalized communities and their local histories. Meanwhile, exploring notions that foster a sense of belonging and identity through landmarked boundaries. The transitory and intangible nature of these homes is a metaphor of memories we carry and conjure within our bodies - connecting grafted sinews in our psyche of site-specific occurrences that expand beyond chronology, collectively into time immemorial.

Installation images by Carlos Hernandez.
Opening reception images by Sam H. Lee.

Project for Empty Space is thrilled to announce the release of an editioned artist book by our Artist in Residence, Daphne Arthur. This 40-page, 6” x 9” mixed-media art book presents images from her exhibition, Fragile Intangibilities, and includes contributions from Ayokunle Falomo, Tobias Wray, and Claudia E. Zapata. The book features delicate, hand-painted silk organza layers that separate the text, beautifully mirroring the exhibition’s primary translucent material. This limited edition of 100 copies is signed by the artist.

GET YOUR COPY

2023, Northeast, Issue #164

2024, Northeast, Issue #170

Eduardo from We Are LatinX sits down with contemporary artist Daphne Arthur. Daphne talks about her multicultural experience being born in Venezuela yet raised in a Trinidadian house. She talks about her creative process and what inspires her to create through the mediums of painting, sculpture, and drawing all while experimenting with different materials. Eduardo and Daphne share their experiences in connecting with nature and how important that is to them both. Daphne also talks about her work that is being shown at the Over The Influence gallery in Los Angeles, CA this month and what drew her to create those pieces.

If you live in the LA area go check out Daphne Arthur's work at the Over The Influence gallery where she is exhibiting her "I've arrived" or "He Llegado" series. The exhibit will be at the gallery until July 24th.

This panel discussion focuses on questions of creativity and freedom, contending with the various conditions that lead artists to challenge established assumptions and beliefs in the face of repression.
12/2/20

Daphne Arthur, an artist represented in Mirror Mirror on the Wall, delivers a talk as part of the closing reception for the exhibit currently on display in the Callahan Center in St Francis College, NY.

Event date: December 5, 2019.

CURATOR STATEMENT

In the 21st century, being witness through media to events and surveyed is as common as breathing air leaves a feeling that there are no real edges between consuming information and lived experience. This exhibition, Daphne Arthur: In the Eye of the World offers viewers an opportunity to shift perspectives and find something to hold onto. In 2006, when Arthur was my student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she was then, as now, a powerful storyteller, able to convey messages about the human experience that move in many directions. Both beautiful and subtle, her stories are compelling, inviting us in as guests and participants. The power of lived experience—the artist’s and the viewer’s—is a touchstone of this exhibition.

Arthur’s work quickly pulls you into another world, a world of realities and complexities that echo personal and collective narratives of past, present and future. Kinesis (2019)—a pensive, staid drama—both desolate and curious, mirrors our own waiting, wandering minds. Her lush and vibrant
color, layered in as many methods as she can invent, is obvious in a work like Target (2020), which also asks questions of the viewer’s assumptions and implicit biases. This mix of metaphorical and pictorial textures is a hallmark of Arthur’s paintings and assemblages.

Within her practice, Arthur is both experimental and analytic, using realist and surrealist strategies, as well as alternative materials and methods, beyond paint, that require audiences to think through her process. One particularly evocative and enigmatic work Ode to Black (2015)—a dramatic, postapocalyptic scene, at once familiar, jarring, and delicate—is made from smoke. The transformation of the ephemeral into something concrete is another of the symbolic bases of Arthur’s work. In her sensual compositions she is always playing around and through her personal and our collective memory. The results are alluring and belie their weighty content. In forceful works that draw upon layers of history, methodology and content, Arthur draws you in, and holds you tightly.

Julia Marsh
Guest Curator

In the Eye of the World
On view: March 5th - TBA
Opening Reception and Artist Talk, March 13th, 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm

Curated by Julia Marsh
Cedar Crest College, Center for Visual Research
100 College Drive
Allentown, PA 18104

Join the City of San Antonio Department of Arts & Culture for the opening receptions of two new exhibitions at Centro de Artes gallery.

On the first floor you’ll experience, “XicanX: New Visions.” This national exhibit curated by Dos Mestizx (Suzy González and Michael Menchaca) challenges previous and existing surveys of Chicano and Latino identity-based exhibitions. This group of 34 artists expands upon how Latinx artwork can be established across ideological borders; freely expressing a new wave of images and voices in a post-internet era. #XicanXNV

Then, head up to the second floor to see “Los Maestros: Early Explorers of Chicano Identity.” This exhibition focuses on three of the founders of San Antonio’s Chicano arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s: Jesse Almazan, Jose Esquivel and Rudy Treviño and will highlight their unique contributions and histories as individual artists. “Los Maestros” is curated by San Antonio arts organization Centro Cultural Aztlan.

The exhibitions will be on display from February 13 through June 28, 2020.

“...a person is a fluid process, not a fixed and static entity; a flowing river of
change, not a block of solid material; a continually changing constellation of
potentialities, not a fixed quantity of traits.”
- Carl R. Rogers

THE GALLERY is pleased to present Congruency, an exhibition that explores the attempt to achieve congruence in an unwieldy world. Objects have a way of keeping time for us. They physically embody moments from the past, but also have the ability to resonate with those of
the future. Art objects also mark the confluence of intention and effort of the maker. Time is layered in an art piece: the past experiences of the artist, the time it takes to create, and each moment that it is considered, looked upon, touched, and moving the viewer.

The term congruence was used by the humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers to describe a state when one’s ideal self and actual self are consistent. Through the work of eleven artists, this exhibition documents attempts at congruence. Congruence for an artist is the elusive moment
when the ideal of the artwork in their head aligns with the object that they have created. Each artwork is an inner examination that has been made whole and external.

Congruency will feature work by Daphne Arthur, Jim Gaylord, Lauren Gidwitz, Catherine Haggarty, Lavaughan Jenkins, Sung Hwa Kim, Maria Kreyn, Calli Moore, Eileen Neff, Dominic Terlizzi, and Aparna Sarkar. This group of artists push traditional methods in an effort to
transcend form; in order to address something larger, more nuanced and ineffable.

These endeavors towards congruency can be felt in each piece; the moments when the channels from mind to object to viewer are clear. We glimpse them in vibrational weavings of paint, symbols and pattern play, the ecstatic transmission of an expression as pigment slips
down the surface, the shifting realms of the micro and macroscopic, the natural and the man-made, the twistings of symmetry and layering of discordant imagery for an unlikely harmony. Each piece is a leap into the Gestalt, where the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

For more information about the artists featured in Congruency, please contact Gallery Director
Will Feurtado at willietjones@yahoo.com

Prato Capital Management, Whiteplains
February 21, 2020 - TBA

Saint Francis College, Brooklyn, NY
Sept 19- Dec 17

Celebrating the 5th installment of Art on the Vine (AOTV) presented by The Agora Culture. This year will feature 17 contemporary Black Women visual artists of color working in various disciplines; Savage-Lewis Artist Residents, presenting new collaborative works completed on the Vineyard during their stay this summer; as well as AOTV Convening: a progressive series of panel discussions and conversations. Aug 10th-14th

https://www.artonthevinemv.com/

http://newyork.splashmags.com/index.php/2018/06/14/the-bench-a-homeless-love-story-review-a-fine-piece-of-theater/#gsc.tab=0

MASS MOCA Residency 2017

Hear/Here exhibition opening - Saturday, June 4th

Hope you had an amazing week! Please join me this Saturday June 4 at Honfleur Gallery in Washington D.C. for the opening of my most recent exhibition, Hear/Here. The exhibition features Daphne Arthur (NYC), Fire Angelou and Andrew Keiper (Baltimore) and Omolara Williams McCallister (DC) exploring the needed dialogue within and between urban centers in the U.S. that constantly grapple with issues of displacement, violence and calls for social justice. We are examining the points of intersection as well as disconnection among the various groups vying for social and political agency in an ever evolving society. June 4th to July 16th

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Mixed Bag:
An International Small Works Exhibition Contemporary Art curated by GA Gardner,
59 Rivoli Gallery, Paris, France
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Broken Walls, Harbor Gallery,
University of Massachusetts Boston, MD
April 07- May 07 2015
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Pancorum Hominum, Rare Gallery, NY
Feb 27th- April 10th, 2014
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Land of Tomorrow, Louisville, KY
Curated by Aaron Skolnick
April 26 - July 2, 2013
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Edge Art: Black-Latino(a) Artists, An Inter-Caribbean Dialogue
(group show curated by Tod Roulette & Dr. Gordon Thompson, and sponsored by Black Studies Program, CCNY Cohen Library, and RAP-SI (BMI)), February 4 – 28, 2013
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Scope Miami 2012
Rare Gallery
booth #F09
Dec 4-9
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African-American Fine Art
Swann Galleries, New York, New York
International Auction Benefit for SCAIII Scholar.org
OCTOBER 18, 2012
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Even Gravity Has Its Ups and Downs
Arena 1, Santa Monica, California
OCTOBER 13- NOVEMBER 10, 2012
Curated by Mark Carter

Opening Reception:
Saturday, October 13th, 6-9pm

Artist: Daphne Arthur, Eben Goff, Sharon Lawless, Ali Naschke-Messing, Pascual Sisto, Cody VanderKaay, Darren Waterston, Susan York.

Artists creativity is notably sourced by free spiritedness, risk taking and a lack of boundaries, but they often find themselves negotiating the laws of physics. A free roaming imagination interacts with force, mass, time and gravity, exerting them to lend shape to objects, fluids and solids.
Even Gravity Has Its Ups and Downs includes works that range from lighter than air to the massively dense, from seriously grounded to ephemeral. Included artist wrestle with the powers that control the universe and allow them to drip, tug, mash, float and expand.

Gallery hours Wed-Sat, 12pm to 6pm
www.santamonicaartstudios.com/

Go Tell It On A Mountain
California African American Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California
OCTOBER 4, 2012- MARCH 31, 2013

James Baldwin's 1953 visceral autobiographical novel, Go Tell It On The Mountain, explores the dual role of the Christian church in the lives of African Americans. It is at once a vehicle for the control and repression in addition to being a wellspring of inspiration and community.
The novel also paints an unerring portrayal of racism in the United States and its devastating emotional affects. This exhibition of the same title finds its anchor in Baldwin's book, and attempts to explore how some artists have mined these oppositional forces found in the Christian church to foster political action and civic engagement. Artists included in the exhibition are Edgar Arceneaux, Daphne Arthur, Andrea Bowers, Carolyn Castaño, Robert Colescott, Mark Greenfield, Zeal Harris, Caroline Kent, Nery Gabriel Lemus, Kerry James Marshall, John Outterbridge, Nikki Pressley, Erika Rothenberg, Sanjit Sethi, and Nate Young, among others.

Caribe Now
Nathan Cummings Foundation, New York, New York
OCTOBER 4- JANUARY 18, 2012
reception OCTOBER 4
exhibition opens to the public OCTOBER 5
Curated by Rocío Aranda-Alvarado

As Part of the Caribbean: Crossroads of the World project, Caribe Now: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Diaspora is an exhibition by artists of Caribbean descent who explore how the Caribbean, through its diaspora, continues to be conceived through the lens of contemporary culture.
In partnership with El Museo Del Barrio, Caribe Now celebrates artists whose work sheds light on underserved populations, and provides a visual expression of social justice by interrogating displacement and discrimination. For more information visit El Museo Del Barrio's website www.elmuseo.org

Poetics of Reverie
Rare Gallery, New York, New York
JANUARY 5- FEBRUARY 2, 2012

Curated by Daphne Arthur

with artists:
Shanga Manning and Daphne Arthur
www.rare-gallery.com/Archive.html#nogo
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