This spring, Pratt in Venice alumnae/i, faculty, and friends have been busy making and exhibiting work, curating exhibitions, and advancing exciting projects. Here’s a cross-section of what’s on!

Grayson Cox

Reggie Bar
14 Store Road
Tuxedo Park, NY 10987

Grayson Cox, Pratt in Venice Printmaking and Drawing faculty (‘15, ‘17), will be featuring a new painting in a group show at the newly established Reggie Bar, Tuxedo Park, NY, in April 2022.

Grayson Cox is a New York City based artist working in a variety of media, from painting and printmaking to photography and furniture-like sculpture. He was born in 1979 in Indianapolis, Indiana, received his BFA from Indiana University and spent two years living and working in Tokyo before moving to New York City in 2005. Grayson received his Masters of Fine Art from Columbia University in 2010. Grayson is the recipient of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Artistic innovation and collaboration grant, National Society of Arts & Letters Career Award, the Daisy Soros Prize, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Residency. He has exhibited in New York and internationally.

Katie Croft (PiV ‘19)

Whose Story Is It?
Spilt Milk Gallery CIC
151 London Road
Edinburgh, Scotland, EH7 6AE, UK
March 5–26, 2022

Pratt in Venice alumna Katie Croft (PiV ‘19) is exhibiting work, Could I Have Been Anyone Other Than Me?, in the exhibition “Whose Story Is It?” at Spilt Milk Gallery in Edinburgh, Scotland, through March 26.

The exhibition brings together a diverse grouping of international mother artists whose work responds to the notion of collective healing. Recognising the disproportionate affect the pandemic has had on mothers, and the desire to mend fractured communities, the need for collective healing has never felt so acute. As the late bell hooks suggested; “rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.

Katie is also teaching a class related to her exhibited work, Learn the Art of Crafting Clay and Make Your Own Reliquary, at Morbid Anatomy.

In this class, participants will learn about the history of reliquaries and relics, create their own personal reliquary using clay, and present their creation to the class as a final project. The first hour of the class will be image rich lecture, while the second hour of each class will be shared studio time so that Katie may address technical issues with the clay and demonstrate techniques as requested.

Over the course of the class, we will explore the history of reliquaries and how they can be a vehicle to explore our own personal relationship with death. In this class, we will explore the origin of the relic and the development of the reliquary as a sacred container for hair, bones, teeth, skin, and cloth. This will include the cult of the hero as well as Christian, Buddhist, and Hindu reliquaries. We will explore the different types of reliquaries historically created, and we will delve into the idea that the reliquary can be a container that both holds a physical part of our corporeal body, but that can also be a vessel that holds our own personal histories. While Catholic reliquaries are traditionally made from precious metals and stones we will make them from clay, a richly physical, democratic, and ubiquitous material available to all humans who have walked upon this earth.

Additionally, Katie will be leading a workshop, Seeded Clay: A Virtual Workshop Exploring Hope, Renewal, & New Beginnings, via Mountain Creative Arts, on Saturday, March 26, 2022.

Spring is a time of growth and renewal. It is a time to shed the weight of winter and look toward a new light on the horizon. In this workshop we will create a sculpture from clay. This sculpture will metaphorically contain our worries, sadness, and struggles that we want to let go of as we approach the end of winter.

In addition, within this sculpture we will embed wildflower seeds. These seeds will represent life and rebirth, hope, and a new beginning. The sculpture you create can then be placed in a garden, your yard, or in a pot on a balcony. If you choose to place it nearby you can watch its transformation and witness the sculpture as it returns to the earth and nourishes the seeds you’ve placed within it.

Katie Croft (PiV ‘19) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She graduated from Pratt with her MFA in painting and drawing in 2020 and is currently a candidate for her MSP in Creative Art Therapy from Pratt, 2022. In her work, she uses clay as a canvas positioning her drawings, paintings, and photographs onto the surface to create sculptural figures who are simultaneously revealed and veiled. Narratives and stories, tropes, hidden images, and secrets confront the ongoing behaviour of dismissing female identity and perspective while celebrating the bountiful history and power of the feminine. As a mother she addressed her own matrilineal misinformation, and her work engages myths of the body, medicine, motherhood, and religion to critique the historical subjugation of women by imposing absurd standards of beauty and behaviour. Her daughter is often her muse and they work together creating dialogues, photographs, and collages that influence the final works and reflect how they process cultural expectations of bodies, race, and relationships between mothers and daughters.

ARI FOUSE (PIV ‘19)

Pratt in Venice alumna Ari Fouse (PiV ‘19) has recently been appointed Assistant Director of Lois Lambert Gallery in Santa Monica, California. Brava!

Ari Fouse is an oil painter. Her work plays with tension, ambiguity, and the indeterminacy of space. Her most recent body of work, the Water-bound Series uses the seascape as a vehicle to explore the possibilities of painting and elemental abstraction.

Fouse is a ‘21 BFA Painting graduate, with a minor in Cultural Studies, from Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn. She is also an alumna of the 2019 Pratt in Venice program, where she served as a teaching assistant for the Art History course.

Fay Ku

The Kittredge/Wilson Lecture—Fay Ku
The Academy Art Museum
106 South Street
Easton, MD 21601
Thursday, April 21, 2022, at 6:00 PM
Free and open to the public; reservation required

Pratt in Venice professor of Printmaking and Drawing Fay Ku will deliver the Kittredge/Wilson Lecture at the Academy Art Museum in Easton, Maryland. The event will take place Thursday, April 21, 2022 at 6:00 PM, and is free and open to the public; reservation required.

Fay Ku is a Taiwanese-born, Brooklyn-based artist whose surreal poetic works reference myths, fairytales, and cultural histories. With meticulous detail and impeccable draftsmanship, Ku creates fantastical worlds that recall dreams, nightmares, and childhood fears and fantasies. Ku is the recipient of a 2007 Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant and the 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship grant. She has exhibited extensively, including in solo exhibitions at the Honolulu Museum of Art, New Britain Museum of American Art, and the Snite Museum of Art. She received her MFA from Pratt Institute and has participated in several residencies at art institutions, including the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Lower East Side Printshop, and the Tamarind Institute. The Academy Art Museum recently added Ku’s lithograph, Sea Change, 2009, to its collection.

Susan Luss (PiV ‘10)

Terrarium Group Exhibition
Ice Cream Social
40 Merritt Street
Port Chester, NY 10573
March 5 – May 6, 2022 (by appointment only)

Pratt in Venice alumna Susan Luss (PiV ‘10) is featuring new work in a group exhibition, Terrarium, at Ice Cream Social in Port Chester, New York.

Terrarium examines growth in all of its confounding forms, inside and outside of containment, managed and wild, protected and exposed. The works speak of growth that sometimes requires destruction or thorny discoveries. They emphasize the natural world’s proclivity to reconstruct, and the marks that changes leave behind. New presences, species, ideas, or generations may emerge, but they always retain a familiarity and irrevocable connection to what preceded them. There, a cyclical and self-nourishing system persists.

Susan Luss (b. 1959, El Paso, TX) is an inter-disciplinary artist living in New York City, maintaining a professional studio in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Luss works with a range of materials and media. She intermixes and assembles these, creating adaptable works engaging the architecture of space, environment, natural forces, and shifting light. Her large-scale paintings on canvas, distillations of her wanderings, both physical and psychological, transform through environmental intervention. Luss received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and her BFA in Studio Arts Painting from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn. She and her husband, Gerald Luss, participated in the 2010 session of Pratt in Venice.

Sofía Shaula Reeser-del Rio (PiV ‘11)

Building Radical Soil
The Latinx Project NYU
285 Mercer Street
New York, NY 10003
January 27–May 5, 2022

Pratt in Venice alumna Sofía Shaula Reeser-del Rio (PiV ‘11) has curated Building Radical Soil at The Latinx Project, New York University.

An artist panel will take place with the curator and select artists from the exhibition on Wednesday, May 4, 2022, from 6–7:15 PM.

Building Radical Soil is a group exhibition that moves us to appreciate the interrelatedness of our everyday lives and the environment. Curated by Sofía Shaula Reeser-del Rio, the show features contemporary artists Nyugen E. Smith, Maria Gaspar, Michelle Hernandez Vega, Koyoltzintli, Glendalys Medina, Carlos Rosales Silva, Lina Puerta, Justin Sterling, and Cinthya Santos Briones. Collectively their works surface an understanding of urgent issues that include extractive economies, environmental racism, and colonial settlement through the reevaluation of ancestral, intergenerational, and community knowledge.

Sofía Shaula Reeser-del Rio (b. 1989) is a Puerto Rican scholar, independent curator, multidisciplinary artist, and educator. Her practice is based between Puerto Rico, Madrid, and NYC. She has organized and produced several major exhibitions with a special focus on Latinx, Latin American, and Caribbean artists, particularly supporting LGBTQ and self-identified female artists from Puerto Rico. Her artistic practice explores themes of memory, ecology, sustainability, new modes of economic/social production, and pedagogy. She has an MFA from the University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain, and a BFA from the Pratt Institute, where she participated in Pratt in Venice, serving as the Painting Course Assistant for Prof. Chris Wright.

Luke B. Watson (PiV ‘13)

Luke B. Watson: Clearcut
MFA Thesis Exhibition
ASU Step Gallery
605 East Grant Street
Phoenix, AZ 85004
March 3–12, 2022

Pratt in Venice alumnus Luke B. Watson (PiV ‘13) is exhibiting work in Clearcut, his MFA exhibition, at the ASU Step Gallery. An opening reception was held on Friday, March 4; the exhibition is on view through March 12, 2022.

Using colored paper and traditional representational painting I craft then document facsimiles of landscape. I hand build models of trees and other phototrophic organisms out of paper, sculpting and reconstituting their pulped essence into a proxy for their original form. Arranging these intricate symbols of plant life, I develop a simulacrum of the landscapes I cherish from materials extracted through its desecration. The paper cellulose, extracted from the nutrient and energy cycles, is stabilized from change, stabilized from life. In this unnatural state, my painting documents what the forest has become and memorializes where it came from. The hyper-saturated colors I use, as well as the untextured planar facets of the trees, evokes the digital lenses regularly used to consume and fetishize nature through, something to be looked at rather than exist within. By stripping the chaos of actual life from my landscapes, the forest becomes inhospitable and sterile despite its rich seductive depiction. For me this operates as a critique on the priorities many hold on how the land is viewed, experienced, and utilized.

Luke Watson is an artist working across media. He graduated from Pratt Institute with a BFA, participating in Pratt in Venice in 2013, and has just received his MFA from Arizona State University. Bravo!