The Parrish Art Museum Presents KAWS and Julia Chiang Summer Solo Exhibitions Featuring New Works
Both Artists to Show New Work Created Specifically for their Upcoming Parrish Presentations
Water Mill, NY | June 28, 2024 — The Parrish Art Museum presents two solo shows this summer featuring internationally renowned artist KAWS and debuting Julia Chiang’s first museum exhibition. Both artists created presentations that include new work aligned with the Museum’s architecture in mind. “We are incredibly excited to feature the two extremely dynamic artists, KAWS and Julia Chiang,” said Museum Executive Director Dr. Mónica Ramírez-Montagut. “An important part of the Museum’s work is to expand the field of art, and, to that end, we are delighted that KAWS will present never before seen paintings, together with an unprecedented showing of eleven human-scale sculptures for visitors to enjoy in the Museum’s expansive galleries. We are particularly looking forward to Julia Chiang’s first solo museum show, an exhibition that will behold and surprise the visitor both for its lushness and delicacy. Both shows will be a delight for the eye. We anticipate an incredibly vibrant summer season this year.”
KAWS: TIME OFF July 14–October 13, 2024
KAWS (American, b. 1974). PASS THE BLAME, 2013, acrylic on canvas, in 2 parts, 120 x 120 in. and 90 x 76 in. © KAWS, Photo: Tom Powel Imaging.
The Parrish Art Museum will be presenting a major solo exhibition devoted to the artist KAWS, including a wide array of sculptures and paintings. This exhibition marks the first KAWS survey on the East End.
“We look forward to partnering with Parrish Art Museum this summer with our sponsorship of KAWS: TIME OFF,” said Marc Perez, president, Bank of America Long Island. “From supporting the Parrish’s free public programming to bringing this special exhibition to Long Island’s East End for the first time, Bank of America believes in the community-building power of the arts.”
KAWS: TIME OFF is curated by Executive Director Dr. Mónica Ramírez-Montagut, with additional support from Brianna L. Hernández, Assistant Curator.
Exhibition Support
KAWS: TIME OFF is made possible, in part, thanks to the generous support of Bank of America; Dior; Skarstedt, New York; and Lisa and Mitchell Green.
About KAWS
KAWS is a Brooklyn-based contemporary artist who has achieved widespread recognition for his graphic style and iconic characters. Working in a wide range of mediums, including painting, sculpture, drawing, installation, and product design, KAWS’ practice transgresses borders between “high” and “low” culture, questions the conventional hierarchies of the art world establishment, and seeks to democratize the way art is experienced for a new generation.
Fulfilling the promise of predecessors such as Duchamp and Warhol, KAWS has reinvented that legacy for the 21st century and taps into the zeitgeist of contemporary American life. With a deep appreciation for pop culture and a fascination with rampant consumerism, his inventive and graphic sensibility is used to deftly examine the flaws of conspicuous consumption, while also reveling in the joys it sometimes brings. Through his riffs on beloved childhood characters, the work also explores universal emotions of joy, innocence, and love, as well as despair, loneliness, alienation, and a “real life” that doesn’t live up to the promise of youth, or Instagram. Inherent to the work is the question of our role in the current cultural landscape, a moral quandary that asks questions, but provides no easy answers.
Born in 1974, in Jersey City, New Jersey, KAWS received his B.F.A from the School of Visual Arts, New York in 1996. He began his career as a graffiti artist on the East Coast of the United States, where he developed some of the forms that would later become part of his signature iconography. While working as an animator for television and film in the late 1990s, he began to gain underground recognition for his series of advertising interventions, in which he would stealthily remove and paint his characters onto existing commercial ads before returning them to their original locations.
KAWS has exhibited extensively in renowned institutions worldwide, including solo exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada (2023); Serpentine Gallery, London, United Kingdom (2022); High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia (2022 & 2011); Mori Arts Center Gallery, Tokyo, Japan (2021); The Brooklyn Museum, New York (2021); The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia (2019); Fire Station, Qatar Museums, Doha, Qatar (2019); Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, Michigan (2019); Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Missouri (2017); Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas (2016) which traveled to the Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China (2017); and many more.
JULIA CHIANG: THE GLOWS AND THE BLOWS July 14–October 13, 2024
Julia Chiang (American, born 1978). Remember That Time When What, acrylic on wood panel, 48 x 96 in. (diptych). Courtesy the Artist.
The Parrish will present the first-ever solo museum exhibition by painter Julia Chiang. The artist will present new paintings and ceramics. Chiang’s painterly process is slow and controlled while spontaneous. Organic shapes coalesce on the picture plane in varying densities of paint and with fervor, scrimmage for territory. Although she operates in the realm of abstractions, the body is the basis for her allegories, metaphors, and explorations. Her vocabulary is rife with organic forms and formations, which function as introspections that range from the corporeal to the psychological. The organic-looking imagery borrows from the physical—medical scans, internal body liquids and environments—and the psychological—fields of layered feelings and emotions, tensions between internal turmoil and external pressures, between fragility and strength. Chiang states, “I’m always interested in our bodies as vessels, what we contain and what we cannot. All that comes out of us, all that is within us . . . Borders both real and imagined. Existing in the in-between.”
Julia Chiang: The Glows and The Blows is organized by Corinne Erni, Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Chief Curator, Art and Education, with additional support from Brianna L. Hernández, Assistant Curator.
Exhibition Support
Julia Chiang: The Glows and The Blows is made possible, in part, thanks to the generous support of Sarah Arison; Michi Jigarjian; Wolf Kahn Foundation; Nicola Vassell Gallery; Miyoung Lee and Neil Simpkins; and Karen and Dennis Mehiel.
About Julia Chiang
Julia Chiang (American, b. 1978) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and studied Studio Art and Art History at New York University. Chiang has recently been featured in solo-exhibitions at Nanzuka Underground, Tokyo, Nicola Vassell Gallery, New York, The Modern Institute, Glasgow, and The Journal Gallery, New York. This year, she created a mural with RxART for the new SUNY Upstate Nappi Wellness Institute in Syracuse, NY. In 2022, Chiang was commissioned by Rockaway Hotel and Spa for the “Rockaway Mural” in Queens, NY. She has been an artist-in-residence at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village, Colorado, The Creative Centre at Mount Sinai Hospital, Henry Street Settlement in New York, HAP Clay Studios in Beijing, and Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont.
About the Parrish Art Museum
The Parrish Art Museum is a place to discover and connect with artists and art with a focus on the rich creative legacy of the East End and its global impact on the art world. Inspired by the natural setting and historical artistic community of Long Island’s East End, the Parrish Art Museum celebrates its legacy through a distinctive contemporary lens and socially conscious global context. The Parrish illuminates the creative process and how art, architecture, and design transform our experiences and our communities, and how we relate to the world. Access to relevant cultural engagement, artistic inspiration, a natural environment, and architectural ingenuity characterizes the Museum experience as a unique destination for the region, the nation, and the world.
The Parrish Art Museum’s programs are made possible, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, and by the property taxpayers from the Southampton School District and the Tuckahoe Common School District.
Contact:
Rachel Judlowe | rachel@judlowe.com
Melanie Tolan | tolanm@parrishart.org
Top Left: KAWS (American, b. 1974), POINT OF DISORDER, 2013, acrylic on canvas, 120 x 116 in. © KAWS, Collection of Larry Warsh. Photo: Tom Powel Imaging. Right: Julia Chiang (American, b. 1978), The Glows and The Blows, 2024, acrylic on wood panel, 72 x 54 in. Courtesy the Artist.
