SHOSHANNA WEINBERGER
Rising Up
Treat Place, Fall 2021
Four Corners Public Arts is thrilled to announce a new mural titled Rising Up on Treat Place in Newark featuring artist Shoshanna Weinberger. This is the first public art project in phase three of the Four Corners Public Arts program.
Rising Up is a mural that confronts our social and political histories in the exclusion of otherness and marginalized.
At the mural’s base are four large stacked squares representing building blocks or earth. Each square is painted in either a horizontal or vertical striped pattern with a specific number of stripes for representing measured time and history: 24 hours; 7 days, 12 months and 13 original colonies. Employing black and white stripe patterns become identifiers that create a visual language and coding. The natural binary of black and white also signifies the societal lines of divisions (i.e. race, economic, class and political) created within civilization. These stripes also act as universal metaphors for hybridity, incarceration, fences, animals, borders, flags and barcodes.
At the top, like a crown, are braided coils of hair representing our collective consciousness. They appear to be growing out of, and rising above to take their place upon the striped building blocks. The hair, wrapped in gold chain links, alludes to the ongoing history of struggle, and the need for change, not only within the communities of Newark but also across America and beyond.
Rising Up was completed in September of 2021.
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Shoshanna Weinberger received her MFA from Yale School of Art in 2003 and BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1995.
Living and working in Newark, NJ since 2006, Weinberger’s studio practice is rooted in an exploration of her Caribbean-American lineage and draws strongly on the complexity of heritage, and assumed norms that are referenced from memory, history, literature and current xenophobic zeitgeist. She considers herself a visual anthropologist, cataloguing and surveying these experiences that ultimately question notions of beauty and identity through ongoing serial works that result in drawings, collage and sculptural installations.
Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in numerous invitational group and solo exhibitions that include a five-time participant of the Jamaica Biennial from 2006 to 2017 held in Kingston. Recent exhibitions: Allegories of the Invisible, Trestle Gallery, Brooklyn (solo, 2019); two-person show Body Language at Nomad Gallery, Brussels (2020); Passing Between the Lines, Long Gallery, Harlem (solo, 2020); Emancipated Imaginaries, curated by AKAA, Manifesta, Lyon, France (2021); Fragments of Perception, Wave Hill, Bronx (solo, 2021). Recipient of a 2014 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant; 2015 Joan Mitchell Center, Artist Residency, New Orleans; 2016 Fellowship from the NJ State Council of the Arts; 2017-2018 Project for Empty Space, Artist Residency, Newark; 2019 Dawn Scott Memorial Award, from National Gallery of Jamaica; 2020 Newark Artist Accelerator Grant made possible by the Andy Warhol Foundation; appointed as the McMillan Stewart Endowed Chair in Painting, Maryland Institute College of Art 2019-2020 and 2020-2021; received a 2021 City of Newark Creative Catalyst Fund Grant. Current 2021 exhibitions: Born In Flames, curated by Jasmine Wahi, Bronx Museum (on view until Sept 12); If You Lived Here You’d Be Home By Now at Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY (on view until Sept 18) ; and Black Beauty, Arthur Roger Gallery, New Orleans, LA (on view until Sept 18).
Public collections include: New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, NJ; The Newark Museum of Art, Newark, NJ; The Sagamore Collection, Miami, FL; Girls Club Collection, Fort Lauderdale, FL; The Margulies Collection, Miami, FL; Davidson College, Davidson, NC; The AC Kingston Collection, Kingston, JA; and Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE