CHICAGO, Illinois – The Hon. Michael C. Fountain, Bahamas Honorary Consul to Chicago, attended the opening reception for Bahamian artist Gio Swaby’s gallery exhibition, Fresh Up, hosted by the Art Institute of Chicago, April 5, 2023.
*The exhibition—Swaby’s first solo museum show—brings together seven of Swaby’s series from 2017 through 2021, along with approximately 15 new works, including her largest work to date, a commission for the US Embassy in Nassau, Bahamas. The title of the show, Fresh Up, developed with the artist, is a Bahamian phrase often used as a way to compliment someone’s style or confident way of being.
Having grown up in The Bahamas surrounded by the materials her seamstress mother used, Swaby chose to work in textiles—a medium traditionally associated with domesticity and femininity—as a means to imbue her works with both familiarity and labor-intensive care. She upends tradition, however. Not only do her often life-size portraits give a sense of monumentality to the techniques of embroidery and piecing, but she also presents the reverse side of her intricately rendered canvases so that the stitching process of her freehand style—the normally hidden knots and loose threads—is visible.
The exhibition is curated by Melinda Watt, chair and Christa C. Mayer Thurman Curator of Textiles, Art Institute of Chicago, and Katherine Pill, curator of contemporary art, Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg. A fully illustrated catalogue, published by Rizzoli, accompanies the exhibition and includes an interview between the artist and Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Nikole Hannah-Jones, as well as essays by the curators and contributions from Swaby herself.
Gio Swaby: Fresh Up is organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg and will run through July 3, 2023.*
https://www.artic.edu/exhibitions/9869/gio-swaby-fresh-up
*Courtesy Art Institute of Chicago
