In the C24 Gallery Atrium, we will be presenting Make It Or Break It, a group exhibition of artwork created by artists who are also seasoned curators. Developed in conversation and collaboration between long-time colleagues and friends David C. Terry and D. Dominick Lombardi, both artists as well as curators, the show brings together the work of seven skilled artists whose curatorial careers lend additional depth to their artistic vision.
Make It Or Break It features the work of Dan Cameron, Sally Curcio, Matthew Deleget, Michelle Grabner, Richard Klein, D. Dominick Lombardi and Yohanna M. Roa. The selections in this exhibition share a common attention to the passage of time and our relationship with the past through multiple media, including the use of found objects and the assemblage of materials that evoke both nostalgia as well as a re-examination of history, context, and culture.
In the same way that curators create a new context around bodies of work by individual or groups of artists, the visual elements in this exhibition recontextualize familiar imagery to create new narratives and explorations. The works by these artists present a re-examination of cultural symbols and traditions through the dual perspective of both artist and curator, with complex, multi-layered results.
As the talent scouts of the art world, curators are tasked with seeking out fresh visions and breaking open the careers of heretofore unknown artists. But when they are also artists themselves, it falls upon them to generate these fresh perspectives through their own creative practice. Make it Or Break It offers a glimpse into the layered imaginations of creators who wear multiple hats, generating a most unique and nuanced dialogue.
MORE ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
Dan Cameron has served as Senior Curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, Founder and Artistic Director of the Prospect New Orleans Triennial, Chief Curator and Acting Director of the Orange County Museum of Art, and has organized or co-curated innumerable biennials and international exhibitions. He has published hundreds of book, catalogs and magazine texts on contemporary art since 1983, and he taught critical theory and art history on the faculties of Columbia University, New York University, School of Visual Arts, Louisiana State University and CalState Fullerton. Since May 2023, he has worked as Co-Founder and Curator of La Capilla Azul, an independent exhibition space on the island of Chiloé, in the Los Lagos region of Chile. Building on the process of archiving, which has been an important part of his role as curator for the past forty years, his latest body of collage work featured in this show is made almost completely from imagistic material completely unconnected to his own life or firsthand experience. Freed from scholarly or sentimental connection, he has concentrated on using every fragment to its maximum visual advantage, the better to be remembered by others.
Sally Curcio has exhibited her work in galleries, museums, and for public installations throughout the United States and internationally, including the Children's Museum of the Arts in New York City; the Fleming Museum at the University of Vermont, Burlington; the Newport Art Museum in Rhode Island and the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut. In Massachusetts she has exhibited at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem; the Fitchburg Art Museum in Fitchburg; the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst; and the Historic Northampton Museum. Curcio's work is in the permanent collections of Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts; the Fitchburg Art Museum, Fitchburg, Massachusetts; and the University Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her sculptural installations aim to elicit a sense of optimism and possibility through form, color, and mode of display. The work subverts the symbolic order by repurposing everyday forms and objects, allowing us to see the familiar as new, and thereby awakening us to what may be possible to formulate a better, more beautiful, more universally connected order.
Matthew Deleget is an artist, gallerist, curator, writer, educator, and arts worker. He has exhibited his work nationally and internationally, including solo and group exhibitions in the US, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. His work was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial and in additional museum exhibitions including MoMA PS1, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, and Stiftung Konzeptuelle Kunst in Soest, Germany. In 2003, Matthew co-founded MINUS SPACE, a gallery based in Brooklyn, NY, presenting the past, present, and future of reductive art on the international level. Since 2006, he has organized 125 solo and group exhibitions at both MINUS SPACE's gallery in Dumbo, Brooklyn, as well as other collaborating venues on the national and international levels, including in Mexico, Belgium, Australia, and New Zealand. Matthew is represented by Dr. Julius AP (Berlin, Germany) and has works available through Philip Slein Gallery (St. Louis, MO). Based on the notions that reductive abstraction can be anything and be about anything, and that meaningful work can be made anywhere on the planet, his painting process is direct and unromantic. He merges painting with conceptual, process, and installation strategies-as if painting a fence, color is used straight out of the tube. For Deleget, it's all a means to an end.
Michelle Grabner is an artist, writer, and a curator with studios in Chicago, Wisconsin, and Umbria, Italy. She is the Crown Family Professor of Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she has taught since 1996. Grabner is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, a National Academician in the National Academy of Design, and a Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters Fellow. Her work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Musée d'Art Moderne Luxembourg, Milwaukee Art Museum, and Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the RISD Museum of Art, among many other public collections. Grabner along with her husband Brad Killam runs the artist-run project spaces, The Suburban (est. 1999) and The Poor Farm (est. 2008). In rearticulating familiar patterns and commonplace formal arrangements, her work underscores the power structures and politics inherent in everyday life. Even the most prosaic, clichéd and mundane motifs such as gingham, rainbows and everyday objects (sardine tins, potatoes, jam jar lids bookends, hair barrettes, TP rolls, cereal boxes), can reverberate with political connotations. Grabner translates familiar forms in the hope of undermining rather than reinforcing their social power.
Richard Klein is an artist, independent curator, and writer. His artwork has been exhibited at the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, OR; The Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, Brattleboro, VT; Caren Golden Fine Art, NY; James Barron Art, Kent, CT; Schoolhouse Gallery, Provincetown, MA; Gavlak Gallery, Palm Beach, FL; Hales Gallery, London, UK; Neuberger Museum of Art, SUNY Purchase, NY; ICEHOUSE Project Space, Sharon, CT; and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI. In his capacity as Exhibitions Director at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (1999-2022) Klein organized over 90 exhibitions of contemporary art, and has edited and/or contributed essays to over 15 major museum and arts publications. In September of 2024 Klein will be the first artist-in-residence at Peck Ledge Light, a 118-year-old lighthouse in Long Island Sound off of Westport, Connecticut. The subject matter of his work is psychological in nature and is based on the thoughts and emotions engendered by time and its passage, by the relationship between light and matter, and an engagement with the complexity and beauty of the material world. He creates works with found objects, materials, situations, and histories, surrendering and letting them guide his process of art making, creating work that is increasingly defined not by style, but by sensibility. He feels art should always be a little strange, if not weird, to reflect the true nature of the world.
D. Dominick Lombardi is an artist, art writer and curator based in New York. A 45-Year retrospective of his art curated by T. Michael Martin, has was exhibited at the Clara M. Eagle Gallery at MSU in Western Kentucky, the Marie Walsh Sharpe Gallery of Contemporary Art, Ent Center for the Arts, UCCS in Colorado Springs, and the Dowd Gallery at SUNY Cortland, New York. Some of his writing credits include the New Art Examiner, The Brooklyn Rail, Two Coats of Paint, ARTnews, The New York Times, Juxtapoz, Art in Asia, The Huffington Post, Art and Antiques, CultureCatch, and dArt International magazine. Lombardi's most recent curatorial projects are "Altered Logistics: Redux," which opened in August 2024 at Clara M. Eagle Gallery at MSU, and "Multiverse," which opened in February 2025 at the Hampden Gallery, UMASS Amherst. Throughout his career he has relied on the collective unconscious for guidance and inspiration. Image flashes while working in the studio or looking at found objects or photographs from old popular culture magazines bring about a broad spectrum of results from the darkly comedic to socio-political observations. He also utilizes his own past experiences by over-painting or reworking previously completed paintings and sculptures to create multi-layered narratives. In the end, what matters most is the mixing of his ideas and aesthetics with past or future thoughts as the collective unconscious works its way in.
Yohanna M Roa is a New York based transcultural-feminist visual artist, art historian, curator and art critic. Her most recent solo performance occurred at The Thyssen Bornemisza Museum in Madrid in 2024. Her artistic work has been studied, published, and discussed by various scholars and publications internationally. Roa has been recognized with the Young Creators Award from the Ministry of Culture of Colombia, and her work is part of the permanent collection of the Tlatelolco Cultural Center in Mexico City. She collaborates with Art Nexus and WhiteHot Magazine. Yoa has lectured at institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art of Mexico and the Latin American Public Art Seminar and has curated projects for institutions including the National Center of Art Research (CENIDIAP) in Mexico and the Tertulia Museum of Modern Art in Colombia. She is the curator and program developer of WhiteBox NY. Yoa's practices aim to provoke changes in how we reflect, organize, and write about the past, particularly in the history of art and our bodies. Grounded in the framework of being a woman, her work focuses on activating decolonial processes, aiming to recover and highlight memories, knowledge, and even the hidden or obscured bodies in the processes of writing history. Yoa defines her artistic practice under the concept of "activist fabrics," where textile practices serve as feminist political action devices. She is interested in highlighting that everyday activities and spaces, such as cooking, sewing, decoration, and caregiving are arenas for rescuing stories connected to socially significant events while demonstrating that spaces often perceived as individual and disconnected are in fact social and structural.
