Contemporary Gallery, University Art MuseumJune 10-September 2, 2022
Opening June 10th, 5:30PM
The NMSU Art Museum is pleased to present Joey Fauerso: Wait for It, a solo exhibition featuring the work of San Antonio-based artist Joey Fauerso. Employing techniques that upend traditional modes of art-making, Fauerso’s work opens onto questions of identity, gender and representation. On view June 10 through September 2, 2022, Wait for It includes recent artworks by Fauerso alongside a poem and essay authored by 2017 State of Texas Poet Laureate Jenny Browne. Wait for It travels to the NMSU Art Museum from the Visual Arts Center at The University of Texas at Austin where it was organized by MacKenzie Stevens, director, with Clare Donnelly, gallery manager.
Fauerso’s oeuvre spans a range of media, including drawing, painting, installation, and video. Wait for It features a selection of Fauerso’s recent paintings and monoprints, from intimate portraits to mural-sized abstractions, alongside a four-channel video installation made in her San Antonio studio and at a residency in Berlin. You Destroy Every Special Thing I Make (2017– 2019) transforms the artist’s workspaces into sites for destruction and reconstruction, with Fauerso’s two sons, their friends, and other performers adopting clever methods to tear down a series of black and white installations for the camera’s lens. This work was acquired into the NMSU Permanent Art Collection in 2020, as part of the inaugural exhibition Labor: Motherhood & Art in 2020 and represents the museum’s push to diversify their programming and collections by exhibiting and collecting significant works by leading female, African American, LGBTQ and other underrepresented and marginalized artists.
Witty, thoughtful, and poignant, Wait for It focuses on Fauerso’s commitment to portraiture and representations of the figure—whether in motion or silent and still. In Fauerso’s paintings, figures often appear expectant and sometimes even burdened, as if anticipating an event that will never happen; their gazes and poses are poignant metaphors for contemporary life, marked by time spent waiting.
Joey Fauerso: Wait for It is supported, in part, by Suzanne Deal Booth, Jeanne and Michael L. Klein, and Fluent~Collaborative. This exhibition is also supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Friends of the University Art Museum and the NMSU College of Arts and Sciences.
Joey Fauerso (b. 1976, San Antonio, Texas) lives and works in San Antonio, Texas. Recently her work has been exhibited at the Visual Arts Center at the University of Texas, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, MASS MoCA, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the Drawing Center in New York. Fauerso has been the recipient of multiple grants and residencies, including a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2020 Joan Mitchell Grant for Painters and Sculptors, a 2021 Sustainable Arts Foundation grant, the Open Sessions residency at The Drawing Center in New York, the Golden Foundation Grant, Dallas Museum of Art Kimbrough Grant, the RAIR artist in residence grant, Yaddo, MacDowell, and Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. Fauerso is a Professor of Art at Texas State University, San Marcos.
Join us for the opening reception on Friday, June 10, 2022. The public reception begins at 5:30. For more info, please visit uam.nmsu.edu.
Press image: Joey Fauerso, Under The Table, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 82 x 110 in. Image courtesy of the artist.
