The Museum of Arts and Design has selected Charisse Pearlina Weston as its tenth MAD Artist Fellow. Created in 2016, the Fellowship is a full-time opportunity dedicated to promoting emerging artists from historically underrepresented communities by providing a stipend, dedicated studio space, and professional development opportunities. 

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

Charisse Pearlina Weston’s creative work emerges from deep material investigations of poetics and the autobiographical. She utilizes glass to conceptually embody both the everyday risk of anti-black violence and the precocity and malleability of blackness in the face of this violence. Melding glass sculptures and photography with poetic fragments of black experience, her work examines the interstices of black interiors and intimacies. She reuses and re-articulates materials from past installations to formulate the next to represent both repetition as a symbol of Black cultural production and its reliance on an order of temporal engagement in which the second time encodes an emergent originality.  

During her MAD Fellowship, Weston will continue her current research on the varying ways contemporary architecture deploys glass as a material invocation of freedom, intimacy, and a site of power in contemporary architecture. She will consider this alongside the material and symbolic use of glass in the surveillance, policing, and other tactics of anti-black violence developed from the “Broken Window Theory.” Weston’s resulting sculptures will examine how the uses and symbolizations of glass in our daily lives reify anti-Black protocols of movement, sight, and being seen. 

Weston received her MFA from the University of California-Irvine, an MSc from the University of Edinburgh, a BA from the University of North Texas, and completed the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program. Recent exhibitions include solo exhibitions at Abrons Art Center and Recess (forthcoming), as well as group shows at the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, and ArtPace, San Antonio (forthcoming).