Galleries

Brooklyn Artist Draws Lines Through Gentrification, Racism with View From Nowhere Exhibition at Rush Arts Gallery

NEW YORK, NY (August 23, 2016) Following her summer residency at Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation, artist Oasa DuVerney debuts a new collection of work entitled, The View From Nowhere on Thursday, September 8 at Rush Arts Gallery. The View From Nowhere is a showcase of social justice-driven large-scale drawings and mixed media works created to give a “visual voice” for those who continue to be silenced. The opening reception on September 8 will begin at 6:00 p.m. The exhibition closes on Friday, September 23 with the artist in conversation with Oasa DuVerney and Kate Fauvell at 4:00 p.m.

Oasa views her art as a mediation negotiating the many challenges on the fault lines of class, gender, and race, in our hyper-linked, strife-beset environment. The View From Nowhere features Oasa DuVerney’s epic graphite-based works created during her residency. The artist said of her work:

As a black woman, I recognize that people who look like me we are often invisible. We are silenced. That’s part of what I’m responding to: that constant silencing, the idea that we should not be in public spaces, that we cannot exist or live in peace, at least not entirely as we please. The View From Nowhere simultaneously references the perspective of the marginalized, those who are ignored and looked over and the historic claim of the white male perspective being neutral – untarnished by race, gender or nationality. Building on the story of Renisha McBride seen only through a screen door before being murdered by Theodore Wafer, the screens in my drawings are symbolic of the filter between the white male gaze and others.

The work is born of DuVerney’s lived experiences and observations, with themes ranging from criminalization of black and brown, bodies, gentrification, housing scarcity, and other pressing social justice issues facing women and people of color in New York City and the United States at-large.