Exhibits in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s annual Open Studio Night allow graduate students to experience the exhibition process as both artists and curators, ensuring that artists who are unable to open their studios to the public have a profession setting to display their work. In just a six-week process, I drafted a curatorial statement, sent out a call for submissions to all SAIC graduate students, coordinated with fellow student curators to select pieces, worked directly with artists to manage installation, and presented Warhol’s Stepchildren to the SAIC community.

Warhol’s Stepchildren Call for Submissions

In the late 1950s, a new movement emerged in the art scenes of the United States and Britain, one whose themes and aesthetics still define much of American art to this day. “Pop Art” emphasized the kitschy elements of contemporary pop culture, bringing the imagery and style of advertisements and comic books onto the fine arts stage. Participants in the movement aimed to be ironic, poking fun at the consumerist culture that dominated post-war America. In 1961, Andy Warhol created the era’s seminal work, Campbell’s Soup Cans, a series of tongue-in-cheek paintings that elevated a banal element of modern life to the role of high art. Warhol’s reputation grew rapidly in the aftermath, and his works soon became the highest-priced pieces of any living American artist. Across the years, countless people have been inspired by Warhol and the movement he helped to spawn, but many have also criticized Pop Art and its legacy. Warhol and his contemporaries often merely pointed at, rather than critiqued, the capitalist lifestyles of the era. Additionally, while Pop Artists may have sought to challenge the fine arts world through their elevation of mass culture, they still reinforced many of its hierarchies. Though women were often the subjects of famous works, such as Warhol’s portraits of Marilyn Monroe or Roy Lichtenstein’s comic-like bombshells, female artists like Corita Kent and Rosalyn Drexler have been comparatively overlooked. Warhol’s Stepchildren tries to find an indirect lineage for Pop Art, and uncover how the movement’s continued influence inspires artists to adapt its conventions and challenge its beliefs. 

Warhol’s Stepchildren displays works that respond to Pop Art and its legacy, either in color, form, subject, or motif. These pieces aim to reinterpret the over-reactive, brightly-colored, ironically capitalistic art of the 1960s and ask what we can learn from it in the twenty-first century.

After working together for the Matter exhibition at the Marshall T. Steel Center, I was approached by participating artist Fabiola Gironi about acting as an independent curator for her exhibit in the 2025 Los Angeles SPRING/BREAK Art Show. The show’s theme was “Paradise Lost/Found.” Together, we workshopped the curatorial statement and exhibition design, selected pieces from her body of work Night Vessels, and coordinated the application and selection process for the show. While IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT (EVE) was selected for participation, ongoing wildfires in the Los Angeles area necessitated canceling the in-person event. Nonetheless, adapting and finalizing the virtual edition of the exhibit, as well as navigating rapid communications between the show’s coordinators, artists, and curators, was an insightful and fulfilling experience.

Curatorial Statement for IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT (EVE)

Fabiola Gironi is a born and raised Italian, a place where Catholic tradition is inescapable. There, the story of Genesis is omnipresent, weaving into the light and the shadows. Eve ate the apple, shared it with Adam, and they both became ashamed of their bodies. This is how Paradise was lost — a place of endless enjoyment — replaced by war, work, and pain.

In Western culture, the body (especially the female body) is blamed as the link between humankind and evil, keeping us from our lost Paradise. In this tradition, it is only once humans are freed from our bodies that Paradise might be reclaimed in death. The body, seen this way, is a cage, an interior with no exit, looking out at what may be or might have been. 

In Gironi’s recent work, Night Vessels, the vases represent the body. The connection between clay, earth, and the body is one of the oldest and most profound in art. Adam was formed from the dust of the ground, creating a sacred relationship that was broken by the Apple. 

Vessels are sacred objects for nourishment, ritual offerings, and fostering civilization. In Gironi’s series, they hold plants, flowers, and hide animal shapes as symbols of regeneration, reconnecting the human experience to the cycles of nature. 

At the center of the show will be a bowl of apples – the forbidden fruit – for guests to take and eat, symbolically sharing in the act that led to the loss of Paradise. The walls of the show will be with a dark starry night recalling the landscapes in the paintings and Cappella Scrovegni in Padova, near the artist’s hometown. Mirroring the landscapes visible in the paintings, the exhibit space will allow guests to step into the scene themselves and consider their connection to the vessels more deeply. 

Night Vessels draws inspiration from Italian ancient artifacts, including Renaissance painted Maiolica vessels, pagan terracotta sculptures, and textile designs. They bring to mind a mix of cultures and traditions, whose relationships to Paradise are myriad.

Paradise, then, is not a place to conquer or to return to, but a state of reconnection to the mystery of our own existence, in our own delicate and resilient bodies. This series of paintings reflects this interconnectedness, where each vessel and flower speaks to the unity of life, death, and renewal. 

Using a bright and bold palette, this series continues to bridge Gironi’s traditional oil painting techniques with domestic crafts like embroidery. Each vessel is set within imagined domestic environments and night landscapes that reflect the different places Gironi has lived with her family between Europe and California. This series deviates from her previous works through their more imaginative subjects. Here, the mundane transforms through a reclamation of the beauty of everyday life. The embroidery throughout the series serves to bridge the lost union between the functional and the decorative, the creative and the skillful, in a return to folk art and craftsmanship. 

IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT (EVE) is a meditation on bodiliness and the human connection to Paradise. This is a relationship formed by objects, which take on an almost sacred significance through daily rituals. Night Vessels is a series that brings together the domestic and the divine, a place to consider what humanity has found on Earth through the things we’ve created with our hands, even in the loss of Paradise.

Near the end of my junior year at Hendrix College, I was approached by Dr. James Dow about the opportunity to curate an exhibit in Ellis Hall, a historic home on the Hendrix campus which houses the Religion and Philosophy departments. Working in collaboration with the Windgate Museum of Art, I put out a call for submissions for Matter, selected the works of six unique artists, and oversaw the complete curation process. The exhibit was on display throughout the 2024-2025 school year, with the works becoming a subject of writing by students in two Philosophy courses and a point of discussion for faculty, students, and countless visitors on campus.

The multimedia art exhibit explored the concept of material culture, which encapsulates any object that humans use to define their lives, relationships, identities, or beliefs. Composed of everything from coins to cookware, material culture illustrates the connection between humans and the environment through the objects that we find meaningful. Our possessions, in many ways, define who we are. Works in this exhibit questioned how we separate art from artifact and form from function. In an era focused on commodity and short-lived products, Matter expressed how objects come alive with cultural, and personal, significance.

An opening event for the exhibition was held on September 27th, during which I led a discussion between the contributing artists and the Hendrix community.

Selected Works and Labels

Caleb Cole

Holecloth

Sewn secondhand jeans

Caleb Cole is a Midwest-born, Boston-based artist whose work addresses the opportunities and difficulties of queer belonging. Using collage, assemblage, photography, and video, they bring secondhand objects and media together for chance encounters, deliberately placing materials from different time periods into conversation as a means of considering a lineage of queer culture. 

Holecloth calls upon the desire to preserve that which is missing or difficult to perceive. Early colonial quilts were primarily made from whole cloth, or created from a single piece of fabric, rather than disparate pieces. This sculpture subverts this tradition, drawing attention to the impossibility of a singular history. Instead, it honors the queer tradition of stitching together and inventing an identity from fragments of dominant culture. Holecloth is a quilt that does not provide comfort or warmth, and refuses to hide what is underneath, and this exposure can be both dangerous and sexy. The denim’s wear and tear serves as a record of the experiences of the bodies who once wore it. Though the quilt is preserved, it hangs limply, the absences of its holes dramatized by shadows on the wall. It insists on a history that is not seamless, neither wholly triumphant nor traumatic: a past that is inherently incomplete, and yet worthy of preservation.

Fabiola Gironi 

Archetype

Oil and acrylics on stitched canvas

Fabiola Gironi is a contemporary artist from Milan, Italy, currently residing in Los Angeles. She primarily works in painting and drawing. Prompted by her experiences of motherhood, the Covid-19 pandemic, and a lifetime of international travel, Gironi’s recent body of work focuses on still-lifes and interiors that explore the transient nature of “home.”

The objects in this still-life were chosen to represent femininity and its presence in Italian culture through the centuries. Inspired by her daughter, Gironi sought to display how her experiences of womanhood and motherhood interact with cultural heritage. The dried flowers and floating crystal sphere evoke magical connotations in Italian oral history and folklore, where intellectually curious women were often labeled as witches. The vibrant brushstrokes lead to a tube of lipstick and suspended ballet shoes, symbolizing societal expectations for women to always be beautiful and elegant. Finally, the bottle of milk and the open book turned to Leonardo’s Study of the Madonna and Child with a Cat reflect maternal instincts.

I co-curated In The Shadow of the Moon as an undergraduate museum associate at the Windgate Museum of Art at Hendrix College. Inspired by the Great North American Eclipse, which passed over central Arkansas on April 8th, 2024, the exhibit displayed human responses to the moon and its disappearance throughout time and across cultures. I was tasked with selecting pieces that demonstrated this relationship, writing myriad interpretive labels, and extensively researching the cultural history of eclipses. Countless visitors arrived at Hendrix College that day to view the eclipse from our open campus; the exhibit educated children and adults on the science and history of what they would witness, while also impressing on them that these awe-inspiring cosmic events have always gone hand in hand with art. I’ve always been a bit of an astronomy nerd, and this exhibit was a way for me to share that love with my community.

Selected Works and Labels

Roy Boney Jr., Cherokee

Trip to the Moon

Acrylic on board

In Cherokee tradition, an eclipse occurs when a great frog in the sky attempts to swallow the Moon or the Sun. To scare the creature away, the people would run wild, firing their guns or bows and arrows towards it, and even shouting or throwing objects towards the sky until the Moon reappeared. Here, Roy Boney Jr., a Cherokee artist based in Tahlequah, OK, depicts the story through a different lens. The Man in the Moon, an iconic image from the first ever science fiction film, A Trip to the Moon (1902), is himself devoured by the cosmic frog and has been struck in the eye by a capsule that resembles a bullet. The original film follows a group of tourists who travel to the moon and encounter strange creatures. This painting reimagines the story as “a group of Cherokee space explorers going to the moon to battle the giant frog to keep the moon out of its belly once and for all.”

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Blue Marble, 2012

Satellite photographs

With its stunning view of the Earth’s surface in totality, NASA’s The Blue Marble was one of the most widely distributed images in history. The original, taken by the Apollo 17 module crew as they traveled toward the moon, was released in 1972 in an era of intense environmentalism. Displaying the Earth in its isolation, beauty, and fragility in outer space, the image radically changed how humans related to our planet. Now, the term “blue marble” has come to signify Earth and all its people united in our shared homeworld. NASA continues to apply the name to a series of images which depict the whole globe in high resolution, with periodic additions to the series continuing to fascinate viewers (Blue Marble 2002 is even one of the default backgrounds for iPhones). The photo displayed here, Blue Marble 2012, is composed of images taken from the Suomi NPP satellite over the course of six orbits of the Earth in an eight-hour period. Suomi NPP orbits the planet from pole-to-pole at a distance of around 500 miles from the surface, so the image contains some distortion due to these odd angles. Despite this, the photo continues to inspire a new generation in appreciating our planet’s place in the universe.

St. George Stanley 

The Great Solar Eclipse 

Engraving

An estimated 1.5 million tourists will visit Arkansas this year to view the total solar eclipse, but astronomy-based tourism is far from new. Throughout the Victorian era, expeditions to view total eclipses were undertaken by everyone from wealthy amateurs to government officials, and their adventurous writings spurred greater public interest in astronomy. This cover depicts an 1878 expedition to Georgetown, Colorado to view the cosmic event, of which the artist writes “the wonderful light over all the grand landscape was not of sunlight, or moonlight, or starlight, or twilight, and an adequate description, beyond stating the tint as a peculiar lilac, is impossible.”