May 20 - July 6, 2023
From Women and Their Work:
“Paradise Bloom is a group exhibition featuring the work of Anahita Bradberry, Jessica Carolina González, Naomi Lemus, and Alexis Pye organized by guest curator Ashley DeHoyos Sauder. The exhibition examines the idea and definition of “paradise” by asking What is paradise? and Who creates it?
Paradise can often be described as a location, a feeling, a sanctuary, or mythology that often offers refuge providing peace or safety for someone or from something. Paradise can also be a resource for liberation allowing the creator to develop personal forms of utopias as a response to their environment or the social and political climate around them.
Through use of paintings, installations, neon lighting, and photography, Paradise Bloom explores the interconnected relationships between identity development and self preservation using expressions of nature, domestic interiors, diasporic aesthetics and traditions as resources for world-building and re-imaging.
Paradise Bloom offers each artist the opportunity to present their own concepts and ideas of paradise through creative action, from creating space for individual and collective belonging, to engaging in acts of healing through ritual and repetition and developing new narratives through object form and storytelling, asking Do we bloom in paradise or does paradise bloom in us?
Paradise Bloom is inspired by the essay The Disturbances of the Garden by Jamaica Kincaid, the book On the Necessity of Gardening: An ABC of Art, Botany and Cultivation, edited by Laurie Cluitmans, and ideas highlighted in bell hooks’ Belonging: A Culture of Place.”
Reception: May 20, 2023 | 7–9 pm
Reading: June 15, 2023 | 6–8 pm
Poetry in Paradise: Gather in Women & Their Work’s courtyard, to discuss readings based on the current exhibition: Paradise Bloom.
Women & Their Work (Cesar Chavez)
1311 East Cesar Chavez Street
Austin, 78702 Texas
Get directions