Gio SwabyFresh Up

May 28 through October 2, 2022

Image: Gio Swaby, Pretty Pretty 8 (detail), 2021, Thread and cotton fabric on Muslin, Museum purchase in honor of James G. Sweeny

 


 

Gio Swaby: Fresh Up at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg Press Release

 


FEATURED VIDEO

Save the date! Gio Swaby: Fresh Up opens at the MFA on May 28!

 

The safety of our visitors, staff, and artwork is our top priority at the MFA. Our team worked diligently ahead of Hurricane Ian to ensure that all of the artwork within the MFA was safe, secure, and out of harm’s way. Due to the fragile nature of the textiles in Gio Swaby: Fresh Upthis exhibition was de-installed as a precautionary measure. As a result, the exhibition is closed a week earlier than originally planned. We are excited that this powerful and beautiful exhibition will travel next to the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC), where it will be on view from April 8, 2023 through July 3, 2023 and then will head to Peabody Essex Museum, where it will be on view from August 12, 2023 through November 26, 2023. We hope you can experience this exhibition!

We are honored to have collaborated with our colleagues at the AIC to host the debut museum exhibition of multidisciplinary artist Gio Swaby. The impact of her artwork, “love letters to Black women,” had a profound effect on our members, visitors, and community. We look forward to sharing some of our favorite moments from the exhibition and related programs over the next few weeks. One of the highlights is this interview between Curator of Contemporary Art Katherine Pill and Gio Swaby.


 

The Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg is proud to present the first solo museum exhibition of multidisciplinary artist Gio Swaby (b. 1991, Nassau, Bahamas), whose work explores the intersections of Blackness and womanhood. Employing the portrait genre and a range of textile-based techniques, Swaby’s work is anchored in a desire to present and celebrate the complex personalities of the sitters. Interested in restorative forms of resistance, she has stated, My work operates in the context of understanding love as liberation, a healing, and restorative force. These pieces celebrate personal style, strength, beauty, individuality, and imperfections.” 

Swaby works in series form, and the exhibition will feature bodies of work spanning 2017 through 2021. Growing up surrounded by the threads and fabrics of her mother, a seamstress, Swaby chooses to work in mediums traditionally associated with domesticity as a means to imbue her works with familiarity, labor, and care. Swaby upends tradition, however, and gives the sewing medium a sense of monumentality with the life-size series Pretty Pretty. The subjects are intricately rendered in freehand lines of thread, and shown on the reverse side of the canvas so that the stitching process—its knots and loose threads, so often hidden—is visible. There’s a vulnerability to “showing the back,” but Swaby embraces and elevates the imperfections.

Gio Swaby: Fresh Up at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg

Swaby’s art is centered upon the personal connections forged between subject and artist, and conversation is key to achieving these portraits of beauty and power that she deems love letters to Black women. The portraits begin with a photo shoot wherein the subjects are captured in a moment of empowerment and self-awareness. Swaby foregrounds their personal style —seen in the detailed renderings of jewelry, hair, and clothing—creating space for self-definition and unapologetic self-expression.

Swaby earned her BFA in Film, Video and Integrated Media from Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver, BC and is currently completing an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art, Media and Design at OCAD University, Toronto, ON. She has exhibited internationally, and her work is included in the permanent collections of major public institutions throughout the United States.

This exhibition is co-organized with the Art Institute of Chicago, where it will open in 2023. A fully illustrated catalogue, published by Rizzoli Electa, accompanies the exhibition and features an interview between Swaby and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Nikole Hannah-Jones, as well as series introductions by the artist and essays by Melinda Watt, the Art Institute of Chicago’s Chair and Christa C. Mayer Thurman Curator of Textiles, and Katherine Pill, Curator of Contemporary Art, Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg.

Made possible in part by generous support from The Margaret Acheson Stuart Society, PNC BANK, Gobioff Foundation, Sonia Raymund Foundation Inc., James G. Sweeny, and Garth Family Foundation. Contributing support provided by the City of St. Petersburg and the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Arts and Culture, the Florida Council on Arts and Culture, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Media Partners: Tampa Bay Times | WUSF Public Media  

Support for the exhibition catalogue provided by the MFA Collectors Circle.