The Henry is pleased to announce Raúl de Nieves: A window to the see, a spirit star chiming in the wind of wonder…, a newly commissioned exhibition by the New York-based artist. Across painting, sculpture, and performance, Raúl de Nieves fuses aesthetic traditions of Mexican craft, Catholicism, the Tarot, the canon of European art, drag performance, and punk music. Steeped in symbolism and personal mythology, de Nieves’s work engages themes of self-actualization, transformation, and cycles of death and rebirth. Often using humble or castoff materials, de Nieves reenvisions the commonplace to create densely textured, dazzling new forms that conjure a continual process of becoming.
At the Henry, de Nieves will create one of his signature “stained glass” installations to transform the museum’s largest gallery space into a container of colored light. The artist imagines what a celestial landscape could be by using colored acetate and tape to custom-fit his intricate, translucent panels to the three immense skylights that span the gallery. The exhibition’s poem-like title leads visitors through a meditative journey of inner reflection, while a temple-like seating arrangement provides places for visitors to spend extended time in contemplation of the narrative illustrated across the panels. The panels themselves will transmit the transitional natural light to create a kaleidoscopic, constantly changing atmosphere inside the gallery, illuminating a journey of continual becoming into an ever-changing interplay of possibility. De Nieves’s installation considers the potential of building alternative worlds by recasting whose and which narratives matter.
Activations and performances by de Nieves and local guests will punctuate the run of the exhibition, filling the space with various forms of sound and movement that generate a communal experience.
Raúl de Nieves: A window to the see, a spirit star chiming in the wind of wonder… is organized by Nina Bozicnik, Curator at the Henry Art Gallery, and Risa Puleo, Independent Curator. Generous support is provided by the Floyd and Delores Jones Endowed Fund for the Arts, with additional support from Company Gallery and Morán Morán. Media sponsorship is provided by The Stranger.
ARTIST BIO
Raúl de Nieves (born 1983 in Morelia, Michoacán, Mexico; lives and works in Brooklyn, New York) has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions in North America and internationally. He has presented solo exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; and the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art, Georgia, among other institutions. Additionally, he has participated in group exhibitions at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the High Line, New York; the K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong; the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; the New Orleans Museum of Art, Louisiana; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and numerous other venues. De Nieves has staged performances at institutions including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia and MoMA PS1, Queens. He has been an artist in residence at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia and Fountainhead, Miami, as well as a fellow at the Joan Mitchell Foundation. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. This fall, in addition to the exhibition at the Henry, de Nieves's work will also be shown in a
new commission at the Baltimore Museum of Art.
CO-CURATOR BIOS
Nina Bozicnik is a curator at the Henry Art Gallery, where she has organized multiple solo and group exhibitions, including most recently Thick as Mud (2023); ektor garcia: matéria prima (2022); Packaged Black: Derrick Adams and Barbara Earl Thomas (2021/22); Elaine Cameron-Weir: STAR CLUB REDEMPTION BOOTH (2021); and Will Rawls: Everlasting Stranger (2021), realized in collaboration with Velocity Dance Center. Bozicnik’s curatorial work takes multiple forms—it has recently included the multi-disciplinary colloquium Bugs & Beasts Before the Law, organized on the occasion of the artist duo Bambitchell’s exhibition of the same name, and programming in conjunction with the pilot year of the Henry’s artist fellowship program, designed to facilitate dynamic exchange between visiting artists and the University of Washington community. Recent publications include ektor garcia: matéria prima; Bugs & Beasts Before the Law, Appendix A-L; and Carrie Yamaoka: recto/verso.
Risa Puleo is an independent curator based in Chicago. a window to the see, a spirit star chiming in the wind of wonder… is her second exhibition with de Nieves, and follows Raúl de Nieves: Eternal Return and the Obsidian Heart at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami in 2021. Puleo is one of a team of curators who has organized the 2023 Counterpublic Triennial in St. Louis. Puleo’s other exhibitions include Walls Turned Sideways: Artists Confront the American Justice System, which originated at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston in 2018 and traveled to Tufts University Art Gallery, Medford, MA in 2020; and Monarchs: Brown and Native Artists in the Path of the Butterfly, which originated at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE in 2017/18 and traveled nationally. Additional venues that have hosted Puleo’s exhibitions include ArtPace, San Antonio; the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, New York City; Franklin Street Works, Stamford; Charlotte Street Foundation, Kansas City; and more. Puleo has written for Art in America, Art Papers, Art 21, Asia Art Pacific, Hyperallergic, Modern Painters, and other art publications.