Vickie Pierre, Black Flowers Blossom (Hanging Tree), 2020; hand-strung glass, plastic, and wood beads; fabric, plastic butterflies, flowers and foliage, glitter, vintage Avon perfume bottles, and wooden ship bookends. Image courtesy the Artist and Fredric Snitzer Gallery. Photography by Zachary Balber.
Vickie Pierre, Totems For My Sisters (We Are Illuminous!), 2019; Latex and metallic paint, metal, resin and wood shelf sconces, wooden ship bookends, decorative plastic wall plaques, Avon glass perfume bottles, plastic foliage, jewelry, silk doll hair, hand-strung beads, shaped MDF panel and vinyl lettering.
Vickie Pierre, I Can’t Say No To You (Good Enough), 2014; Resin wall plaques, plastic leaves, Avon glass perfume bottles, wooden shelf sconces and ship bookends, jewelry, and hand-strung beads, mounted on shaped MDF panel, latex paint, and vinyl lettering, Overall: 84 x 108 x 5 inches.
Detail of Vickie Pierre: Be My Herald of What’s to Come at Boca Raton Museum of Art.
Like the town crier in a fractured fairy tale, Be My Herald of What’s to Come rings in Vickie Pierre’s solo show at the Boca Raton Museum of Art. Grounded in the Arts and Crafts movement, her installations have a storybook feel. A fractured fairy tale is, after all, a new twist on an old story, reimagined and restructured for a contemporary sensibility. Just as fractured fairytales can be more subversive than the traditional fables, the playfulness and whimsical flourishes of Pierre’s assemblages are underscored by her pull towards the beautifully grotesque. In this new exhibition, her works cast a feminine deity spell within the Museum gallery. In the installation she created in 2020, Black Flowers Blossom (Hanging Tree), the artist honors the souls of people lost to racial injustice, including George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and the many others.
from the accompanying exhibition text
Detail of Vickie Pierre, And Though I May Have Lost My Way, All Paths Lead Straight to You, 2013.
Installation view of Detail of Vickie Pierre: Be My Herald of What’s to Come at Boca Raton Museum of Art.
Detail of Detail of Vickie Pierre: Be My Herald of What’s to Come at Boca Raton Museum of Art.
Vickie Pierre, And Though I May Have Lost My Way, All Paths Lead Straight to You, 2013; plastic wall plaques, porcelain, resin, wooden shelf sconces, Avon glass perfume bottles, silk doll hair, band-strung beads on MDF, latex paint, and vinyl lettering, Overall: 84 x 108 x 5 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Fredric Snitzer Gallery.
Installation view of Detail of Vickie Pierre: Be My Herald of What’s to Come at Boca Raton Museum of Art.
In this special release of a Art21 x Burnaway feature, the practice of creating subversive narratives and a reckoning with the self is explored in Trenton Doyle Hancock's work.
For the March edition of Burnaway's co-publishing with Oxford American, Ian Carstens pays tribute to the now closed Ruckus Journal, an independent arts journal based out of Louisville, Kentucky.
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