IN BOCCA AL LUPO

AMANDA CURRERI

EXHIBITION DATES:
JANUARY 16 - MARCH 1, 2025

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Romer Young Gallery is pleased to present its seventh solo exhibition with artist Amanda Curreri. In Bocca al Lupo features a new series of textile-based artworks with a focus on the talismanic. The exhibition continues Curreri’s ongoing inquiry into the intersections of material studies, visual culture, and collective futurity.

The exhibition title, In Bocca al Lupo, comes from the Italian idiom meaning “good luck” or more directly: “Go into the mouth of the wolf!” The customary reply being, “Kill it!,” or, Crepi il Lupo! Summoning a willful resolve in the face of our global doomsday reality, the title serves as a touchstone for the exhibition. Individual artworks take their titles from a range of cultural idioms: ¡Mucha Mierda! in Spanish, Toi Toi Toi (said aloud it sounds like three spits - to ward off bad luck), Ganbatte in Japanese, and more. Blending belief, superstition, and study within a formal canvas of furry yarns, energetic color, gestural mark-making, textile design structures, and photographic sources, the results are a personal archive of work that intimately relates to the artist’s search for community and survival in an increasingly hegemonic world.

Much of Curreri’s work is made in the spirit of a cento. Latin for “patchwork garment,” a cento is a literary work composed of verses from a range of disparate authors. The work in the exhibition was handwoven across a range of looms – floor looms, table-top looms, and TC2 digital Jacquard looms. Digital Jacquard weaving is a form of computer assisted hand-weaving that offers a groundbreaking shift for Curreri allowing her artwork to now accommodate ancient techniques (such as hand weaving and dyeing)as well asthe contemporary imprint of digitally translated imagery. Engaged with textiles’ persistence as a social technology, Curreri’s generative work represents spaces of collective possibility, actively enacting ideas rather than simply being about them. Curreri shares, “I'm finding the digital loom capable of producing a convergence of image, histories, technology, and a beautifully stubborn insistence of the body.”

For over more than a decade, Curreri has maintained a critical and creative investigation into her personal Sicilian ancestry and broader Italian American immigration and labor histories. Her work forges a form of public study that blends storytelling, social justice histories, folklore, and pedagogy into artworks and exhibitions like this one, as well as her larger-scale public engagement artworks. The mussel shells appear in many of her exhibitions, and reference a 1921 labor protest at the Plymouth Cordage Company led by Bartolomeo Vanzetti in which workers carried sticks with mussel shells tied to them reportedly shouting, “We Cannot Live on Clams Alone!” Curreri hosts invitational mussel dinners which have created a deep material archive from which works likeIl Portafortuna con le Conchigliecan be made. With work that intimately relates to queerness, learning from history, and figuring out a collective lifeline, Curreri tackles and represents the hybridity of the complicated times in which we live.

Curreri holds an MFA from the California College of the Arts, a BFA from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a BA from Tufts University in Sociology and Peace & Justice Studies. She is a faculty member in the Department of Art at the University of New Mexico. In 2025 she will be an Artist in Residence at Os Icelandic Textile Center’s Digital Weaving Lab. Curreri’s artwork has been recently commissioned by Facebook Open Arts, the Cincinnati Art Museum and the University of New Mexico Art Museum. Her work has been exhibited at the Oakland Museum of California (Queer California), Cincinnati Art Museum (Women Breaking Boundaries), Contemporary Arts Center (Archive as Action), Asian Art Museum and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), Ortega y Gasset Projects (New York City), and the Incheon Women’s Biennale, Korea. Curreri’s artwork has been featured in the New York Times, Artforum, VICE, Hyperallergic, Frieze Art, KQED Arts, San Francisco Chronicle, and more.

For more information, please contact the gallery at info@romeryounggallery.com or 415.550.7483.