The Bronx Celebrates: Cathleen Lewis

Lehman College Art Gallery presented the work of installation artist Cathleen Lewis in the gallery’s ongoing series, The Bronx Celebrates. This series features the work of artists who have lived, worked, or grown-up in the Bronx and has included Vito Acconci, Lawrence Weiner, Ida Applebroog, Whitfield Lovell, Elisa D’ Arrigo, among others.

Cathleen Lewis explores the overlapping testaments of race and female gender. Through her sculpture she examines concepts of beauty, both for African women and African-American women, infusing her work with a resounding intelligence. The gallery presented three of Lewis’ large-scale installations Binary Oppositions is a monumental work comprised of one hundred and forty-four steel panels that examine the language of race through binary words or phrases. The work questions the tendency to reduce the dialogue of race to simple opposites. Black, an installatoin of twelve bags chrocheted from rubber and hung from floor to ceiling. These womb-like structures allude to female accessors and fashion as well as anatomy. The exhibition will also include Extensions (Ethnic Signifiers), an installation of an accumulation of synthetic braids which investigates the social constructions of adornment in the form of a three dimensional line drawing through which the visitor will walk.

The gallery produced an electronic catalogue on the World Wide Web with two essays as a special supplement to TalkBack! A Journal of Critical Discourse. (TalkBack! is an Internet Journal of art and social criticism edited by Robert Atkins and published quarterly by The Center For Long-Distance Art and Culture, a project of the Lehman College Art Gallery).