Heritage

Rebecca Camacho Presents is pleased to announce a group exhibition with Melissa Cody, Bethany Collins and Deborah Roberts. Titled Heritage, the show highlights artists who transform their personal and cultural histories into platforms for their work. Confronting issues including race, gender, language, cultural equity and equality, the varied media and content of Cody's, Collins' and Roberts' practices both intersect and diverge, expanding the dialogue of each artists direct and inherited experience.

Melissa Cody is a fourth generation Navajo weaver and textile artist raised on The Navajo Nation in Northern Arizona. Working in the Germantown Revival style, Cody deconstructs classical bounds by incorporating unusual color schemes and juxtaposing bold, sharp lines with non-traditional symbolism mined from urban culture, poetry, music and street art. Creating contemporary fine art in a forum historically viewed as female craftwork, Cody purposely employs the same variety of commercial yarn that traders often brought to Navajo weavers in the latter half of the 19th century. This material context exemplifies Cody’s multi-faceted practice, straddling time and place, class and category. Cody has been an artist in residence at the De Young Museum in San Francisco and the Heard Museum in Phoenix. Recently she was included in the SITE Santa Fe SITElines exhibition Casa Tomada; Self, Made at the San Francisco Exploratorium and Color Riot! How Color Changed Navajo Textiles at the Heard Museum.

Bethany Collins is a multidisciplinary artist whose conceptually driven work is fueled by a critical exploration of how race and language interact. Interested in the possibility of multiple meanings, dual perceptions, and limitlessness in the seemingly binary, Collins' repetitious style of drawing allows her to fully understand objects in space while defining and redefining her own racial landscape. In her Contronym series, on view in this exhibition, Collins transposes definitions from Webster’s New World Dictionary of American Language onto American Masters paper, then aggressively obscures much of the entries with an eraser. What remain are specific snippets of meaning that are poetically charged through their isolation, as well as the crumbled paper bits left behind by her erasing. Collins' works have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions nationwide. She is the recipient of the Hudgens Prize as well an Artadia Chicago award. Recent solo institutional exhibitions include the Contemporary Art Museum St Louis, the University of Kentucky Art Museum, and the University Galleries, Illinois State University; group exhibitions include the Markel Center at the Virginia Commonwealth University Institute for Contemporary Art, The Print Center Philadelphia, Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Smart Museum Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit and the Corvus Gallery at the University of Chicago Lab School.

Deborah Roberts is a mixed media artist whose work challenges the notion of ideal beauty. In an ongoing series of collage on paper works, Roberts makes abstracted representations of adolescent black youths that explore race and identity issues and consider notions of beauty and body image. Challenging the ideal of the white Venus, Roberts makes room for women of color who are not included in this definition and creates a dialogue among the notions of inclusion, dignity, consumption and subjectivity. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Block Museum of Art, Blanton Museum of Art, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Montclair Art Museum and The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery. Roberts was the recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2016 and the Ginsburg-Klaus Award Fellowship in 2014. A catalogue of her solo exhibition, The Evolution of Mimi, at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art was published in July 2019.