Project Room | Stacy Lynn Waddell: Stranger

Rebecca Camacho Presents is pleased to announce Stacy Lynn Waddell Stranger. The exhibition marks the solo debut of the artist at the gallery.

In the Project Room, Stacy Lynn Waddell debuts the first two works from a new series titled Stranger. Stranger takes inspiration from James Baldwin’s 1953 essay Stranger in the Village, in which the author likened his experience as the sole Black man in a secluded, all-white Swiss Alpine village to being treated as a strange object rather than a person. Using traditional gilding and sculptural drawing practices, Waddell teases out themes threading through Baldwin’s essay, explicating and investigating the connectivity between beauty, provocation, unfamiliarity and fear.

Frequently inspired by historical, literary and cultural figures – launch points of past series include Audre Lorde, Winslow Homer’s watercolor After the Hurricane, Bahamas, and John James Audubon’s book Birds of America – Waddell addresses the intersection of popular culture and history with issues related to visibility, desire, and power; considering the human experience and its historical lineage via our relationship to the natural world.

Rooted in Baldwin’s examination of persistence and humanity in the face of the oft inhumane, Waddell’s Stranger series considers otherness, sexuality, identity, and the awe of beauty tempered by trepidation of the unknown. Using floral still life as a metaphor for the human body, illuminating sensual and provocative forms in the pedigree of Robert Mapplethorpe or Georgia O’Keefe, Waddell creates her sculptural drawings with handmade paper and pastiglia, a technique developed during the Renaissance in Italy to create low relief decoration. Employing this historical craft, Waddell conjures botanicals associated with beauty, elegance and refined feminine mystique and fossilizes them in 22-karat gold. The conversation is both singular and universal, illuminating Waddell’s personal Stranger experiences as well as engaging greater questions far beyond her physical breadth.

Measuring 4 feet in diameter, the pieces on view introduce Waddell’s largest and most intricate gilded works on paper to date.

Stacy Lynn Waddell (b. 1966, Washington, D.C.) lives and works in Durham, North Carolina. She received her BA from North Carolina State University, Raleigh, in 1992 and her MFA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2007.

Waddell is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, an Artist-in-Residence at Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, QueenSpace in New York and Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. During Fall 2022, Waddell ended the year as a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellow in Umbria, Italy where she spent six weeks producing works and conducting research in a 15th century castle. In 2024, she was named the Prensky Visiting Artist at Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Art. In March 2025, Waddell was selected as an inaugural Artist-in-Residence of the Suzanne Fitzallen Jackson Foundation Residency and that fall, lived and worked in the Savannah, GA home and studio of artist Suzanne Jackson.

Recent solo exhibitions include Candice Madey, NYC (2023, 2021); Sala 1, Rome, Italy (2022); and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2022). Group exhibitions include The Studio Museum in Harlem and Brooklyn Museum, New York; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth, Pérez Art Museum, Miami, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and Baltimore Museum of Art among other venues.

Waddell’s work is in the collections of the Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill; Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, Bristol, UK; Brooklyn Museum; College of Wooster Art Museum; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston; The Mint Museum, Charlotte; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; the Princeton University Art Museum; The Studio Museum in Harlem; and the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro.