On-Site: Fall 2024 Welcome Back Exhibition

Event Details

August 26 – September 10, 2024
Gallery Hours: Monday – Friday, 12:00 pm to 6:00 pm
Curated by Yasmeen Abdallah

Pratt Institute’s Department of Fine Arts is pleased to present an exhibition of works in Dekalb Gallery, highlighting our three new full-time faculty members. Please join us in welcoming Laurel Sparks, Alex Strada, and Sam Vernon to our community. Laurel Sparks as Associate Professor of Fine Arts (Painting), Alex Strada as our 2024-2025 Civic Engagement Fellow, and Sam Vernon joins us as Assistant Professor of Fine Arts (Drawing).

On-Site brings together the work of three dynamic artists who contemplate, challenge, and process with immediacy to make the work feel present in the here and now. Their range of materials and communicative expanses pulse and prod our collective conscience in exciting, electric machinations that demonstrate the significance of experimental excavation as practice. Sam Vernon’s work navigates aspects of social justice and bodily autonomy through a substantive physicality that explores democratic means of artistic creation through installation, xeroxing, drawing, and collage. Alex Strada embraces social engagement as her main form of communication, which takes form through video, installation, and community gatherings. Laurel Sparks’ practice embodies the esoteric and the alchemical and contemplates alternate realms that combine painting, collage, sculpture, and drawing. A common thread throughout is the act of play and the physical embodiment of spatiality through intimate and public manifestations. The specificity of each is unique, and yet all are determined to etch marks as deeply into the foundation of society as humanly possible. Through the layering of information and media, each artist engages and responds to external forces through the act of creation, a synchronicity of mirrors held up to society, primed for deep introspection and outward reflection as they narrate the world around us.

Laurel Sparks (any/all) is a Brooklyn and Hudson Valley-based painter whose work intersects queer craft, textile, occult and abstract histories. Esoteric correspondence systems are encoded in patterns and glyphs that reflect mysteries of macro and micro cosmologies. In tandem, elements of decoration and artifice pay homage to queer and feminist counterculture expressions. Exhibitions include recent solo projects at Kate Werble Gallery, NYC; Knockdown Center, Brooklyn, NY; and group shows at Cheim and Read Gallery, NYC; Leslie-Lohman Museum, NYC; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; and DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA. Awards include a MacDowell Fellowship, Elizabeth Foundation Studio Intensive Program at Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, NY, Fire Island Artist Residency, NY, SMFA Alumni Traveling Fellowship, Berkshire Taconic Fellowship, and an Elaine DeKooning Fellowship. Sparks holds an MFA from Bard College and a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, at Tufts University. In 2022/23, Sparks received a project grant to produce an immersive installation for Tinworks Art, Bozeman, MT, and received a 2024 Chiaro Award Residency at Headlands Center for the Arts.

Alex Strada (she/hers) is a multimedia artist and educator based in New York City. Through film/video, installation, sound and orality, and public art, her socially engaged projects explore collectivity, critical legal studies, and political transformation. Transdisciplinary collaboration is at the core of her practice. Since 2022, she has served as the inaugural Public Artist in Residence with the New York City Department of Homeless Services and the Department of Cultural Affairs, where she is working on a new collaborative public art commission while developing art programming in shelters throughout the city. Recent solo exhibitions include the Queens Museum, NYC; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Aldrich Contemporary Museum of Art, CT; and Project Row Houses, Houston (forthcoming). Strada has received awards and grants from the Graham Foundation, Artadia, NYFA, Rema Hort Mann Foundation, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and she has been an artist-in-residence at LMCC, Artists Alliance Inc, Socrates Sculpture Park, the Wexner Center for the Arts, and the Whitney Independent Study Program. Strada holds an M.F.A. in Visual Arts from Columbia University. Beginning in fall 2024, she will be the Civic Engagement Fellow at the Pratt Institute.

Sam Vernon (she/they) earned an MFA in Painting/Printmaking from Yale University in 2015 and a BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 2009. Vernon has exhibited with many institutions, including the Museum of African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco, California; California African American Museum in Los Angeles, California; G44 Centre for Contemporary Photography, Toronto, Canada; Seattle Art Museum, Olympic Sculpture Park; San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum along with many galleries worldwide. Vernon’s first solo exhibition in Europe, Alter-Reservoir, was on view earlier this year at Kunsthaus Hamburg in Hamburg, Germany. This spring, Vernon returned to the States after a year-long visual arts fellowship with the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. Vernon begins a professorship teaching Drawing at Pratt Institute this fall.

Yasmeen Abdallah (she/they) holds an MFA in Fine Arts with distinction from Pratt Institute and BA degrees in Anthropology from the University of Massachusetts (emphasis in Historical & Collaborative Archaeology, which included field schools with New England Indigenous tribal communities) and in Studio Art with honors, including a Minor in Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies. Abdallah is a Visiting Assistant Professor and temporary Department Coordinator in the Fine Arts Department at Pratt Institute. She is part of the ABC No Rio; Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space, GreenspaceNYC Civic Art Lab, and Flux Factory collectives, and is a contributing writer for Art Spiel and The Urban Activist. Abdallah has been a visiting artist at institutions including Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University Teaching College, Parsons School for Design, Fairleigh Dickinson University; TransBorder Art, and El Barrio Art Space. She was a 2024 artist-in-residence at LMCC’s Art Residency on Governors Island and is a recipient of the 2024 NYFA Queens Art Council New Work grant and Brooklyn Arts Council SU CASA 2024 grant.