Her Kind

Ivana Bašić, Amy Butowicz, Juliana Cerqueira Leite, mujero, Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya, Shinique Smith, Rachel Youn

July 29 – August 28, 2021

Sargent’s Daughters is pleased to present Her Kind, an exhibition of sculptures by seven artists in diverse mediums, on view from July 29 through August 28, 2021.  The exhibition takes its title from “Her Kind” (1960), the iconic and unsettling poem by American poet Anne Sexton.  The works on view blend and warp pre-existing materials, transforming them into uncanny, anthropomorphic presences.

In “Her Kind,” Sexton speaks as three different witchy female archetypes.  The first is “a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night,” who flies over the rooftops, placing curses on traditional domesticity.  The second “fix[es] the suppers for the worms and the elves” in a cave in the woods which she has outfitted as a home for herself.  The final speaker declares she “is not ashamed to die,” even as she is driven naked in a cart to be burned at the stake.  Each figure defies normative sociality and femininity, and they are exiled and punished for it.  At the end of each description, Sexton repeats the refrain, “I have been her kind,” claiming kinship with these powerful outcasts. 

Sexton’s poetic figures embody their outsider status through intense physical states.  One has twelve fingers, another’s ribs crack under the wheels of a cart.  They are nude, flying, hunched in caves.  “A woman like that is not a woman, quite,” writes Sexton.  And yet, the poet aligns herself with them; at one point or another, she has been each of their kind.  Like a witch in the night, a person may take on many forms, combining disparate attributes into an ever-shifting, ever-evolving assemblage.

Much like the women in the poem, the works in Her Kind are neither women nor anything else.  They take on a variety of strange shapes.  Some are anthropomorphic, blurring the boundary between flesh and thing as they hold their own in the gallery space.  Others assemble and combine objects that normally ensnare the body, rendering them strange and alluring.  All of these amorphous forms destabilize fixed categories, calling into question the boundaries between the human and the non-human, male and female, animate and inanimate.  While they are archetypes of a certain kind, they are also many things at once.

Ivana Bašić (b. 1986 in Belgrade, Serbia) is a Serbian artist living and working in New York. Bašić specializes in sculpture blending various materials, including wax, glass, stainless steel, alabaster and oil paint, as well as immaterial elements such as torque, breath, weight, rigidity and pressure.  Her work addresses the vulnerability and transformation of the human form and its matter. Bašić’s work has been included in shows curated by Nicolas Bourriaud and at Andrea Rosen Gallery, as well as in Chrissie Iles’ milestone exhibition Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905-2016.  Her work is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Amy Butowicz (b. 1975, Akron, Ohio) received a BA in Studio Art from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1998 and her MFA from Hunter College in New York City in 2018. Her practice moves fluidly between painting and sculpture to create allegorical narratives that explore the sexual body and its degeneration. 

Butowicz has been awarded fellowships and scholarships to attend DNA Residency in Provincetown, MA, Salem Art Works in Salem, NY, Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Commonwealth University’s Summer Studio Program, Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts in Saratoga Wyoming, and Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Colorado. She is a 2019 nominee for the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist in New York Grant. Her recent solo exhibitions include Pantomime at The Dairy Center for the Arts in Boulder, Colorado, Inhabit at Anderson Ranch Arts Center, A Room to Hoist at Hunter College, New York City, New York, Hiding in Plain Sight at Underdonk, Brooklyn, New York, and Boudoir Theatre at Peninsula Art Space in Brooklyn, New York.

Juliana Cerqueira Leite (b.1981) is a Brazilian/American sculptor based in New York. Her work explores the materiality of the human body and what it means to be human through her work. With a highly demanding and complex process that entails sculpture but also performance, Cerqueira Leite creates huge pieces embedded with personal histories, trauma, but also a more global, collective consciousness.

Cerqueira Leite received the 2019 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant for her exhibition Orogenesis at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, Italy, and the 2016 Furla Art Prize for her contribution to the 5th Moscow Young Art Biennale. Recent solo shows have included Instituto Tomie Ohtake in São Paulo, Arsenal Contemporary in New York and Montreal, Galeria Casa Triângulo in São Paulo, Alma Zevi gallery in Venice, Nogueras Blanchard in Madrid, and TJ Boulting in London. She has exhibited her work in group shows in venues including Hordaland Kunstsenter for Bergen Assembly, Sculpture Center in New York, Ilmin Museum in Seoul, Marres House for Contemporary Culture in Maastricht, and Saatchi Gallery in London. Her work has been commissioned by international Biennials and Triennials including The Antarctic Pavilion of the 2017 Venice Biennale, Bergen Assembly 2019, Moscow Young Art Biennale, Marrakech Biennale and the 2014 Vancouver Sculpture Biennial. Cerqueira Leite graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art MFA Sculpture program in 2006 in London, as the inaugural recipient of the Kenneth Armitage Sculpture Prize.

mujero (b. 1996, New York, NY) is a Bronx-based interdisciplinary artist. Their work honors queer/Caribbean identity through sculpture, video, and performance. Their practice is the result of a multitude of experiences that require the recognition of all their nuances in order to prompt a new way of viewing oneself, and in turn each other. They are a proud child of Afro-Dominican Immigrants, and was born and raised in New York City.

They have exhibited in galleries and non-profit spaces including New Women Space, Bortolami Gallery, Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery, The Latinx Project at NYU, Westbeth, and Osseous Matter. They hold a BFA in Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design.

Shinique Smith (b. 1971, Baltimore, MD) is a painter and sculptor known for her monumental abstractions of calligraphy textiles and collage that give emphasis to what the artist describes as “the graceful and spiritual qualities of the written word and the everyday.” Smith’s personal histories and belongings intertwine with thoughts of the vast nature of ‘things’ that we consume and discard and how objects resonate on an intimate and social scale. Over the last twenty years, Smith has gleaned visual poetry from vintage clothing and explored concepts of ritual through tying, writing and gestures inspired by her travels and early graffiti roots in Baltimore. Through her process, she builds a complex material vocabulary that deftly interweaves brushstrokes, private narratives and symbolism for the viewer to divine and intuit. Smith’s practice operates at the convergence of consumption, displacement and spiritual sanctuary, revealing connections across space, time, and place to suggest the possibility of constructing worlds renewed by hopeful delight. 

Currently residing in Los Angeles, California, Smith’s art works have been exhibited by and are in the permanent collections of institutions such as, Baltimore Museum of Art, The Barnes Museum, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Bronx Museum, Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans; Denver Art Museum, The Frist Center for Visual Arts, Kemper Museum,  Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Minneapolis Art Institute, MOCA Jacksonville, MOCA North Miami, MOMA PS1, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC, The New Museum, The Studio Museum of Harlem and The Whitney Museum among others.

Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya (b. 1989, Parral, Chihuahua, Mexico) graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University with an MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media in 2020. Montoya’s lil beings are a fantastic becoming that center around anthologies and social issues concerning; border culture, abjection, and mestizaje. Aided by magical realism, nahualismo, Sci-Fi, and the labor of his family. His work hybridizes and creates parallels between; land, the human, and the animal as a way to investigate the process in which violence eradicates, erases, and erodes communities of color. He has also exhibited at Residency Art Gallery, Commonwealth and Council, Virginia MOCA, Company Gallery and Sargent’s Daughters. In September 2020, Montoya debuted his first solo show at Sargent’s Daughters, which was reviewed by The New York Times.

Rachel Youn (b. 1994, Abington, PA) is an artist living and working in St. Louis, MO. Working across sculpture and installation, Youn sources materials with a history of aspiration and failure through online secondhand shopping. Venturing into the suburbs, Youn rescues electric massagers from suburban limbo, fastening artificial plants to the machines to create kinetic sculptures that are clumsy, erotic, and absurd. Haunted by their immigrant father’s pursuit of the American Dream, their work identifies with the replica that earnestly desires to be real, and the failed object that simulates care and intimacy. 

Youn has had solo exhibitions in St. Louis at the Contemporary Art Museum, Monaco, and the Bermuda Project. Their work has been included in group exhibitions in St. Louis at the Parapet Real Humans, the Sheldon Art Galleries, and the Luminary, among others. Additional group exhibitions include the Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY; HAIR + Nails, Minneapolis, MN; Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Los Angeles; and Granite City Art and Design District, Granite City, IL. Youn is a recipient of the Vermont Studio Center Fellowship and the 2020 Great Rivers Biennial Award. They received their BFA from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.

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