BELLWETHER is pleased to present Paula Wilson’s first New York solo exhibition, The Stained Glass Ceiling. Wilson will exhibit a cumulation of paintings, prints, drawings, and mosaics created over the past three years. Her hybrid artworks combine various painting and printmaking techniques such as woodblock, silkscreen, and lithography. Pastoral and decorative motifs are depicted through collaged layers of paper and pigment in artworks whose surfaces have a textured, patinated beauty. Women appear in a range of guises: as nude figures dancing around an urn; as grandiose, oversized ladies; and as tough, self-reliant world travelers. All represent different facets of femininity, and call into question the roles of adornment and decoration within the lives of women, and within visual art as a whole.

The dense layering of color, image, pattern, and material in Wilson’s paintings acts as a visual metaphor for the complex stratum of histories and cultures that inform her work. Depictions of verdant gardens are overlaid with woodblock prints of compact discs; decorative vases feature exploding bouquets and graffiti-like scrawls of spray paint; an immense portrait of a lady is seemingly generated from within through an accumulation of other, autonomous, artworks. These conflations reference the myriad factors that contribute to the development of an identity, and an artistic practice.

Paula Wilson received her MFA from Columbia University in 2005. Her work has been featured in group and solo exhibitions in the US and Europe, including Paintings and Drawings from the Hanno Valley, Gallery Suzy Shammah, Milan (solo); Frequency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Turn the Beat Around at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, The Manhattan Project, Fred Snitzer Gallery, Miami; Cinema Remixed and Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Image Since 1970, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta; and Black Alphabet: Contexts of Contemporary African American Art, Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw. Wilson lives and works in New York and New Mexico.

Paula would like to thank everyone at the Leroy Neiman Center for Print Studies at Columbia University, Mike Lagg for his innovative help mounting, framing, and transporting the work, and Beverly Wilson for everything and more.