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Brooklyn Museum Opens Exhibition of Work by Marela Zacarias

Brooklyn Museum presents anxhibition of work by Marela Zacarias on view February 1 through April 28, 2013. Zacarias is the seventh artist in the continuing Raw/Cooked series of work by under-the-radar-Brooklyn artists, presented with support from Bloomberg.


Marela Zacarias 163-213 Manhattan (detail).

The artists in the series’ second season were recommended by an advisory panel of leading Brooklyn artists that includes Michael Joo, Paul Ramírez Jonas, Amy Sillman, and Mickalene Thomas, who each proposed three artists for consideration. The final selections were made by Eugenie Tsai, John and Barbara Vogelstein Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum. The Museum offers each of the participating artists a variety of unconventional spaces in which they may make art interventions, creating projects that draw inspiration from the architecture of the building and/or works from the Museum’s collection.

Zacarias, recommended by Ramírez Jonas, lives and works in the Gowanus neighborhood in Brooklyn. Her work combines painting and sculpture and is characterized by an interest in site specificity, the history contained in objects, and current events. Her Raw/Cooked exhibition, titled Supple Beat, draws on the concept of resilience in the Williamsburg Murals and explores the idea of bouncing back from adversity, relating to the history of the public housing project for which the Murals were commissioned. Zacarias’s large-scale wall sculptures are constructed from window screens and joint compound and painted with original patterns that the artist will design based on the unique color palettes and geometric abstract forms of the Murals. Positioned on the walls of the first-floor lobby and the Great Hall, the works in Supple Beat suggest movement and appear to be unfurling—climbing walls and interacting with objects as if they were murals that have come to life, escaping their confinement.

A longtime resident of Brooklyn, Zacarias was born in Mexico City. In 2012 she was the first artist-in- residence at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Connecticut. She is a graduate of Kenyon College and received an MFA in painting from Hunter College. She has taught mural art in Washington, D. C., and Mexico City and is the cofounder of the Connecticut-based Latinos Contra La Guerra and the Regional Coalition for Immigrants Rights. www.brooklynmuseum.org

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