El Museo del Barrio, the Hostos Center for the Arts & Culture and the Bronx Council on the Arts present their first-ever joint exhibition titled Revival: Contemporary Pattern and Decoration at the Longwood Art Gallery @ Hostos in the Bronx. Guest curated by Rocío Aranda-Alvarado, and a part of Hostos Community College’s 50th anniversary celebration, the group exhibition explores a renewed interest in pattern and decoration by contemporary artists in various media featuring works by 26 artists. Such interest builds upon a movement that developed in the 1970s, when artists began to explore the possibilities of pattern and focused on the repetition of color, line, and shape. The movement became known as “Pattern and Decoration,” or more generally “P & D.” In part, this was a response to the severity of the Minimalist movement that was dominated by large-scale works by male artists.

Revival: Contemporary Pattern and Decoration reflects contemporary concerns of living artists who evoke both pattern and the body as forms of symbolic and visual language. The body acts not only as a bearer of crucial social information, but also as a reminder of its historic role in all kinds of patterns and other image-making, such as wallpaper, fabric design, porcelain objects, and silhouette portrait painting. Today, artists evoke the bodies linked to internet searches, glossy magazine images, historic works of art, and other cultural monuments. Geometric lines evoke the historical significance of abstraction and the endless possibilities of line and form in pattern to evoke a variety of ideas, physical reactions, and subsequent responses. Taken together, the artists presented here explore a broad range of aesthetic approaches to both the body and pattern as interconnected and meaningful elements of artistic production.

Participating Artists: Damali Abrams | Firelei Báez | Leonardo Benzant | Lionel Cruet | Abelardo Cruz Santiago | ray ferreira | Marlon Griffith | Alejandro Guzman | Lee Jacob Hilado | Deborah Jack | Remy Jungerman | Jessica Lagunas | Troy Michie | Joiri Minaya | Pierre Obando | Wilfredo Ortega | Cecilia Paredes | Antonio Pulgarín | Freddy Rodríguez | Sheena Rose | Keisha Scarville | Mickalene Thomas | Margaret Rose Vendryes | Marcus Zilliox