Grace Rosario Perkins: Circles, Spokes, Zigzags, Rivers
Opens Oct 18
Grace Rosario Perkins: Circles, Spokes, Zigzags, Rivers
Grace Rosario Perkins, Lets Go Back To That Magic Place That Only You and I Have Seen (Illuminations), 2023. Acrylic, spray paint, paper, and transparencies on canvas, 77 × 60 in. (195.6 × 152.4 cm). Collection of Sasha and Charlie Sealy. © Grace Rosario Perkins, courtesy the artist and Bockley Gallery
Oct 18, 2025–Feb 8, 2026
Grace Rosario Perkins: Circles, Spokes, Zigzags, Rivers marks the first solo museum exhibition in New York City for Grace Rosario Perkins (Akimel O'odham/Diné, b. 1986, Santa Fe, New Mexico). The presentation brings together approximately ten recent works—primarily large-scale paintings made between 2022 and the present, including two paintings created specially for this exhibition, as well as a new sculpture.
The title of the exhibition draws on imagery that connects the artist’s family to their tribal homelands in the southwestern United States. Perkins’s vibrant and layered works are shaped by an intuitive, dynamic process of addition and removal. Her materials are wide-ranging, often incorporating found objects and personal belongings such as photographs, jewelry, pages from books, fabric, plastic bags, plaster, and plant materials. Working with acrylic, spray paint, and collage, she constructs dense surfaces that speak to both individual and collective memory. Guided by diaristic encounters, DIY ethos, spirituality and plant medicine, the artist references popular and material culture, language, music, and sports as they converge with more intimate reflections on grief, love, and hope.
Through abstraction, Perkins resists reductive representations of Indigenous identity, instead presenting an expansive vision rooted in both ancestral knowledge and the urgencies of now. Circles, Spokes, Zigzags, Rivers offers a vital and multifaceted portrait of an artist creating new forms of storytelling.
Grace Rosario Perkins: Circles, Spokes, Zigzags, Rivers is organized by Adrienne Edwards, Engell Speyer Family Senior Curator and Associate Director of Curatorial Programs, with Rose Pallone, Curatorial Assistant.