Between Tongue and Teeth, Angela Fraleigh’s first major museum exhibition, brings together over a decade of the artist’s works which question and reimagine women’s roles in art history, literature, and contemporary media. In a bravura style that weaves together realism and abstraction, Fraleigh creates striking works ranging from intimate portraits to monumental figure paintings. The exhibition features more than 30 pieces, including several new paintings and sculptures inspired by women activists, artists, and designers, as well as previous works based on historical paintings.
The Opening Night Reception is on Friday, September 23 from 6:30-8:00pm and is free for Everson Members, $15 for non-members. The artist will be in attendance, as will artist Marie Lorenz whose exhibition, Tide and Current Taxi, is also opening. The exhibition opens to the public on Saturday, September 24 and runs through December 31, 2016.
Fraleigh will offer a guided gallery walk of her exhibition and discuss selected works on October 13, 2016 at 6:30 pm. The gallery walk is FREE with Museum admission.
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Angela Fraleigh, Carried by Voices, 2014
oil and 23kt gold leaf and alkyd on canvas
Private Collection
Since the mid-2000s, Fraleigh has explored power dynamics related to gender, sexuality, and class through depictions of mythical and historical female figures. Fraleigh’s heroines, set within abstract, dream-like settings, frequently hail from centuries-old European paintings or other male-dominated sources where they have been relegated to the margins or shadows. Fraleigh liberates these peripheral characters and re-casts them as daring protagonists within newly-constructed narratives, thereby restoring their autonomy, agency, and power.
Fraleigh’s environments couple the seen with the unseen: swirling abstract spaces combine with bold voids of color; thick pours of paint or lustrous metallic leafing obscure fleshy forms; turned heads and cropped faces reject the viewer’s gaze. The ambiguity of these richly painted worlds, and the secretive nature of the females who inhabit them, create an unmistakable sense of allure. However, the resistance of Fraleigh’s female protagonists to submission, helplessness, or passive visual consumption, challenges the roles women have traditionally occupied within artistic space.
Angela Fraleigh: Between Tongue and Teeth is curated by Elizabeth Dunbar, Director and CEO of the Everson Museum of Art. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication that includes essays by Kelly Baum, Curator of Post War and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Jennifer Tyburczy, author of Sex Museums: The Politics and Performance of Display, as well as an interview with the artist conducted by Dunbar.
Between Tongue and Teeth is sponsored by Nicole & Michael P. Falcone and Cecily E. Horton, with support from Aminy Audi, Susan A. Estabrook, Bonnie & Gary Grossman, and Bobbi & Clifford Malzman, and others.
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Angela Fraleigh
ABOUT ANGELA FRALEIGH
Fraleigh was born in 1976 in Beaufort, SC, and raised in rural New York. She received her BFA in painting from Boston University and her MFA in painting from the Yale University School of Art, then spent two years in Houston as a Core Artist in Residence. Fraleigh’s solo exhibitions include Lost in the Light at the Vanderbilt Mansion in Hyde Park, NY (2015), Ghosts in the Sunlight at the Inman Gallery in Houston, TX (2014), and far as my eyes could see at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA (2011), among others.
Among her awarded grants, residencies, and other recognitions are the Alice Kimball English Traveling Fellowship; the CORE Artist in Residence Program at the Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts; the Eliza Randall Prize at the Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts; the CACHH, Individual Artist Grant Fellowship, Houston, TX; the Faculty Research and Development Grant at Moravian College, Bethlehem, PA; Artist in Residence at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; Artist in Residence at Frans Masereel Centrum, Beligum; Artist in Residence at Can Serrat, El Bruc, Spain; Artist in Residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE; and studio membership at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York, NY.
Fraleigh is a professor and the department chairperson of the Moravian College art department. She is represented by Inman Gallery in Houston, TX.
