frame: 32 3/4 x 25 inches
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Though separated by generation and medium, the artists share an interest in forms that resist stability. Hood's drawings present figures that appear skeletal, mechanical, and at times alien, inhabiting psychological spaces where dream and memory converge. Kunin's ceramic sculptures similarly blur distinctions between body, architecture, and ornament, creating hybrid forms that draw upon mythology, decorative traditions, and queer understandings of transformation and self-fashioning. Parsons's sculptures move between image and object, distilling bodily presence into fragments charged with desire, memory, and psychic tension. Through coded symbols and partial forms, his work reflects the instability of identity and the performative dimensions of queer experience. Working with minerals, plants, and other natural materials, Przezwańska creates sculptural environments that foreground the reciprocal relationship between human perception and the living world.
Collectively, the body emerges as a vessel for projection and transformation: a site where psychic, material, and ecological realities meet.
JULIA KUNIN (b. 1961, Vermont, US) is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work is rooted in craft, queer abstraction, and feminism. Her ceramic sculptures merge body and architecture with humor and eroticism, employing a personal symbolic language to explore lesbian visibility and desire. Her iridescent glazes create a psychedelic optical ebullience. In these coded compositions, Kunin asserts a feminist and queer presence within art historical lineages reaching back to Marsden Hartley and Victor Vasarely. As she notes, “Geometry alone may seem benign, but in this context, the geometry becomes subversive.” Symmetrical forms such as keyholes and labryses appear as architectural lattice works in clay, embedding symbolic meaning and near-spiritual iconography into their structures and surfaces.
Kunin is a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow and she received a Peter S. Reed Grant in 2023, a Fulbright to Hungary in 2013, a Trust for Mutual Understanding grant in 2010, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 2008. She has participated in residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Millay Colony for the Arts, Yaddo, MacDowell, and Art Omi. Recent exhibitions include a 2025 solo presentation at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, NY, and in group exhibitions at the American Museum of Ceramic Art (AMOCA), Pomona, and CA Museum of Craft and Design, San Francisco, CA. Her work is held in the collections of The Everson Museum, Syracuse, NY; The German Leather Museum, Offenbach, Germany; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); the Margulies Collection, Miami, FL;, the Museum of Art and Design (MAD) in New York, NY; and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston, TX.
JOEL PARSONS (b. 1985, Springdale, Arkansas) is an artist, curator, and teacher based in Memphis, TN where he is an Assistant Professor of Art, Director of Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Director of Clough-Hanson Gallery at Rhodes College. He has been shown at Flyweight Projects in New York, NY; the Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles, CA; Yale University’s Greene Gallery; Western Exhibitions in Chicago, IL; and the Yerba Buena Art Center Triennial in San Francisco, CA. He is the cofounder of Beige, an alternative gallery and performance space devoted to the work of LGBTQ+ artists. His queer country music band and performance art project, The Sissy Dicks, has released three albums and regularly plays venues in the Southeastern United States, including Goner Fest in Memphis, TN and the Spellcasters Maritime Ball in New Orleans, LA. He received a BA from Rhodes College, Phi Beta Kappa, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was awarded the John Quincy Adams Fellowship. His writing has been published in The Brooklyn Rail, Art Papers, and Art in America. Parsons is represented by Sheet Cake Gallery.
His multidisciplinary practice centers queer intimacy, anxieties, and pleasure. Dance, roses, and tears are consistent throughlines in his work, evoking celebration, longing, protest, performance, and humor at different turns. "Recent work exists within what he describes as a 'Speculative Dance Club for We Who Feel Otherwise in a World on Fire.'" In this space, Parsons exorcises frustrations and desires stemming from fraught means of sharing information (and misinformation), pandemic isolation, and oppressive systems and politics. The dance floor becomes a place to experience freedom and joy and cast protection over friends and loved ones. Grids organize and create order, but often fall apart or fail, underscoring the futility of making sense of this world.
KATARZYNA PRZEZWAŃSKA (b. 1984, Poland) studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and remains based in the city. Przezwańska’s work sits at the intersection of nature and material culture. Moving fluidly between architectural interventions, installations, sculptures, and paintings, she creates intuitively sensual and emotionally resonant works. Drawing on geological phenomena, folk traditions, pop culture, plant life, and ritual, she incorporates rocks, seeds, branches, eggs, geodes, and minerals as essential components.
Przezwańska’s practice often engages with both rational systems—geometry, architecture, geology—and more speculative frameworks such as orgone energy, a mid-20th-century theory of universal life force. By referencing these contested or mystical ideas, she highlights the tension between science and belief and suggests that materials and forms may hold unseen energies capable of shaping emotional, sensory, and even healing experiences. She balances large-scale public and intimate studio works, grounded in vitality, color, and human touch—deliberately avoiding hermetic or overly conceptual modes.
Her 2017 residency at New York’s International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) underscored her approach: assembling found organic materials—stones, seeds, leaves, sticks—as raw matter for delicate, often anthropomorphic sculptures. Her work merges humor, tenderness, and subtle dialogues with viewers beyond age or education. She has participated in prominent exhibitions and is represented in major Polish public art collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw. Przezwańska was recently a collaborating artist for the Polish Pavilion at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (2025). The interdisciplinary exhibition, titled “Lares and Penates: On Building a Sense of Security in Architecture,” interrogates how architecture—through rituals, built objects, and domestic practices—constructs emotional and rational experiences of safety.
DOROTHY HOOD (b. 1918, Bryan, Texas, US; d. 2000, Houston, Texas, US) established herself as a pioneer of modernism from 1937, first as a scholarship student at the Rhode Island School of Design and briefly at the Art Students League in New York City, before settling in Mexico City in the 1940s. There, she would spend two decades embedded in the rich cultural fabric of a city amid post-war and post-revolutionary bohemia. She befriended leading artists and intellectuals, including Pablo Neruda, José Clemente Orozco, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Mathias Goeritz, Diego Rivera, and Rufino Tamayo.
In 1962 Hood returned to Houston and had solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Witte Museum, San Antonio; Rice University, Houston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York; and her work is in the permanent collections of numerous American museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Everson Museum, Syracuse, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; among many others. During her lifetime, Hood’s work, from her formally rigorous yet metaphysical and intimate abstract paintings, to ink drawings on paper and collages, garnered an impressive exhibition history and support from influential critics, curators, and collectors, including Philippe de Montebello, Dorothy Miller, Clement Greenberg, Jim Harithas, and Barbara Rose, among others.
In 2016, the Art Museum of South Texas (AMST), Corpus Christi, organized a major retrospective of Dorothy Hood’s works and published a monograph about her life and career, which culminated in the exhibition and book entitled The Color of Being/El Color del Ser: DOROTHY HOOD (1918-2000). In the fall of 2018, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, presented an exhibition entitled Kindred Spirits: Louise Nevelson & Dorothy Hood, mounting an unprecedented visual dialogue between the works of both artists.
