GO OUT FOR SWEETS & COME BACK

GO OUT FOR SWEETS & COME BACK

January 12th - February 23rd 2018

"I moved to Tulsa in January 2016 for the Tulsa Artist Fellowship knowing next to nothing about the place. It was a leap of faith.

I’ve lived in NYC since August 2001, and every once in a while the whole city - 8 million people – are feeling the same thing at once. This can be great (first day of spring!) or terrible (9/11), but after the killing of Eric Garner, being in close proximity to two subway shootings and seeing the police barricade precinct entrances, I needed some faith.

In Tulsa, I learned about the oil industry, female incarceration rates, thriving contemporary Indigenous histories and the Greenwood Massacre. More vulnerable young people had their lives taken too soon, there was a tense election which the made the country more volatile. In the meantime, my studio was filling up with strange little sculptures that seemed to be little beings, both in their personalities and physical vulnerabilities. For the last six months I loaned this work out as an excuse to have conversations, to be vulnerable. I don’t know if it worked. 

The title for the exhibition comes from Don’t Call Us Dead, the most recent collection of poems by Danez Smith. The epigraph reminds me that I was privileged to go out to Tulsa and come back, that the work, sweet and candy colored, was loaned and came back. But the real reason I chose it was to remind me about the necessity of joy – of living - in the face of death."

Molly has created outdoor site-specific paintings in New York City and exhibited across the United States. She has been a resident artist at the Salina Art Center in Kansas and in the Art & Law Program with the Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts in NYC. Molly's work was part of Spontaneous Interventions: design actions for the common good in the U.S. Pavilion at the 13th  International Venice Architecture Biennale.  She has also been an artist in residence at Recess Activities/Pioneer Works (2012), in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Program (2013) and Smack-Mellon (2014). In the spring of 2013 Molly installed a permanent exterior painting for the Garden at The James Hotel in Lower Manhattan. Recent commissions include a 6,000 sq. ft. mural for Toledo, a temporary garden for a city block in Seattle, and a sculpture for a light rail station in Denver.