Grace Rosario Perkins

Detail

This installation features work by Grace Rosario Perkins, alongside her father, Olen Perkins.

Grace Rosario Perkins has spent a large chunk of time residing on the Akimel O'odham Indian Reservation (Blackwater AZ) and on the Navajo Nation (Fort Defiance AZ). This upbringing has affected her body of work which consists of repetitive motifs of women, mountainscapes, abstract patterns, and shapes built from a consciousness in which memory, familial identity, pop culture, and obsessive mark making are paired with text.

Though the work is often pointed, it incorporates a use of language that is often vague and can invoke meaning from the viewer; words with widespread meaning such as "Feeling," "Vision," and "Circumstance" are used frequently. In a recent body of work, Grace has used fragmented sentences and words from the Diné language lifted directly from Navajo dictionaries and other reference materials as a means to challenge both the transmission and disintegration of culture.

In 2012, Grace was part of a group of women who founded the Black Salt Collective, a small collective with aims to make work that "embodies cultural and contemporary narratives" and increase the visibility of women of color artists. See more work here: http://hhhhiiii.tumblr.com/