"Artists are shapeshifters. We're adept at weathering sudden changes, upheavals and even tragedy and we've been doing so throughout history. We tend to work alone, creating worlds for ourselves and anyone that does go along."
— Stacy Lynn Waddell, April 2020
Stacy Lynn Waddell’s practice investigates beauty and transformation through experimental and alchemical processes. Using heat and laser technology, accumulation, embossing, interference and gilding, Stacy creates works that structure sites of intersection between both real and imagined aspects of history and culture. These points of intersection pose important questions related to authorship, beauty and the persuasive power of nationalistic ideology.
Waddell has participated in exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem and The Brooklyn Museum in New York; Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; The North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC; The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Columbia College, Chicago, IL; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; Atlanta Contemporary, among other venues. Her work is in the collections of The Brooklyn Museum; The Nasher Museum of Art; The Weatherspoon Art Museum; The North Carolina Museum of Art; The Gibbes Museum of Art; The Studio Museum in Harlem; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Waddell earned her MFA from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2007.
CANDICE MADEY will present Waddell's first solo exhibition in New York featuring paintings and works in gold leaf in September 2021.
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Image credits: Stacy Lynn Waddell Studio View. Photo by Olly Yung © 2020 Matrons & Mistresses (banner); Camoufler, 2013, Burned handmade paper with Austrian crystals, 16 x 12 inches. Photo by Harrison Haynes. (above).
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
Stacy’s work will be featured in Taking Space: Contemporary Women Artists and the Politics of Scale at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from November 19, 2020 through April 11, 2021.
Curated by Jodi Throckmorton and Brittany Webb, this exhibition examines the approaches of women artists for whom space is a critical feature of their work, whether they take the space on a wall, the real estate of a room through sculpture and installation, engage seriality as a spatial visual practice, cast a wide legacy in art history or claim the space of their body. This exhibition invites viewers to consider how size and repetition can be interpreted as political gestures in the practices of many women artists.
PAFA presents Golden Blue Island by Stacy, a work that was gifted to the museum in 2019 by Lowery Stokes Sims in honor of Linda Lee Alter.
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Image credits: Untitled (Island I), 2012, Burned, branded and singed paper with watercolor, 52 x 52 inches. Photo by Christopher Ciccone (banner); Golden Blue Island, 2015, Acrylic and composition gold leaf on paper, 34 x 47 inches. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Gift of Lowery Stokes Sims in honor of Linda Lee Alter, 2019.36.2. Photo by Christopher Ciccone (above).
We Radical Women Wanted a Black Revolution (for M.H.)
Featured in Brooklyn Museum Exhibition: Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection (2018-2019).
“Stacy Lynn Waddell infuses bodily presence and lived experience to examine historic erasure of Black achievements in traditional monuments. The artist exalts “M.H.,” performance artist and sculptor Maren Hassinger, atop a plinth in place of Confederate General Beauregard whose statue was removed from New Orleans, during their residency at the Joan Mitchell Center in 2017.
Waddell utilizes gold and aluminum leaf, perhaps as a nod to heraldic traditions, while her painstaking linework reflects the laborious technique of monolithic creations. As monument removal becomes increasingly pressing in the current Black Lives Matter movement, Waddell’s work tempts the viewer to question: What would the world look like if we amplified the voices of Black women?”
— Jenée-Daria Strand for The Brooklyn Museum, Tumblr, July 2020.
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Image credits: Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection, Brooklyn Museum, 2018-2019. Photo by Jonathan Dorado (banner); We Radical Women Wanted a Black Revolution (for M.H.), 2017, 22 karat gold, composition gold and aluminum leaf with gouache, watercolor, acrylic, and Sumi ink on paper. Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the Contemporary Art Committee and purchased with funds given by Deborah Rechler, 2018.23. Photo by Christopher Ciccone (above); Photos by Stacy Lynn Waddell, 2017-2018 (below).
Richmond Monuments
These photographs are from Stacy’s recent research material investigating the changing nature of monuments in the United States. They were taken on a road trip to Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia in August 2020, a period of intense protests in the city over Richmond’s memorials to confederate figures such as Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis, prompted by the recent murder of George Floyd.
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Image credits: Photos by Stacy Lynn Waddell, 2020.
FUTURE TEXTS at the SJ Weiler Fund
Presenting Beatriz Cortez, Chitra Ganesh, Cauleen Smith, Stacy Lynn Waddell, Saya Woolfolk.
On view through December 18, 2020
VIEW EXHIBITION
“By making Octavia Butler a focal point for her work, Waddell not only draws attention to the complex historical and social themes that Butler herself sought to reveal, but finds an artistic muse in Butler and her exceptional self-resolve and devotion to envisioning radically equitable worlds.”
– Candice Madey
READ FULL ESSAY (PDF)
The Dawn of our Kindred Sower of Parable (for Octavia E. Butler), 2020 (detail)
22 karat gold leaf on canvas
48 x 36 inches
Photo by Jake Smisloff
FUTURE TEXTS: Imagining Utopia in a Time of Crisis and Change
The SJ Weiler Fund
WATCH PANEL DISCUSSION
On June 8, 2020, The SJ Weiler Fund presented a zoom conversation with Dr. Alondra Nelson, Dr. Saisha Grayson, and four contemporary artists—Chitra Ganesh, Cauleen Smith, Stacy Lynn Waddell, and Saya Woolfalk—for a discussion related to Nelson's essay Future Texts (2002). The artists shared how they explore personal visions of the future that redress history and expose and revoke the cultural and gendered biases of outmoded techno-narratives through their work.
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Image credits: FUTURE TEXTS, 2020 (installation view), SJ Weiler Fund. Photo by Adam Reich (banner and above).
Mask at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery
Amna Asghar, Leilah Babirye, Donna Chung, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Nicole Eisenman, Tamara Gonzales, Rachel Harrison, Arnold Kemp, David Kennedy Cutler, Michael Mahalchick, Demetrius Oliver, Sarah Peters, David Torres, Stacy Lynn Waddell, David Wojnarowicz.
On view through November 28
54 Ludlow St, New York, NY 10002
VIEW EXHIBITION
“Stacy Lynn Waddell’s marks of singed paper distort faces, here with hair seemingly out of control and contrasting with traditional ideas of beauty and the upkeep of appearances.”
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Image credits: Field of Flowers, 2007, Branded and distressed canvas, 58 x 96 inches. Photo by Christopher Ciccone (banner); Untitled (self portrait under COVID 19 quarantine), 2020, Burned paper with graphite. 10 x 8 inches. Photo by Heidi Bohnenkamp; Untitled (self portrait under COVID 19 quarantine with straightened hair ponytail that doubles as a mask), 2020, Burned paper with graphite, 10 x 8 inches. Photo by Heidi Bohnenkamp; Untitled (self portrait under COVID 19 quarantine reflecting on my time as a graduate), 2020, Burned paper with graphite, 10 x 8 inches. Photo by Heidi Bohnenkamp (above).
WOMEN ARE POWERFUL AND DANGEROUS
The work of Stacy Lynn Waddell is rooted in ideas of transfiguration and alchemy, presenting a view that certain objects, images and words hold powerful and sacred potential to move and transform us. Her gilded works evoke wide-ranging artistic traditions such as Byzantine icons, Klimt’s golden period, or Warhol’s Gold Book.
Waddell often employs text or found portraiture to address social injustices and reclaim positions of power, as in WOMEN ARE POWERFUL AND DANGEROUS II. The title, a reference to poet and feminist Audre Lorde, is legible across the work’s surface, intricately-layered in luminous gold leaf and watercolor patterning.
WOMEN ARE POWERFUL AND DANGEROUS II, 2019
Composition variegated gold leaf with watercolor on paper
51-1/2 x 53 inches
Matrons and Mistresses
On July 16, 2020, Lizzie Cheatham McNairy interviewed Stacy Lynn Waddell for Lizzie’s excellent online magazine Matrons and Mistresses.
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Image credits: Stacy Lynn Waddell Studio View (banner); Hot Head, 2007, singed paper, 47 x 34 inches (paper dimensions), 51 x 38 framed (left); Untitled (paper tile study), 2015, distressed and collaged paper with spray paint, 8 x 6 inches (center); Stacy Lynn Waddell Portrait in Studio (right). All photos by Olly Yung © 2020 Matrons & Mistresses.
“The power that I have as an artist is that I can create and I can create imagery that extends that story, that revises that story, and that shapes it in a way that is inclusive of me, my ideas and my ideals.”
— Stacy Lynn Waddell, Matrons & Mistresses
For more information on Stacy Lynn Waddell:
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