Real Art Ways announce the opening reception for Greenness on Thursday March 21

Greenness
Real Art Ways • 56 Arbor St, Hartford, CT 06106
March 21 – May 19, 2024

Greenness

Real Art Ways presents a new exhibition by Real Art Award recipient Alex Dolores Salerno titled Greenness, an exhibition that draws from disability wisdom to embrace the earth and a holistic sense of safety. The exhibition is on view through Sunday, May 19. An opening reception will be held Thursday, March 21 from 6-8pm (during Real Art Ways’ monthly social, CCH). Gallery hours are everyday from 2-9pm. Admission is free. Real Art Ways is located at 56 Arbor Street, Hartford.

Spanning installation, soft sculpture, video, and photography, Alex Dolores Salerno’s first solo exhibition, Greenness, draws from the artist’s own autistic experience of nature, and the sense of “access intimacy” (as coined by Mia Mingus) that they feel through the work of disabled ancestor Mel Baggs. The artist argues that being in relationship with the earth is an access need for all just as ramps, ASL interpretation, audio description and other accessibility practices are necessary for us all to live together in community. Throughout the gallery Salerno uses the color “OSHA safety green”, a federal standard color that indicates the location of safety equipment or information. Rejecting restrictive ways of engaging in art contexts, our workplaces and our environments, Greenness invites touch, stimming, rest, and slowness. By intertwining these sensory regulating actions and ways of being with an expanded concept of workplace safety, the exhibition makes apparent how capitalism and its destructive demand for continuous productivity, production, and consumerism estranges us from both the earth and our needs.

Alex Dolores Salerno

Alex Dolores Salerno (b. 1994, homeland of the Nacotchtank, Anacostan and Piscataway people colonially known as Washington D.C.) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Lenapehoking, colonially known as Brooklyn, NY. Informed by queer-crip experience, community, and culture, they work to critique standards of productivity, 24/7 society, notions of normative embodiment, and the commodification of rest. Salerno received their MFA from Parsons School of Design and their BS from Skidmore College. They have exhibited at the Museum für Moderne Kunst (Frankfurt), Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo de Castellón (Castellón), ARGOS centre for audiovisual arts (Brussels), Art Windsor-Essex (Windsor), The 8th Floor, the Ford Foundation Gallery (NYC), among others. They have been awarded a Wynn Newhouse Award (2022) and an Art Matters Foundation Artist2Artist Fellowship (2023). Recent publications include Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art and Art in America. Salerno has been an artist in residence at Art Beyond Sight’s Art & Disability Residency (2019-2020), the Artist Studios Program at the Museum of Arts and Design (2021), the Visual Artist AIRspace Residency at Abrons Arts Center (2022-2023), and they are currently in residence at BRIClab: Contemporary Art Residency Program at BRIC (2023-2024). Visit Salerno’s website here for more information.

Salerno is a recipient of a 2023 Real Art Award. The Real Art Awards are a juried competition open at no cost to emerging artists from the six New England states, New York, and New Jersey. The jury for the 2023 Real Art Awards included multidisciplinary artist and educator Aki Sasamoto, artist/writer/curator Devin Kenny, and Will K. Wilkins, Executive Director of Real Art Ways. In addition to a cash prize and a solo exhibition, each artist receives a logistical and curatorial support throughout the exhibition process. This project is supported in part by awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Edward C. and Ann T. Roberts Foundation. To learn more about the Real Art Awards and this year’s recipients, please click here.

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