Her show Gio Swaby: Both Sides of the Sun includes three series.
According to Artnet,
The artist works with fabric to create threaded line portraits and striking silhouettes using colorful textiles, the patterns strategically placed to echo the natural curves and forms of the body. Many of the works are done in life-size scale, Swaby’s subjects—often, friends she photographs—proudly taking up space.
Swaby said,
“We don’t have enough images of Black bodies experiencing joy.
The media feeds us so many images of Black people in moments of suffering, and it effects you because you see yourself reflected in that“I wanted to create a space where we could see ourselves reflected in a moment of joy, celebrated without expectations, without connected stereotypes.”
The work that has resonated with audiences as well as some of the most prestigious museums in the country. Eight institutions have bought from the show; the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis and the Museum of Fine Art St. Petersburg in Florida next year.
Oliver said,
“There’s over 100 people on the waiting list…
I think she has unlimited potential. I just feel like the sky’s the limit for where she’s going.”
Private collectors who were able to purchase works from the current show include the author Roxane Gay and actor Hill Harper, of CSI: NY and The Good Doctor.
“I didn’t have these kinds of expectations. It’s a lot to take in, but I’m feeling more excited than anything else. I had the belief that art couldn’t be something that you pursued as a career. But nothing else felt right.”
Sway says her interest in textiles is attribute to her mother, a lifelong seamstress, who died last year.
“Growing up my house was full of fabric and thread and sewing machines. I’m one of five siblings, but I was the only child who was really interested in sewing at all.
I connect textiles with an act of love.”
I see the work being connected visually and contextually to a line of prominent Black American artists like Barkley Hendricks, Mickalene Thomas, Kehinde Wiley, who painted Barack Obama‘s official portrait for the National Gallery and Michelle Obama‘s official portraitist, Amy Sherald, as well as Ghada Amer. (Will we see a portrait of VP Kamala Harris by Swaby perhaps…?)
The work in the show is also, in part, Swaby’s response to the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter of last summer.
“The feelings that I had at that specific time are always with me as a Black woman, and it was even more heightened during that period.
It was incredibly hard already to be experiencing this global pandemic and sharing in that loss with everyone else in the world, but also experiencing with all other Black people the incredible loss that we have suffered and we are constantly reminded of.”
Some of the moments that have had the greatest impact on me as an artist is where I hear feedback from Black women and girls who are seeing the work and recognizing themselves…
I’ve had quite a few people reach out to me on Instagram to express gratitude—it’s a lovefest.”
