ALFRED, NY – Alfred University alumnx Sondra Perry ’12 will have work in an upcoming month-long digital exhibition in New York City’s Times Square.
Times Square Arts, the largest public platform for contemporary performance and visual arts, will exhibit Perry’s work, titled “FLESH WALL,” throughout the month of February. From 11:57 p.m. to midnight each night during the month, FLESH WALL will be displayed as part of Times Square Arts’ Midnight Moment exhibition series.
Midnight Moment is the largest public platform for contemporary performance and visual arts, synchronized on electronic billboards throughout Times Square nightly. In FLESH WALL, Perry uses video, performance, and digital manipulations to explore notions of identity, representation, and Blackness, both from an intimately personal perspective and a historical lens. Expanded to monumental proportions across the billboards of Times Square, FLESH WALL is an animation of a super-modulated, highly processed image of the artist's skin—so magnified that it takes on a nearly unrecognizable form.
Through this process, "the flesh loses all kind of realistic render, but you gain some kind of understanding of what creature-ness is or what identity means outside the label of human," Perry explained in a Broadway World story published online on Thursday, Jan. 21.
Perry, an African-American artist based in Perth Amboy, NJ, earned a B.F.A. degree from Alfred University’s School of Art and Design in 2012. Perry studied expanded media and three-dimensional studies as an undergraduate at Alfred University and went on to earn an M.F.A. degree from Columbia University in 2015.
The artist’s work is critically acclaimed, and has earned Perry numerous awards. In December 2019, Artnet News listed a piece of Perry’s video art among the top 100 most influential pieces of art of the last decade. Ben Davis, an art critic from Artnet News – the world’s first dedicated 24-hour global art market newswire – wrote a piece titled “The 100 Works of Art That Defined the Decade, Ranked,” and placed Perry’s piece, “IT’S IN THE GAME ’17 or Mirror Game for Vitrine of Projection (2017)” as No. 82 on his top 100 list.
In the fall of 2018, Perry received the Nam June Paik award at a ceremony at the Westfälischer Kunstverein in Münster, Germany. The award is given biennially to an artist working with moving images and new technology. Earlier that year, Perry was named the winner of the inaugural Toby’s Prize, a $50,000 award given to a contemporary artist by the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland. In 2017, the Seattle Art Museum awarded Perry its Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Prize, which is given biennially to an emerging black artist. Perry was also a recipient of a 2017 Biennial Grant from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation.
