Marianna Peragallo
Marianna Peragallo is a Brazilian-American artist and educator based in New York, NY. Her recent anthropomorphic sculptures embody the cross-sections of love, labor, endurance, and support.
She started thinking about love more critically because it is often misrepresented as being sentimental, passive, or, worse, manipulative. Like queerness and femininity, love is often mischaracterized as non-essential fluff. However, love is a radical act rooted in strength and mutual support. It is something that needs to be learned and taught. With this in mind, she draws from the aesthetics of children's books and childhood where we first (mis)learn about love.
Thank You For Shopping Here, 2022
Amor Perfeito (Pansy), 2022
Through sculpture, Peragallo is considering what love and support can look like. She makes commonplace household objects that are often taken for granted. Initially, the objects were action-oriented. They were body-text-object hybrids that physically became a single loving gesture. More recently, she has been making sculptures of household objects that have resigned from their intended purpose. These sculptures are a pivot in a more idiosyncratic direction that reflects the melancholy and absurdity of the past two years. The objects are simply existing, rather than being perpetually useful.
Thank You Have A Nice Day, 2022
Marianna’s work has been shown in various locations, including recent exhibitions at A.I.R. Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Collar Works (Troy, NY), Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY), Garrison Art Center, (Garrison, NY), the Border Project Space (Brooklyn, NY), and a two-person exhibition at Transmitter Gallery (Brooklyn, NY). She has made public art projects for the New York Restoration Project at the Suffolk Street Community Garden (New York, NY), Art Lot (Brooklyn, NY), and Light Year 56 (Brooklyn, NY). Marianna was an artist in residence at the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony (Woodstock, NY) in 2014, Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY) in 2019, Mass MoCA’s Assets for Artists residency (North Adams, MA) in 2019, and the New Hope Colony Artist Residency in 2021. She is in residence at the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program through August 2022. Marianna received a BFA from the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, and an MFA from The School of Visual Arts, New York.
Installation view of Green House at Spring Break Art Fair 2022
She currently has a solo exhibition Home Grown open Saturday, October 15th at Winston’s, Los Angeles. Peragallo spent the last year in residence at the Sharpe Walentas Studio Program in Dumbo, NY where she had the opportunity to start a new body of work and spend time with a fabulous cohort of artists. The Brooklyn Rail invited her to participate in their Weekend Journal series to talk about what she was working on there. That work was first shown in a two-person exhibition titled Organs Without Bodies at Transmitter Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, and most recently at Spring Break Art Fair in a four-person exhibition Peragallo co-curated titled Green House. The show received a Critics Choice in Hyperallergic & the work from that exhibition is still available for purchase through December.
View more of Marianna Peragallo’s work on her instagram and website.