Ballroom culture as imagined through 19th-century Pre-Raphaelite paintings is front and center in Jamie Vasta’s fifth exhibition with PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY. It’s with immense pleasure we present House of Roses, a celebration of the shimmering, diverse expressions of queer identity. The composite glitter portraits draw inspiration from the opulence, bearing, and metaphor found in Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Rousing in lush outdoor environs and restaged with queer identities in full bloom, Vasta’s ficitve family are gorgeous, tattooed, costumed, commanding and heralded by community—they refuse the lassitudes of erasure and closeted thinking. As a queer youth growing up in Rochester, New York, Vasta found hope and inspiration in Paris Is Burning—a film that elevates queerness as jubilant, communal, and fierce. Vasta’s imaginary family portraits in House of Roses pay homage to and expand in portraiture the legacy of Black and Latinx communities who built ballroom as a site of chosen family, safety, resilience, and performance, enshrining the courage and intention of their vision as well as the limitless diversity of queer experience. Known for her contemporary figurative “paintings” made entirely of bombastic bits of glitter and a little glue, Vasta reimagines art history with a queer lens. In her first exhibition Mustn’t in 2007, Vasta reframed Angela Carter’s feminist fairy tales depicting a mystical landscape where women with supernatural powers cavort in deadly play. Vasta’s second exhibition reflects the trophy portrait in glitter, this time with internet composites of adolescent females posed with their kill. Vasta then presented After Caravaggio – a contemporary reframing of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio’s historic paintings where she posed her coterie of friends and colleagues with contemporary props, turning gender and context on end. After the Hudson River School positioned Vasta’s glitter on wood landscapes in the traditions of 19th century landscape painting. Now Vasta turns to the sensorial visuals of the Pre-Raphaelites in House of Roses, a celebration of trans, nonbinary, and genderfluid as icons of beauty, sensuality and self-possession as much at home in the natural world as voguing in the ballroom. Flowing drapery in luminous glitter mirror Vasta’s operatic revelry and imposing gravity. A Vision of Fiammetta, after Rossetti, is almost ambrosial, a stately genderfluid portrait, obliquely referencing the original painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1898). Vasta’s Vision of Fiammetta strikes a direct, unyielding gaze, embraced by exquisite red roses in a deep verdant garden. The melodrama of this series is a siren call to Vasta, whose imagination is fueled by the beguiling amplification glitter delivers. I recommend you don those rose-tinted glasses and plunge into Queer splendor with House of Roses! "The subjects of my paintings are a diverse group of tattooed, genderfluid individuals who defy traditional notions of beauty and representation. By positioning these figures as the focal point of my reinterpretation of Pre-Raphaelite imagery, I challenge the historical tropes that have often sidelined those who fall outside normative definitions of gender and beauty. The lush floral motifs represent not just the natural world but also the flourishing of diverse identities and experiences. They serve as a reminder of the strength found in community and the importance of nurturing oneself and others". – Jamie Vasta Jamie Vasta received her MFA from the California College of Arts in 2007. Her work has been reviewed in Artillery, Art in America, Artforum, art LTD, Modern Art Obsession, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, SF Weekly, and The Bay Guardian. Vasta is included in prestigious public and private collections, including the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Arizona State University, and the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento. In Conversation TBA: Please join Patricia Sweetow & Jamie Vasta for an insightful conversation into the development of House of Roses! _____ Event: Saturday, November 1 at 2:00 pm In Conversation: The Weaving of an Icon, John Paul Morabito and Patricia Sweetow PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY is thrilled to present Our Lady of the Bathhouse, beaded jacquard tapestries by John Paul Morabito. Morabito spent their early formative years in the Bronx, more specifically in the Bronx of the immigrant Italian-American community. This milieu provided an environment resplendent with cultural particularities, memories of religious icons dotting walls and tables, heavy perfumes, scents from candles and cooking wafting through the air, lavish brocade and fringed furniture encased in plastic (stand-ins for liturgical garments), plastic runners shielding rugs from human presence, heavy mahogany-stained wood tables, and, of course, on the personal side, big hair, leopard prints, oversized gold jewelry, painted nails, false eyelashes, cigars, polyester everything, and gesticulating robust conversations. Every ethnicity has its own Bronx, this landscape of experience has been the stuff of film, writing, and art for generations, continuing today. And thus it’s true of Morabito, the perfect petri dish birthed from the very icons that shaped the cultural imagination of their youth. This visual landscape is mirrored in their tapestries and, with a shimmer and a wink, exaggerated through campy drag decadence. Presenting this extraordinary series offers more than a window into Morabito’s life and studio practice, it reveals an effective propaganda tool of early church and state: tapestries. Begun in 2018 and completed in 2020, Morabito unveils their series of religious tapestries with a subtle but explicit intervention, cloaking 15th- and 16th-century Renaissance paintings of Madonna and Child in flamboyant colors of drag—a Queer allegory turning sacred to Camp. Morabito remediates devotional paintings by artists such as DaVinci and Botticelli with accentuated day-glow colors and a stigmata presentation shimmering with gold beaded fringe. With this joyful celebration of sensorial imaginings, Morabito deftly reframes and reclaims the historic stigmatization and hypocrisy of the Catholic Church through queer transubstantiation. The best blasphemy is a slow burn. Our Lady of the Bathhouse includes one tapestry from For Félix (love letter), a tribute to Felix Gonzales Torres, who succumbed to AIDS in the 90’s. This sweeping 7’ beaded tapestry will hang in the gallery’s entry alcove. Upon entry, you will metaphorically walk through a veil between sex, life, and death, an exquisite corollary to the homoerotic beaded curtains of González-Torres. For Felix is the outgrowth from the remediated Renaissance tapestries featured in our exhibition, Our Lady of the Bathhouse. While Morabito’s beaded tapestry offers a ravishing tribute to González-Torres and generations lost to AIDS, the work also raises a celebratory fist to subsequent Queer generations. Like González-Torres, Morabito’s tapestries act in defiance of religious, political and institutional policies as the guiding moral orthodoxy. Beading the long strands of thread central to For Felix is analogous to the beaded Rosary, only instead of contrition, Morabito’s act is erotic, lacing their tapestry with power, desire, intimacy, exaltation, and remembrance. John Paul Morabito was awarded the prestigious United States Artists Fellowship in January 2024. Their current academic appointment is at a public research university where they are Assistant Professor and Area Head of Textiles. From 2013 to 2022 they were on the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies. They hold a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recent and upcoming press in 2025 include New Art Examiner (June 2025) by Michel Ségard, and in December – W Magazine by Jori Finkel. In tandem with their studio, John Paul Morabito pursues a practice-led scholarship that positions weaving as a critical platform of cultural produc­tion. Their writing has been published in Art China, The Textile Reader 2 (China Academy of Art), The Journal of Textile Design Research and Prac­tice, Textile: Cloth and Culture. They are the editor of Weaving Beyond the Binary, a special issue of the international peer reviewed journal, Textile: Cloth and Culture. Their work has been included in museum exhibitions, including the Art in Embassies Program, Washington, DC; The Threads We Follow, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA), Winston-Sa­lem, NC; Queer Abstraction, curated by Jared Ledesma, Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA, and Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Over­land Park, KS; Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Arts, Zhejiang Art Museum, Hangzhou City, China. Their tapestries are included in public and private collections, with a recent placement at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh.