Born in 1986 in the Hamptons, NY. Lives in New York City.
Pamela Council is a New York based interdisciplinary artist creating fountains for Black joy. Guided by material, cultural, and metaphysical quests, Council’s practice embodies a darkly humorous and inventive Afro-Americana camp aesthetic, BLAXIDERMY. Through this lens, Council uses sculpture, architecture, writing, and performance to make dedications and monuments that provide relief for grief and shed light on under-valued narratives.
Council has created commissions, exhibitions, performances or presentations for: New Museum for Contemporary Art, United States Library of Congress, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Studio Museum in Harlem, and MoCADA. Council has been Artist-in-Residence at MacDowell, Red Bull Arts, Bemis, Rush Arts, MANA, Signal Culture, Mass MoCA, and Wassaic Project. A recipient of the 2017 Joan Mitchell Grant, Council holds a BA from Williams College and an MFA from Columbia University and is currently artist in residence at ISCP.
Council often uses humor as a political tool to expose systems of power and inequality in a society in which even death carries a high price tag.
Camp is commonly seen as the love of irony and artifice, a theatrical devotion to what the mainstream considers ugly and/or garish and gaudy. But in its original and Blackest manifestation, Camp is a way of looking, one that shifts whose gaze has power as well as who can be at the center of the political project we call beauty.
At Denny Dimin Gallery, the multidisciplinary artist Pamela Council told me that the work in their new solo exhibition—the first since signing on with the dealer—was “dark, maybe the darkest I’ve done.”
Your list of must-see, fun, insightful, and very New York art events this month, including the Armory, Bushwick Open Studios, and the New York Film Festival.
Artist Pamela Council is Building a Joyous, Camp “Fountain for Survivors” in Times Square: The sculptures will feature close to 400,000 acrylic nails.
Denny Dimin Gallery Announces Representation
Solo exhibition Bury Me Loose opens at Denny Dimin Gallery on September 10, 2021
Time Square Arts Announces Major Public Installation A Fountain for Survivors
Many of the artists in Fringe explore ideas around gender stereotypes through the re-appropriation of traditionally “feminine craft” techniques, while many use the idea of camp as a conceptual framework.
A more intimate and entirely irresistible group show—cleverly titled “Fringe”—is on view at the Denny Dimin gallery through Aug. 20.
“Many artists in Denny Dimin Gallery’s program have been significantly influenced by the movement…I also wanted to explore how some artists have complicated the gender identities of craft and how artists of diverse backgrounds have brought other important histories into their work, enriching the dialogue around the ideas of P & D.”
“As a Black woman artist, I get asked about the political meaning of my work, but I don’t often get asked why it looks the way it does.”
The space is filled with objects that hold emotional weight and have their own relations to a particular place and time for the artist. Council has created an environment to house these transitional objects (i.e. objects that provide psychological comfort), in turn building a “transitional” space for herself and for her viewers to experience.
This year was a strong one for women in the arts.
