New York-based Artist Carla Repice to exhibit and speak at APSU this January

The Austin Peay State University Department of Art + Design, with support from the APSU Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts (CECA), is pleased to welcome artist Carla Repice to campus this January.

“We’re doing something a little different with our first CECA Visiting Artist Speaker of the semester,” Michael Dickins, chair of the Visiting Artist Speaker Committee, said. “Carla Repice will be exhibiting her work for a two-week run in the Barbara Beach Gallery. Then, instead of hosting our usual artist lecture on creative practice, I will be in conversation with Carla regarding her body of work on display, entitled The White Problem. This will be a one-on-one conversation that is open to the public and open to public discussion.

“This work is powerful, and I’m glad that we were able to partner with COOP Gallery in Nashville to be able to extend the conversation. After leaving APSU, The White Problem will be on display at the COOP Gallery during the month of February. COOP is Nashville’s longest established, artist-run project space and curatorial collective that was established in 2010.”

The exhibit opens Tuesday, Jan. 21, in the Barbara Beach Gallery located on the second floor of the Art + Design building. The conversation between Repice and Dickins will take place at 6 p.m. on Jan. 30, in the Barbara Beach Gallery. All events are free and open to the public.

The White Problem is a multi-faceted project by New York-based artist Carla Repice, addressing the dehumanizing effects of racism on the human psyche. Repice aims to expand and deepen what and how meanings of whiteness are transferred, understood and shared through the language of painting. Using found images online as reference, her paintings stand at a distance from the found photographs, but not to the subject matter, witnessing a complex narrative of targets, shields, divisions, violence and other social forces shaped by Western thought. According to Robyne Walker Murphy, executive director of the New York City-based arts organization Groundswell, The White Problem “pulls back the curtain of white racism and the physical, psychological and spiritual violence that it breeds. We see how racism and white violence has severely corrupted the humanity of white people.”

Repice is a first-generation Italian American born to Southern Italian immigrants Post-World War II. Her work investigates systems of oppression, and probes the effects of racism and dehumanization on the human psyche. Repice received her MFA in performance art from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and she studied painting and feminist theory with Rose Shakinovsky and Claire Gavronsky at The Lorenzo de Medici School of Art in Florence, Italy.

She has shown her work at Equity Gallery, New York; The deCordova Museum, Massachusetts; Pioneer Works, Brooklyn; The San Diego Museum of Art; The New York Historical Society; The Radical Archives Conference organized by Mariam Ghani and Chitra Ganesh; Trinity Church, Boston; Five Myles, Brooklyn; Chashama, Ridgewood, Queens; and LinkSoul Lab, Oceanside, California. Her art and teaching practice were written about in Art Journal Open, The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, Hyperallergic, Art Fag City, The Huffington Post and NPR. She has been awarded residencies at Yaddo and SPACE at Ryder Farm in upstate New York.

Repice founded and was the artistic director of The Bronx Art Collective, a nationally recognized social justice and visual arts program for high school youth at the DreamYard Art Center in the South Bronx. She is currently the senior manager of education, engagement, and interpretation at Bard Graduate Center and lives in New York City.

For more on Repice and her work, visit: www.carlarepice.com

The Barbara Beach Gallery is open 9 a.m.-4 p.m., Monday-Friday. The gallery is closed on weekends and holidays, and it follows the University’s academic calendar. For more on this exhibition and discussion, contact Dickins at dickinsm@apsu.edu. All ages are welcome, but parental guidance is suggested.