Children's Museum of the Arts families are invited to enjoy a free afternoon of art activities and an artist-led tour of Bea Scaccia: With Their Striking Features at JDJ. Bea will lead children in a portrait drawing activity, focusing each other's clothes, hair, and other adornments instead of facial features.
With Their Striking Features marks Italian multidisciplinary artist Bea Scaccia's debut exhibition with JDJ and her first solo exhibition of paintings. At the heart of Scaccia’s practice is the need to create characters and visual archetypes — often genderless, faceless, and ageless — as a means to understand herself and others. Much like ourselves, the characters in Scaccia’s paintings, drawings and animations arm themselves with costumes and possessions that speak to the roles they are trying to perform, and the identities they are attempting to embody, particularly with respect to issues of class and gender. This exhibition focuses on a new body of paintings developed over the last two years, in which Scaccia’s characters appear to be entirely engulfed by their finery: hair, jewels, lace, tassels, fur, ribbons and crystals are piled on top of each other to points of absurdity. These objects evoke a sense of laborious costume and style that is linked to traditional and stereotypical notions of feminine beauty.
Beatrice Scaccia (b. 1978, Frosinone, Italy, lives and works in New York) is an artist and writer. Her visual works, which take the form of drawings, paintings, and digital animations, explore the absurdity of the human condition. She has had solo exhibitions at venues including the Katonah Museum of Art, New York (2021); Cuchifritos Gallery, New York (2014); and Ugo Ferranti Gallery, Rome (2010). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Magazzino Italian Art, New York (2020); The Center for the less Good Idea, Johannesburg (2020); American University’s Katzen Arts Center, Washington, D.C. (2016); and AIR Gallery, New York (2011), among others. Her work is included in several public and private collections, including the William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation and the Portland Museum of Art.
Programs at Children's Museum of the Arts are supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.