New York City. – Morton Fine Art is pleased to present work by artists Adia Millett and Eto Otitigbe at the 2023 Future Fair. Using a range of process-oriented techniques, Millett takes things apart, removes, replaces, cuts, pastes, sews, and rebuilds to discover the space where transitions occur and where stories of impermanence unfold. Similarly, Otitigbe’s thoughtful, tactile inversions take on the parlance and pose of public art while tacitly alienating their collective messaging, creating specific objects that are both recognizable and not, and which play around themes of race, imperialism and historical teleology to excavate forgotten pasts and evoke new futures. Future Fair will be held May 10-13, 2023 at Chelsea Industrial (535 W 28th St., New York, NY 10001)
About ADIA MILLETT
Repeatedly circular, black, white and multicolored patchwork moons float in and out of Millett’s work, reflecting the fluidity of time and the potential for transformation. The textiles, which draw on the domestic and artistic traditions of quilt-making, piece together to combine culturally diverse, often repurposed fabrics and historical iconography.
In some cases, her pictorial elements are more straightforward, focusing on structural objects such as rooftops, windows and doors. Gold Roof presents an almost typological night view of a house, its reticulated golden roof carefully rendered in gold leaf, interrupted by the presence of a white moon and realistic plastic window panes that see through to the gallery wall.
“While my work pays homage to the past through the use of repurposed fabrics and historical iconography, its bright atheistic imagery looks to, and is informed by the future,” says Millett. “It reminds us of the importance of renewal and rebuilding, not only through the artistic process, but also through the possibility of transformative change.”
Adia Millett, originally from Los Angeles, California received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. In 2001, she moved to New York City for the prestigious Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, followed by the Studio Museum in Harlem residency program. Millett has been a standout in numerous group exhibitions including the well-received “Greater New York” show at PS1 in Long Island City, New York and “Freestyle” at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the Barbican Gallery in London; The Craft and Folk Museum in LA; The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Atlanta; The Santa Monica Museum of Art; and The Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans. Millett has taught as an artist in residence at Columbia College in Chicago, UC Santa Cruz, Cooper Union in NY, and California College of the Arts. Millett currently lives and works in Oakland.
She has been represented by Morton Fine Art since 2020.
About ETO OTITIGBE
In his work as a painter, sculptor and fabricator, Otitigbe distorts the materialist distinction between blueprint and artifact, as well as the functional and contextual differences between monuments for posterity and temporary obstructions. Assuming a temporal framework that unravels intent and disaggregates historical coherence, Eto Otitigbe recognizes history as a grand artifice formed from the selective privileging of facts. In this conceptual vision, the role of the monument becomes a manifestation of the historical record, visualizing and physically implementing preconceived narratives into present public space—while making room for echoes of the past to take shape.
By placing in dialogue the conceptual frameworks, design blueprints, specific histories and local landscapes which led to the realization of each work of public art as a discrete interactive form, Otitigbe unearths a profoundly materialist study of modern signifiers in public space. In his current public projects—including his work as a member of the Design Team for the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville—Otitigbe has been involved in what theorists of Afrofuturism might term “countermemory”: assemblages that contest the colonial archive to establish the historical character of Black culture. In past exhibitions, Otitigbe collected the remains of these projects for a study of the materiel in the imaginative inquest of a future archaeologist: attempting to both trace and fuse the phenomena of recent history into a blueprint for the previously unseen, as well as to posit new futurist perspectives from which to study and critique the recent past.
Otitigbe's work has been in solo and group exhibitions that include 2013 Bronx Calling: The Second AIM Biennial, organized by the Bronx Museum and Wave Hill; Abandoned Orchestra, Sound Sculpture installation and performance with Zane Rodulfo, Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; The Golden Hour, Oakland Cemetery, Atlanta, GA, curated by Oshun D. Layne; and Bronx: Africa, Longwood Gallery, Bronx, NY, curated by Atim Oton and Leronn P. Brooks.
Otitigbe’s fellowships and awards include the CEC Artslink Project Award for travel and cultural projects in Egypt and the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship at the National Museum of African Art where he explored the intersection of Urhobo language and historical objects.
He is an Assistant Professor of Sculpture in the Art Department at Brooklyn College. He received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT, an M.S. in Product Design from Stanford University (M.S.) and an MFA in Creative Practice from the University of Plymouth.
He has been represented by Morton Fine Art since 2022.
About MORTON FINE ART
Founded in 2010 in Washington, DC by curator Amy Morton, Morton Fine Art (MFA) is a fine artgallery and curatorial group that collaborates with art collectors and visual artists to inspire fresh ways of acquiring contemporary art. Firmly committed to the belief that art collecting can be cultivated through an educational stance, MFA's mission is to provide accessibility to museum-quality contemporary art through a combination of substantive exhibitions and a welcoming platform for dialogue and exchange of original voice. Morton Fine Art specializes in a stellar roster of nationally and internationally renowned artists as well as has an additional focus on artwork of the African and Global Diaspora.
Morton Fine Art founded the trademark *a pop-up project in 2010. *a pop-up project is MFA's mobile gallery component which hosts temporary curated exhibitions nationally.
