Recipient Information
Location
Goulds, Florida
Year of Award
2023
Grant or Fellowship
Southern Prize and State Fellowship
Grant Amount
$5,000
Chris Friday is a multidisciplinary artist based in Miami. Her work serves as both a contemplative reflection of and counter-narrative to the pervasive under/misrepresentations of Blackness in mainstream media and popular culture. Friday's portfolio features large-scale works on paper, murals, video, ceramics, projections, photography, comic illustrations, and social practice/activism through curating.
Friday’s work has been included in exhibitions locally, nationally, and internationally, including recent solo exhibitions such as “Good Times” curated by Laura Novoa and presented at Oolite Arts (2023), “One More River” presented at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee, and her work as part of “The Cartography Project” presented by the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. (2022).
Friday has received numerous awards, fellowships, and grants, including a Knight Foundation “Knights Champion” support grant (2022), a “The Ellies” Creator award from Oolite Arts (2021), the GMBCV People's Choice award in Miami Beach's No Vacancy juried art show (2021), and residencies with MassMoCA (2023), Anderson Ranch Arts Center (2022), and the Visual Arts Residency at Chautauqua Institute (2019).
She is currently a 2nd-year resident studio artist at Oolite Arts in Miami, and an adjunct professor at the New World School of the Arts.
Artist Statement
My work explores themes of rest, privacy, and supplementing the archive as a way of advocating and claiming space for Black bodies that are historically excluded from it.
Utilizing the internet as an infinite source of archival samples, I collect iconography and anecdotes from the shared experiences of people of color to construct and preserve alternative historical and personal narratives.
Often incorporating a black-and-white Chalkboard aesthetic, which plays on concepts of learning and teaching, I analyze mainstream media to identify problematic perspectives and their origins, question the legitimacy of such perspectives, and offer possible solutions in my work.
Recent large-scale drawings depict Black bodies in acts of leisure, at play, and in repose, as a means of opting out of stereotypically portraying Black bodies in various scenes of trauma, pain, or over-sexualization. Accompanied by comic-style graphic illustrations that allude to desired and imagined environments and context, I give my subjects the rest and privacy they are entitled to, even while on display reflecting the longing to achieve this for myself, my family, and my community in waking life.
Artist's photo by Carolina Porras Monroy.