LIKE MAGIC
October 28, 2023 - 2025
MASS MoCA

Simone Bailey, Raven Chacon, Grace Clark, Johanna Hedva, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Cate O’Connell-Richards, Rose Salane, Petra Szilagyi, Tourmaline, and Nate Young

Curated by Alexandra Foradas

PRESS RELEASE
MORE INFORMATION

As installed in Like Magic at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA.
Photos: Kaelan Burkett.

Milk-Stealing Harness
Bronze, brass, nugold, repurposed leather, raw wool
Dimensions variable
2019

Milk-Stealing Garter
Bronze, brass, nugold, repurposed leather
Dimensions variable
2023

According to Icelandic folklore, to create a tilberi - a milk stealing creature - a witch must unearth the rib of a recently buried body and wrap it in wool. The rib is then placed between the breasts, producing a worm-like creature which will suckle and steal milk from an animal’s udder, retreating beneath the skirts of the witch when needed.

While hidden, the tilberi will suckle from a nipple on the witch’s inner thigh for sustenance - an example of a so-called “witch’s mark” or “witch’s teat”, marks on the body used by hunters to identify witches.

Hancock Shaker Village
Chace Gallery
June 18th - November 27th, 2022

ARTIST’S STATEMENT
Objects are often the way that I rationalize the world and myself as a maker and artist. In brooms I find an object both quotidian and magical, intelligible in use and curious in making. These objects possess a history both unique in itself and illustrative of the American experience.

In 2019, I received a grant to learn broommaking from Carole Morse at The Foxfire Museum in Mountain City, Georgia. Two years later, I travelled throughout Western Massachusetts conducting fieldwork on broom history. While Georgia and Massachusetts are different regions of the country, they both have distinct broom cultures that have informed my practice.

The exhibit’s subtitle is borrowed from a hymn written by a Shaker Sister that I encountered while researching. It resonated deeply with me: the specific line “this work I will do” felt, to me, a reminder that as an artist I am in service to both myself and others. To me, the research I was conducting needed sharing, and the resulting objects marked my continued self-actualization as a queer person through making—work that needs doing, alongside the questioning of romanticized practices and histories of craft. So, the “simple” broom can serve as many things at once.

Much like our perceptions of artisanal broommaking, the Industrial Revolution relegated Shaker Society to a wonder and a rarity, full of magic and mystique. However, both still exist today in limited numbers. This perception is further compounded by the lore and spiritual qualities of both. The iconic Shaker broom served both as a tool of the home but also as a ritual tool, and the broom is a classic symbol of witchcraft. Upon arrival to what was recently named New York, Mother Ann was accused of witchcraft by other colonists, and cases of frantic Shaker spirituals and trances in the 19th century have led researchers to draw parallels with the cases of possession from the Salem Witch Trials.

My own relationship with craft is fraught—in art and life I reject most binaries, and have struggled to qualify myself as an artist or craftsperson. These works are neither and both. I have now begun to see these surreal tools, my most candid works yet, as objects of my own persecutions and delight as I navigate through these binaries, trauma and queerness. I have found pleasure in not being one or another. There is magic in that too.

My goal as an artist and educator is to plant seeds that will generate change, so this show was born in a place of love and critique. It is my hope that these works, along with their Shaker counterparts, result in a revisioning about history, and an appreciation for the many hands it takes to accomplish something, giving credence.

-Cate O’Connell-Richards, MFA

CURATOR’S STATEMENT
Shaker artisans incorporated their principles into their work: durability, simplicity, utility, perfection, grace. Their religion fostered excellence in temporal as well as spiritual matters. Living in community affected Shaker work and life, freeing individual members from the economic pressures of life experienced by those in the World. In such an atmosphere, the finest work was expected, accomplished, and celebrated, even in utilitarian objects such as the simple broom.

The work of Shaker hands continues to elicit admiration and respect from contemporary artists today. It is our privilege to present in this exhibition– 22 exceptional examples of Shaker brooms and brushes alongside the art and craft of broomsquire Cate Richards, whose works represent the essence of Shaker life and work in excellence and simplicity. While the number of Shakers has diminished, interest in the Shakers’ craftsmanship continues to grow.

-Dr. Linda Johnson

Photos by Kyle Herrera.
See additional signage HERE

Hesse Flatow
November 18 - December 18, 2021
+ November 20 poetry reading / panel discussion with Xiao Situ

PRESS RELEASE

S. Erin Batiste
Christina P. Day
Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez
Cate Richards
Julia Rooney
Kelsey Tynik

“The tinsmith came to my help and made me a body of tin, fastening my tin arms and legs and head to it, by means of joints, so that I could move around as well as ever.” (1)

In 1900, L. Frank Baum invented the Tin Woodman, a character whose body of flesh is taken apart by his own enchanted ax, and reassembled in tin, limb by limb. Morbid as it is, the story raises the age-old, metaphysical question: if an object’s parts are replaced entirely by new parts, is it still the same object?

This question emerges centrally for the writers and visual artists in Affective Histories. Using a range of materials and textual sources, each artist transforms “the original” by disassembling, replacing, and reconstructing. Records, remnants, archive, anachronisms, nostalgia, inheritance: the work exhibited in Affective Histories create haptic relationships to particular slices of time. Presented together, the artworks form an archive of local, communal, and personal histories through the use of found material and borrowed forms not typically considered worth keeping or recording. Using juxtaposition and collage, the artists included in Affective Histories disrupt normative linear time by folding foreign time into the present.

(1) Baum, L. Frank. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Oxford University Press, 2010.

Images courtesy of Hesse Flatow and Jenny Gorman Photography

January 9-April 10, 2021
No. 5 Gallery, Abel Contemporary

There is a fascination with the past. As we delve further into a digital age, analog tools of the hand - tools which require movement and feeling - span further away in the timeline with each passing year. With that, our interest in them grows. They become mythological fetish objects of our romantic notions and false memories of history, taking new forms as bourgeois decorative elements, emblems of some sort of perceived authenticity. After all, if you put the word craft before/after a word it somehow becomes magical.

I too find magic in the old. Pre-industrial tools and their relation to creation and penance, spiritualism and witchery. Their forms, textures, and sounds are the ingredients for my own personal ritual objects. These rituals are my own and no one else’s.

This is a false anthropological display, the subject of which is myself and my ceremonial rites and implements. They are indulgent, a pastoral gothic, somewhere between jewelry and tool. They attract and repel, stimulating a simultaneous curiosity of the past along with repulsion and confusion.

-CR

2017-2020

Arcane relics of an unknown ancient order.
2015-2016

Rayon flocked aluminum / 2016

These forms were created by scanning my body then building off of the file using CAD software. The results were then 3D printed in plastic and used as a matrix for sand casting.

24k plated bronze / 2016
Jewelry for the negative spaces.