Twenty Recipes for Patience: Black Women, Surrealism, and Abstraction
Join host Dr. Melaine Ferdinand-King and artist-archivist Renée Neely-TANNER for a morning of close looking and conversation, anchored in Twenty Recipes for Patience, the first focused survey of Donnamaria Bruton's prints and paper-based works.
The program will open with a guided walk through the exhibition — an opportunity to spend time with Bruton's monoprints, lithographs, woodcuts, drypoints, etchings, and collages before moving into dialogue.
Drawing on Bruton's belief that conscious confrontation with surreality and anomaly can restore the human spirit, Dr. Ferdinand-King and Neely-TANNER will explore the broader inheritance of Black women working across abstraction and the surreal. We will discuss a tradition of artists who have long used spiritual practice, interior life, and the materiality of making as sources of catharsis and reality-bending. Bruton's work moves through transformation: from anxiety to peace, from intolerance to patience, and from anger to love. This conversation asks what traditions, tools, and ways of seeing she was drawing from and who is carrying that work forward.
The 11am event is a curated event prioritizing Black women and girls - however - all are welcome.
Twenty Recipes for Patience is the first focused exhibition of Donnamaria Bruton’s prints and paper-based works. The collection features monoprints, lithographs, woodcuts, drypoints, etchings, and collages that reveal Bruton’s preoccupation with themes of spirituality, escape, and landscape. For Bruton, spirituality was the primary lens through which she developed her printmaking practice because it offered a pathway to consciousness through creative labor. She forged a sense of discipline in silence, stillness, prayer, and study, leading to, as she once described it, a “transformation from anxiety to peace, intolerance to patience, anger to love”. Produced across nearly twenty years, the series holds a convergence of mark, media, and movement that collectively testify to Bruton’s belief that conscious confrontation with surreality and anomaly can aid in restoring the human spirit.
