Cameron Patricia Downey

Hair + Nails is thrilled to present Get You a Straw, a solo exhibition by Minneapolis born and based artist Cameron Patricia Downey at the gallery’s New York location. Get You a Straw is a site-specific installation, filling the gallery from end-to-end in a single gesture.

Cameron Patricia Downey‘s practice is rooted in an intimacy with the inanimate. It is interested in the private lives of objects and an investment in seeing through the question of what happens when we let the things that crowd our life speak back. Downey‘s second solo show with the gallery and their first solo show in New York City is marked by an ongoing devotion to the shapes, aesthetics and surfaces that allow one space to flow into another: crown molding, interstices, veneers and joints. Downey splices together common, everyday objects, imbuing them with new life and revealing their motives which sit outside of their duties. Black material culture, blues philosophy, and poetic interpretations of colloquial craft histories, coalesce in an installation that spans from one edge of the gallery to the other.

Get You a Straw is clearly kin with To the 9’s (currently on view as part of “Let’s Meet at the Horizon” at the Katherine Nash Gallery at University of MN) about which Downey describes as a ramp “as old as the first desire for transformation, a monument concerned with itself, jubilant and as futile as the things that tell tale of our mortal lives. I’m thinking in the language of our oldest promises of splendor recurring: COGIC purple and brass waves crashing along a small shore.”

Cameron Patricia Downey (b. 1998, Minneapolis, Mni Sóta Makoce) is an antidisciplinary artist whose work oscillates between sculpture, print, film, body and otherwise. Peering into the private lives of objects, seeing instruction in the incidental and the misremembered, Downey’s work strives to unfurl, make-altar-of and lend fantasy to the Blues of Black life and relation. Adornments gather in glamorous community, crowding around their spectres; communion sought with objects themselves. Central for Downey is a belief that form is not just a record keeper, but a philosophy of feeling. The thing is the way. Downey’s work has been exhibited by Hair+Nails, Minneapolis and New York; Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Berlin; T293 Gallery, Rome; Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis; MCA Santa Barbara; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; James Fuentes, NYC; Fragment Gallery, NYC. They were the 2025 recipient of the Black Artist and Designers Guild Creating Futures Grant, the Alice Kimball English Traveling Fellowship and the 2023 Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation’s MN Art Prize and their work is in the collections of Walker Art Center and the Yale Peabody Museum. Downey is a recent artist in residence with the Walker Art Center’s Moving Image department, The Yale Peabody Museum, Juxtaposition Arts, Loghaven Artist Residency and Second Shift Studio Space of St. Paul. Downey holds a BFA in environmental science and visual art from Columbia University and an MFA in sculpture from the Yale School of Art.