John Paul Morabito

Patricia Sweetow Gallery is thrilled to present the dazzling woven, beaded tapestries of John Paul Morabito in their first one-person exhibition with the gallery. The title of the exhibition, Take Me To Heaven, references the famed Black, Queer, disco icon of the '70s and '80s, Sylvester! Sylvester's music, lyrics, and gender fluid persona give voice to the cultural and political shifts in America when sexual energy pulsated in clubs throughout urban centers, where seduction, drag, sparkle, protest, coming out, demands for equal rights and decriminalization began ripping through the hetero-normative walls of the United States. Morabito's luminous tapestries tower as a metaphoric rallying cry, "This is a retracing of the queer resistance born in urban discos of a prior generation. As social and political forces once again seek to eradicate queer people, I, like those who came before me, reach for the promise of queer futurity."

Improvisation guides Morabito's woven abstractions; bold intersecting geometry with electrifying gold and hot neon colors are the intuitive gestures of "the body pulsing to the rhythm of the beat." Morabito's work delivers "a spark of divinity," reaching back in time to the cultural zenith that celebrated queer spaces. However, citing health as the orthodoxy of reason, AIDS provided political heft for the erasure and censure of queer public centers in the '80s and '90s. Morabito's unabashed emphasis on metaphor, beauty, and sensuality fuels the recovery of queer identity, community, and place—"where glamour, glitter, sweat, and low light open embodied pathways to find something greater than yourself." Glass beads, hand-dyed wool, and cotton in the hands of Morabito become the sacrament of possibility, defying voices that would choose to turn back the clock of time.

In our first group exhibition with Morabito, (A Chorus of Twisted Threads, 2023) the gallery presented selections from For Félix (love letter), an homage to Félix González-Torres, who succumbed to AIDS in the ’90s. This series was a corollary to the exquisite homoerotic beaded curtains of González-Torres, a powerful metaphoric veil between sex, life, and death. Morabito's beaded tapestries offered a ravishing tribute to González-Torres but also delivered a celebratory fist to subsequent Queer generations.

John Paul Morabito was awarded the prestigious United States Artists Fellowship in January 2024. They are Assistant Professor and Head of Textiles at Kent State University in Ohio. From 2013 to 2022 they were on the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies. They hold a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Their work has been included in museum exhibitions, including the Art in Embassies Program, Washington, DC; The Threads We Follow, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA), Winston-Salem, NC; Queer Abstraction, curated by Jared Ledesma, Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines, IA, and Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Arts, Zhejiang Art Museum, Hangzhou City, China. Their tapestries are included in public and private collections, with a recent placement at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh.