The Fabric Workshop & Museum Reopens Today with Jonathan Lyndon Chase: Big Wash

Visual Arts

The Fabric Workshop & Museum 
Reopens today with:
Jonathan Lyndon Chase: Big Wash
January 5, 2021 – June 6, 2021

The Fabric Workshop and Museum (FWM) reopened today with Jonathan Lyndon Chase: Big Wash, on view from through June 6, 2021. The exhibition is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition and features new work created during their 2019-2020 screenprinting residency at FWM.

Jonathan Lyndon Chase is a Philadelphia-based visual artist whose works—drawings, paintings, sculpture, video and sound—focus primarily on black, queer domestic intimacy. The artist was invited to work with the FWM Studio in the museum’s renowned screenprinting facilities to conceptualize and produce an original design. Chase employed this newly-created yardage as canvases on which to make a new suite of paintings, as well as soft sculpture and clothing.

For Big Wash, Chase turns their attention to the laundromat as a site that is at once private and public. With newly created paintings, drawings, and video projection, they continue their signature ability to move seamlessly between history and fantasy, as well as interior and exterior, with vivid depictions of eroticism, masculinity, queerness, nostalgia, and magical realism. Chase’s vibrant textile design punctuates the exhibition and acts as a stand-in for black queer bodies navigating both the rawness of the urban landscape and intimacy of domestic settings.

“In addition to championing an emerging and prescient voice in our own community, as well as the contemporary art landscape in general,” shares FWM Curator Karen Patterson, “Big Wash links back to FWM’s roots: the process of screenprinting, and the role it has long played in influencing an artist’s practice.”

Support for Jonathan Lyndon Chase: Big Wash is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts.

About Jonathan Lyndon Chase
Jonathan Lyndon Chase (b. 1989, Philadelphia) received their MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in 2016. Recently chosen as a 2019 Fellow by the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, the artist is represented by Company Gallery in New York and their work has also been featured in recent solo exhibitions at Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York; and Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles. Recent group exhibitions include Personal, Private, Public at Hauser & Wirth and Embodiment at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York; Tell Me Your Story at Kunsthal KAdE, The Netherlands; and Disembodiment at UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles.

Chase’s work can be found in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Bronx Museum, Bronx, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; The Rubell Family Collection Contemporary Arts Foundation and Institute of Contemporary Arts, Miami, FL; Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection, Palm Beach, FL; High Art Museum, Atlanta, GA; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN. Their work has been featured in The New York Times, T Magazine, Artforum, GQ, Artnet News, The Brooklyn Rail, and Hyperallergic, among others. wild wild Wild West & Haunting of the Seahorse, the artist’s second book, was published with Capricious in 2020. Their debut book, Quiet Storm, was released in conjunction with Company Gallery in 2018. Chase currently lives and works in Philadelphia.

About the Fabric Workshop and Museum
Founded in 1977, FWM both makes and presents, encouraging artists to experiment with new materials and new media in a veritable living laboratory. Through its renowned Artist-in-Residence (AIR) Program, FWM collaborates with artists to expand their practices, while documenting the course of artistic production from inspiration to realization. FWM presents large scale exhibitions, installations, and performative work, utilizing innovative fiber and other media. Today, FWM is the only US institution devoted to creating work in textile and new media in collaboration with some of the most significant artists of our time.

Major support of FWM is provided by the Marion Boulton “Kippy” Stroud Foundation. FWM receives state art funding support through a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency. Additional support is provided by The Philadelphia Cultural Fund, Agnes Gund, and the Board of Directors and Members of The Fabric Workshop and Museum

Contact: Abby Addams