NADA Projects: Booth P28

548 West 22nd Street

New York, NY 10011

VIP Preview (by invitation):

Thursday, May 2, 10am–4pm

Open to the Public:

Thursday, May 2, 4–7pm

Friday, May 3, 11am–7pm

Saturday, May 4, 11am–7pm

Sunday, May 5, 11am–5pm

Stellarhighway is honored to stage a solo presentation by Michela Griffo of her large-scale paintings and drawings from the 1980s for NADA New York 2024. These older bodies of work have gone mostly unseen for the better part of forty years—having been destroyed or kept hidden—and this will mark the first focused presentation of Griffo’s historic work since then.

Michela Griffo is an artist and activist who came of age on the piers and streets of New York City in the 1950s and ’60s. She was an early member of the Redstockings and a founding member of Radicalesbians, Lavender Menace and the Gay Liberation Front. She was active in the Civil Rights, Women’s Rights and Gay Rights Movements, working closely with activists such as Yoruba Guzman and radical organizations such as The Young Lords. She risked her life with other queer activists on the front lines to pave the way for younger generations to come out and live safe and productive lives. For decades Griffo’s visual art practice has centered on exposing societal injustices and fictional narratives, exploring themes such as the lesbian woman’s voice, as well as childhood trauma and addiction.

The paintings in the presentation are what remains from her The Family series, most of which she destroyed in the late ‘80s during a drunken rage prior to a second stay at rehab. Like all of Griffo’s paintings, they are formally governed by two elements symbolizing the dichotomy she interprets: a painted fantasy and a reality depicted in graphite. They combine characters from modern and traditional fairy tales with cropped and masterfully rendered figures from Albrecht Dürer engravings to illuminate the dynamics of abuse. In Mother, we see a partially drawn figure of Pain from Dürer’s Hercules at the Crossroads, where the demi-god must choose between Pleasure and Pain, in the act of striking down ornate pillars; the Mickey Mouse on the room’s wallpaper witnesses the scene in shock. In Swine in the Nursery, a bassinet is being accosted by Dürer’s pigs from The Prodigal Son Among the Pigs, ready to feed, as Humpty Dumpty experiences his tragic fall over and over. Even the Walls Had Ears positions a winged television set (Griffo's only escape in youth) against a green wallpaper with a repeating pattern of human ears. In these last two paintings, the graphite elements Griffo sourced are from Dürer’s Adam and Eve: Adam, holding a branch from the Tree of Life, reaches into the window of the latter while Eve’s branch from the Tree of Knowledge grows into view in the background of the former.

The poster-sized colored pencil and graphite drawings are symbolic still-lifes culling aspects of Griffo’s identity or calling to some glossed-over, potentially dark, truth. Most of this series, too, was lost, stolen or destroyed in years past. They are the first of Griffo’s work to incorporate renderings of childhood paraphernalia like pages from comic books with reworded conversations, as seen in But Mom, Ginger and I… and Honest Muffy, I’m Not a Juvenile Delinquent, a narrative exposé component that is central to her most recent bodies of work. "They are part of the transition into the work made when I started painting again in 2002, where I use comic-type inserts as the Greek chorus. Honest Muffy… was the beginning of using an alter-ego to speak the truth of what I saw happening."