Grant Czuj: Welcome home, son. Curated by Michael Sherman
May 18th - July 29th, 2023-
Grant Czuj: Welcome home, son. Curated by Michael Sherman. Installation View
Nina Johnson is pleased to present Welcome home, son, a solo exhibition of new and existing works by Polish-American artist Grant Czuj, curated by Michael Sherman. Opening May 18 in the Main Gallery, the show touches upon the artist’s familiar histories and aesthetic investigations of alienation, incarceration, biopolitics, and the working class.
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Grant Czuj, Left_Overs:4735, 2023, Cotton, polyester, hose, wire, fleece, beer cans, grommets, yarn, cardboard, acrylic latex paint on canvas, 60 x 55 x 6 in.
Born in Detroit to a Polish-American family of generational automotive workers, Czuj experienced the hardships and successes of the immigrant working class. At 17 years old, Czuj was incarcerated in the Michigan Department of Corrections and served a term of nearly 10 years, where he became interested in the political drivers between societies and the manner in which individuals are structured and repressed. Upon his release, he pursued and completed a BFA at College for Creative Studies in Detroit and a MFA at the Yale School of Art.
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Grant Czuj, Home:8823, 2023, Cotton, polyester, screen print, wire, polyfill, beer cans, acrylic latex paint, 72 x 48 x 18 in.
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Grant Czuj: Welcome home, son. Curated by Michael Sherman. Installation View
Working with various objects and materials, Czuj constructs the indexical process of painting to mimic the tactics of administration and rehabilitation within state incarceration and the repression in class systems, bringing forth both traditional aspects in the painting process and emotive responses from the viewer.
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Grant Czuj, Home:6687, 2023, Cotton, polyester, faux fur, screen print, dye, yarn, cord, wood, upholstry tacks, acrylic latex paint on canvas, 86 x 60 x 18 in.
Welcome home, son features 11 paintings from a number of Czuj’s series, including the Left-Overs and Administrator series which incorporate a variety of mediums including wood, pillow cases, inkjet prints, enamel, latex paint, rubber, flannel, and wires, among others. Czuj will also introduce a new series titled Home. Home uses similar processes and materials as the other series’, though uses the boundaries and armatures of the painted surfaces as an opportunity to reference images and objects found around the interior and exterior spaces of a home. All ranging in height and proportion, the works will be displayed on the walls of the gallery as well as on the floors of the space, taking on a more sculptural form.
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Grant Czuj, Home:0048, 2023, Wood, beer cans, wool yarn, screws, rope, air hose, acrylic latex paint on canvas, 20 x 48 x 16 in.
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Grant Czuj: Welcome home, son. Curated by Michael Sherman. Installation View
“Though I am very much interested in the histories of materiality, the importance of my studio practice lies in the creation of an artwork,” said Grant Czuj. “This time and space for creation has always served me well in combating alienation, especially within my adult development as an inmate. For this exhibition, materiality in concept holds together the painting surface. This surface is loaded in information, but it seems to acquiesce to the exploration of color, light, and shadow. This is exciting to me, how these two lanes hold a relationship.”
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Grant Czuj, Home:8447, 2023, Cotton, polyester, 2 x4, polyfill, beer cans, acrylic latex paint on canvas, 51 x 60 x 8 in.
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Grant Czuj: Welcome home, son. Curated by Michael Sherman. Installation View
“I was able to visit open studios at Yale last year and was really blown away by Grant’s story and his work,” said Michael Sherman. “For me as a filmmaker, story is always most important and that’s how I’ve always collected and curated. I spoke with Grant about working together one day and we met at Nina’s in Miami and we all agreed this would be a wonderful collaboration. His idea of building work from found objects and the idea of family and his time in prison really builds an incredibly detailed world which he lays on canvas or creates in sculpture.”
Welcome home, son is on view through July 29, 2023.
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Grant Czuj, Home:8778, 2023, Cotton, polyester, faux fur, screen print, dye, yarn, cord, wood, upholstry tacks, acrylic latex paint, 86 x 60 x 18 in.
About Grant Czuj
Grant Czuj continually draws from his familial ties within American working-class culture. Born in Detroit, his family has been rooted in the American automotive industry for generations. At seventeen years old, Grant was sentenced to the Michigan Department of Corrections to a term of incarceration that lasted nine and a half years. During his incarceration, he routinely exhibited and published with the University of Michigan’s Prison Creative Arts Project, publishing fiction and poetry in the PCAP annual Michigan Review of Prisoner Creative Writing and exhibiting at the Annual Exhibit of Art by Michigan Prisoners at the University of Michigan’s Duderstadt Gallery. His art practice uses materiality and abstraction to work through an embodied experience of prison life that resists the dominant normative interpretation and visual language of incarceration. He holds a BFA in Art Practices with a minor in Critical Theory from the College for Creative Studies, and an MFA from Yale University in Painting and Printmaking. He is the winner of the 2022 Yale Prison Education Initiative Teaching Fellowship, the 2021 Alice Kimball Traveling Fellowship, the 2019 Imre J. Molnar Artistic Achievement Award, the DeSalle Scholarship and the James Banton Endowment Scholarship among others.
About Michael Sherman
Michael Sherman is a movie producer; he co-founded and runs Bow + Arrow Entertainment, a production company that focuses on artist driven narrative and documentary pictures. Bow and Arrow recently premiered Elyse Steinberg, Eli Despres, and Josh Kriegman’s THE FIGHT, Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw’s THE TRUFFLE HUNTERS, and Sam Feder’s DISCLOSURE at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Recent films also include Rashid Johnson’s NATIVE SON, an adaptation of Richard Wright’s famed novel for HBO, which premiered as the Opening Night selection of the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and Alex Ross Perry’s HER SMELL, starring Elisabeth Moss, which has been named by The New York Times, Vanity Fair and Indiewire as “one of the best films of 2019”. Sherman is currently producing a doc-series with Joey Soloway called SOUTH COMMONS and beginning post production on a doc-series about COMPTON executive produced by Dr Dre. Sherman is a devoted patron of the arts. He serves as a trustee at his hometown Baltimore Museum of Art.