CORNING, NY.- The Corning Museum of Glass has awarded the latest Rakow Commission, one of the most prestigious commissions for artists working with glass, to conceptual artist and writer Charisse Pearlina Weston (b. 1988, Houston, TX; based in Brooklyn, NY).

The work, titled to appear before the first beat of unwilling end (anacrusis), will be unveiled March 16. The mixed-media work continues the artist's ongoing investigations into Black life, intimacy, and technologies of surveillance. Utilizing varying levels of concealment and legibility, the work features photographs from the January 6, 2021 protests at the U.S. Capitol, a collapsed-glass installation previously made by the artist, and an original poem exploring power, time, and resistance that has been etched onto portions of the work. The text includes re-articulated fragments from outtakes of the former U.S. President Donald Trump’s address to the nation following the attempted coup. Using methods of enfoldment, withholding, and repetition, which Weston terms “Black tactics of refusal,” the work mediates on the dynamic interplay of violence and intimacy.

The Museum’s Rakow Commission, in its 37th year, supports the creation of a new work in glass by an artist who pushes the boundaries of the material and who is not yet represented in CMoG’s permanent collection. The annual award was first presented in 1986, and recipients have ranged from emerging to established artists.

“Charisse Pearlina Weston came to our attention in 2020 when she was selected for inclusion in our international survey of contemporary glass, New Glass Review 41, an annual exhibition-in-print that features 100 of the most timely, innovative projects in glass produced each year,” said Kathy Fredrickson, CMoG director of collections and curatorial affairs. “It is an honor to include in our collection this vital, responsive work, important both for the cultural moment it grapples with and for its unique manipulation of the translucent properties of glass.”

“Weston’s work is a groundbreaking addition to our growing collection of contemporary works of art,” said Karol Wight, president and executive director of The Corning Museum of Glass. “Each year, we select an artist at the forefront of the field. Weston’s experimentation and investigations into materiality help us see and understand glass in a new way.”

On Thursday, March 16, 2023 at 6:30 pm EST, CMoG will host a Connected by Glass lecture by Weston, followed by the public reveal of to appear before the first beat of unwilling end (anacrusis), which will go on view in the museum’s Contemporary Art + Design Galleries. The lecture will be livestreamed and available to global audiences, who will be able to engage with the artist via the event chat. Interested individuals can register for the livestreamed event here. The in-person lecture is free and open to the public.

Charisse Pearlina Weston (b. 1988, Houston, TX; based in Brooklyn, New York) is a conceptual artist and writer whose practice is grounded in a deep material investigation of poetics and the autobiographical in the service of Black people. Her first solo museum show, of [a] tomorrow: lighter than air, stronger than whiskey, cheaper than dust is on view at the Queens Museum, NYC through March 5, 2023.

Weston received a BA from the University of North Texas, a MSc in Modern Art: History Curating and Criticism from the University of Edinburgh’s Edinburgh College of Art and a MFA in Studio Art, with Critical Theory emphasis, from the University of California-Irvine in 2019. She is an alumna of Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program.

Weston was named a Studio Museum Harlem 2022-23 Artist in Residence, a 2023 Jerome Hill Fellow, and will be a 2023 Hodder Fellow at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, Princeton, NJ. She has exhibited in groups at the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston (2020), Jack Shainman Gallery’s The School (2022), and the acclaimed group show Black Melancholia presented at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College (2022). She has mounted solo exhibitions at Project Row Houses (2014, 2015), Recess (2021), and the Moody Center of the Arts at Rice University (2021). She has received awards and fellowships from Artadia Fund for the Arts, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Dedalus Foundation, the Harpo Foundation, the Graham Foundation, among others. She was a 2021 Artist Fellow at the Museum of Art and Design, where she was also awarded the 2021 Burke Prize. She was recently a Paul and Irene Hollister Fields of the Future Fellow at Bard Graduate. Her hybrid manuscript, Awaiting, will be published by Ugly Duckling Press in March 2023.