NEW YORK, NY.- Grace Rosario Perkins: Circles, Spokes, Zigzags, Rivers marks the first solo museum presentation in New York City for Grace Rosario Perkins (Akimel O’odham/Diné, b. 1986, Santa Fe, New Mexico), an artist whose work is distinguished by its bold material experimentation, layered visual lexicon, and engagement with questions of belonging, place, and memory. On view are ten recent works, the majority of which are large-scale paintings completed between 2022 and the present. Two of these paintings have been created specifically for this exhibition, alongside a new sculpture debuting here for the first time.

The exhibition’s title, Circles, Spokes, Zigzags, Rivers, describes petroglyphs that connect the artist’s family to her tribal homelands in the southwestern United States, including the vital, yet threatened, waters of the Gila River and Rio Grande. The influence of such longstanding technologies of visual storytelling is evident in Perkins’s symbol-rich art. Flowers, stars, the sun, and spider webs are given significant presence within the systems the artist creates to record her life.

“We are excited to build upon the Whitney’s commitment to presenting emerging artists with this exhibition of Grace Rosario Perkins’s recent work. As an artist who combines diaristic accounts, a do-it-yourself ethos, and spirituality into her process, Grace makes works that are embedded with and thereby index both personal and worldly meaning. Her art examines themes like familial reconciliation, botanical healing, addiction in communities, and embracing one’s power as someone who is queer, Indigenous, and feminine. Influenced by longstanding methodologies of visual ideograms that precede and are beyond the Western art historical canon, she is constantly developing a dynamic and singular language of abstraction. It is especially significant that this exhibition, the first of Grace’s in a New York museum, will be on view for all to see in the John R. Eckel, Jr. Foundation Gallery, which is always free to the public,” said Adrienne Edwards, Engell Speyer Family Senior Curator and Associate Director of Curatorial Programs at the Whitney Museum.

“I use painting to get everything out. I use painting as a way to move a lot of energy– good, bad, highs, and lows. Painting is a healing ritual. When I paint, it’s like singing a song or dancing. It is solitary, but I still find ways to bring people in, always. I believe everyone should have access to their own personal agency and healing. I didn’t go to art school but spent over a decade as an educator working with adults with disabilities, at-risk youth, in rehab centers, and in hospice. Just make something. That’s what this is about… just having the permission to take stuff that feels good or feels bad and moving it,” said Grace Rosario Perkins.

Perkins’s practice is shaped by an intuitive and dynamic process in which acts of addition and redaction become central compositional strategies. Working primarily with acrylic, spray paint, and textual fragments, she incorporates an eclectic range of found and personal materials—family photographs, jewelry, book pages, fake eyelashes, plastic bags, botanicals—each serving as an elegiac vessel of memory, testimony, and cultural inheritance.

Drawing from language, music, and sports, the artist’s references to popular and material culture intersect with intimate meditations on grief, love, and hope, revealing the interwoven nature of personal narrative and collective experience. Her paintings and sculptures are not static objects but living archives—sites where the boundaries between past and present, the individual and the communal, are continually revisited and reimagined.

By foregrounding abstraction, Perkins resists reductive representations of Indigenous identity and situates her work within a lineage of modern and contemporary artists who have utilized unconventional forms to articulate political, cultural, and emotional truths. In her hands, abstraction is both storytelling and a means of engaging with the world—layering histories, symbols, and intentions into surfaces that demand both close looking and expansive interpretation.

Grace Rosario Perkins: Circles, Spokes, Zigzags, Rivers is organized by Adrienne Edwards, Engell Speyer Family Senior Curator and Associate Director of Curatorial Programs, with Rose Pallone, Curatorial Assistant.