The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, has been approved for a $25,000 Grant for Arts Projects award from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to support its exhibition “Chiffon Thomas: The Cavernous,” on view at the museum from Sept. 15 to March 3, 2024. The Aldrich project is among 1,130 projects across the country, totaling more than $31 million, that were selected during this second round of Grants for Arts Projects fiscal year 2023 funding.
Museum Executive Director Cybele Maylone, said, “The Aldrich is thrilled to present The Cavernous artist Chiffon Thomas”™ first museum exhibition, later this year. Featuring a new body of work and the artist”™s first outdoor sculpture, this ambitious exhibition will also be accompanied by Thomas”™ first museum publication”¦.”
With his works Thomas examines the ruptures that exist where race, gender expression and biography interconnect. He joins reclaimed materials recovered from abandoned colonial architecture ”” columns, windows, doorways, wooden spindles and ceiling tin ”” with cast fragments of his body split and fractured in urethane and foam, as well as plaster and leather, sometimes combined with sections of the Bible. Interrogating a legacy of colonialization and the Black diaspora in the U.S. Thomas interweaves materials resonant with personal and collective histories of trauma and repair as well as resilience and transformation.
