Nicki Green:
Fruitful Vine

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River Valley Arts Collective is honored to present Nicki Green: Fruitful Vine, the artist’s first New York solo exhibition. Curated by Liz Munsell and staged in Al Held’s former drawing studio, the exhibition features new ceramic sculptures created for the space, and a recent, time-based installation incorporating water.

Working primarily in clay, Green explores the transformative capacity of her materials and the queering of figuration through hand-building techniques and purple and white glazed surfaces. Her work pays respects to the histories of ceramics while infusing this medium with new shapes and purposes that center on trans embodiment. Green has long described her work as “sculptures of functional objects”—meaning they generate space to think beyond the bounds of both function and representation. Her vessels refute the premise of a frictionless exchange between human bodies and inanimate objects as the basis of ‘good design.’ Emphasizing instead the shared presence of living things and still objects, Green’s work generates unions rather than transactions: handles evoke the palm of a hand; tubs cradle the soul; and webs found in nature, reproduced in clay, are intended to inspire human networks of cohesion and care. Green explains, “as a sculptor, I've been interested in how objects can both acknowledge and record our bodies in space. Ritual objects that directly reference transness, or are designed for trans bodies, help to create a record of our presence.”

While trans embodiment is core to Green’s practice, figuration takes on a slippery status in her work. Green draws and builds bodies without acquiescing to proportional forms, brushing up against the golden ratio, or x or y taxonomy. On the ‘faces’ of each vessel in Three Fruitful Vines as a Fountain, sketches of androgynes appear like uncovered blueprints for being human that pre-date western gender binaries. Likewise, the two-part trough at the base of the installation further emphasizes dual parts conjoining into an integral whole. Hardware holding the work together is intentionally located on its exterior; the mechanics are experienced through an abundant seam that insists upon visibility. Coded into this composition are the ceramic wash station and shared urinal—utilities native to ancient bathhouses and modern cruising sites that re-envision the bathroom as a space for holiness and pleasure.

Three Fruitful Vines’s title references Joseph from the Torah and the Old Testament and Yusuf from the Quran. In some variations of the ancient stories that form the basis of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Joseph/Yusuf is described as an effeminate beauty and a boundary-breaking visionary—a “fruitful vine” that is fed by a spring and whose branches transgress walls. The anthropomorphic quality of such a vine, instilled in Green’s title, is further emphasized in this installation through the torso-like shape of its wall-hung tanks. Bodily scaled, they appear as protective shields that guard a life force—water, the largest component of the human body. Humans, too, are vessels of living water, with our input and output orifices. Rather than facilitating an explicit action or exacting image-based representations, Green exercises her thoughts in clay, generating a rich queer and trans lexicon that is both material and spiritual.

Green continues her ongoing study of how the built world interacts with the natural world in her series Hybrid Vessels. The uncontainable growth of mycelial roots and morel mushroom crevices seem to penetrate these containers, which appear excavated from an archeological site, and yet simultaneously futuristic, nodding to the “natural” disasters that continue to overtake humanity’s constructed environments. At the same time, they are steeped in the present, freshly hand-crafted, their curves evidencing their maker’s fingers in conversation with coils of moist earth. This haptic collaboration between material and maker further breaks down the false dichotomy between nature and humanity that the Hybrid Vessels bear witness to.

Both bodies of work included here reflect Green’s drive to interrogate the history of ceramics and what she calls “the illusion of an uninterrupted white object.” As the artist explains, tin glazed earthenware was “designed in the Middle East for Muslim textual and ornamental dishes and tiles around 800 CE to replicate the whiteness and contrast of Chinese porcelain, but using an abundant red earthenware clay body. Simultaneously, the Chinese porcelain industry was importing cobalt from the Middle East to create the iconic blue and white aesthetic.” Laden with colonial power dynamics, Dutch delftware and other European iterations of tin glazed earthenware were made en masse in the 17th century for import to the artist’s native Boston, streamlining domestic life and infusing it with transcontinental aesthetics. This fluidity of materials and ideas, temporalities and geographies, permeates Green’s work. Her vessels transparently address the topic of appropriation and mimesis, and reject straightforward, white-washed variations of these histories by exposing red clay bodies at their edges. Subverting watertightness physically and metaphorically, they are intentionally faulty, evincing only these amalgamated histories.

Incorporating found wooden beer keg faucets, metal hardware, and her own forms built in clay, Three Fruitful Vines as a Fountain drips periodically, uncontrollably, subtly—seeming to function with an eerie independence. For Green, “static objects that become active gesture at what’s possible”—they lead us to question our built environments, our everyday modes of operation, exposing vivid seams, and kinks in a system that was engineered to fail us. Such visual, tactile, and sonic slippages serve as an uncanny reminder of all that leaks, of all forces that slip through fissures and even tightly controlled hatches. As a trans artist, Green is practiced in taking what’s useful from broken establishments and sloughing off the rest. In her own words, “If trans inclusion doesn’t exist in the histories of these rituals, then I have a chance to explore the potential of them. The expansiveness of a hole in the history of a practice, or an object, offers so much possibility.” Writing at a time when the purpose, values, and image of governing institutions are crumbling, the act of constructing anything is both a commitment to uncertainty and an opportunity to reimagine terms and structures entirely anew.

Nicki Green is a Kingston-based artist and an Assistant Professor of Ceramics at Alfred University. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), London, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles CA, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), Berkeley CA, Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, France, among others. Green has exhibited her work internationally, notably at the New Museum, New York; Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, France, The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, in the 16th La Biennale de Lyon, Lyon, France, and the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Brasil, among others. She has contributed texts to numerous publications including Transgender Studies Quarterly, Fermenting Feminism, Copenhagen and The Center for Arts Research Publications, University of Oregon, Eugene. Green is a 2022 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award Winner, a 2022 Nancy Graves Foundation Grantee, and was a 2020 Art Matters Fellow. In 2019, she was a recipient of an Arts/Industry Residency from the John Michael Kohler Art Center. Originally from New England, she completed her BFA in sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2009 and her MFA in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley in 2018.

Over the past five years, River Valley Arts Collective has partnered with the Al Held Foundation to present exhibitions in Held’s former drawing studio, outdoor installations on the foundation's grounds and, more recently, performances in Held’s painting studio.

RVAC is grateful for generous support from Agnes Gund, Mara Held and Daniel Belasco / The Al Held Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, ASD Fund of the Essex County Community Foundation, Mark di Suvero / Athena Foundation, Cabbage Hill Farm Foundation, The Coby Foundation, Hugh Davies, Mark Dion, Kristen Dodge, Accola Griefen Gallery, Stef Halmos / Foreland, Andrew Howarth, John B. Koegel, Esq., The Linda and David Zackin Charitable Gift Fund, The New York Foundation for the Arts, The O’Grady Foundation, Robin Panovka, Martin Puryear / Puryear Family Fund, Clay Rockefeller, Rydingsvard Greengard Foundation, Richard Salomon Family Foundation, The Schwimmer Family Charitable Fund, Kiki Smith, Leon Polk Smith Foundation, Hart Perry / Southwood Wood Products, Janice Stanton and Ronald L. Windisch, Jean-Marc Superville Sovak, The Swimming Hole Foundation, Lenore G. Tawney Foundation, Helen Toomer / Stoneleaf Retreat, Luke Ives Pontifell / The Thornwillow Institute, Anne Townsend, Turkana Farms and SJ Weiler Fund.