E.V. Day”Breaking the Glass Ceiling”

Children's Museum of the Arts

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Children’s Museum of the Arts (CMA) presents E. V. Day: Breaking the Glass Ceiling, a gravity-defying exhibition that encourages viewers to aim high and break through their own invisible barriers.

Known for her gravity-defying suspension sculptures that explore themes of science fiction, space, gender, and humor, E. V. Day illuminates contradictions in gender roles and stretches the confines of social stereotypes. In her new site-specific installation in the central Cynthia C. Wainwright Gallery, E. V. Day will use turnbuckles, monofilament, and angle iron to build multiple suspended trajectories in the ceiling, using the columns and walls as mounting points. Day will employ chains, brass rods, elastic cords, and hardware to build tension, highlight resistance, and imply velocity. The ceiling installation will be complemented by shattered glass images displayed around the perimeter of the gallery referencing cosmic aspirations — the strong desire to achieve something that might feel just outside of one’s reach.

Dating from the 1980s, the glass ceiling is an unacknowledged – and ultimately illegal – barrier to advancement, primarily for women and people of color. Day sees the glass ceiling as a symptom of a broader problem — the collective subjugation of nature and our planet. With her installation, Day creates a conversation about the invisible barriers that prevent us from breaking through the glass ceiling and onward into the cosmos.

Breaking the Glass Ceiling is the final show of a three-part exhibition cycle that comprises CMA’s 30th anniversary CIVICKIDS: Make Art. Make A Difference campaign, a year-long series of exhibitions, community events, and digital art calls that foster civic engagement and shared community pride through art-making. The first exhibition, Art & Activism: Drawing the Line (September—October 2018), gave viewers the tools and strategies to create social change. The second exhibition, A Way with Words: The Power and Art of the Book (October 2018—April 2019), showed viewers how to develop their stories and form individual narratives. Lastly, Breaking the Glass Ceiling aims to give viewers the courage and platform to let their voice be heard.

E.V. Day: Breaking Glass the Ceiling will encourage visitors of all ages to aim high, beyond the glass ceiling. Breaking barriers, reaching beyond traditional boundaries, stretching beyond one’s own and society’s current limits, reflect not only themes in contemporary art but CMA’s 30 years of growth.

E. V. Day is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist whose work explores themes of feminism and humor while employing gravity-defying suspension techniques. Recently awarded the prestigious Rome Prize for Visual Arts by the American Academy in Rome, Day worked for a year in the Eternal City where she continued a twenty-year practice of creating sculptures that interact with, and respond to grand architectural spaces. Day emerged into the contemporary art scene after graduating in 1995 from Yale University School of Art’s sculpture MFA program, and has had group and solo exhibitions in the U.S. and internationally ever since. Day’s work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The National Museum of Women in the Arts, The New York Public Library, the Saatchi Collection, The Lever House, and The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

Laura Bernstein: Hybrid Ecologies
(through September 8, 2019)

Taking inspiration from The Book of Miracles, an illustrated manuscript depicting miraculous phenomena and awesome apocalyptic visions of the 16th century, Hybrid Ecologies looks to the past — ancient and medieval mythology — to speculate on the future of our changing times. As visitors travel through Hybrid Ecologies, the boundaries known to separate ecosystems collapse and begin to break. Creatures of the sea swim with those who fly in the sky, while sharing terrain with those known to inhabit the land. Desert, forest, and mountains, converge. Fusing and confusing space and form and new relationships between species are built. As these barriers are shattered, visitors are invited step inside the suspended forms that act as helmets, to contemplate possibilities for cohabitation, mutation, and hybridization. With extinction and devastation comes the need for imagination, possibility for revelation, the discovery of new creation. An evolving community full of transformation and metamorphoses, Hybrid Ecologies offers visitors the opportunity to play within a living diorama to experience shifts in scale and time, to imagine a world where borders are fluid between all living species, are shattered, and a new sky’s the limit takes hold.

Laura Bernstein is a multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She uses video, performance, sculpture, installation, and painting to reflect on human and animal behavior, alternative histories, mythology and the grotesque. Her work has been included in exhibitions at BRIC, NURTUREart, and the Long Island University Humanities Gallery, in Brooklyn New York; The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY; Vox Populi and Icebox Space, in Philadelphia, PA; ACRE Projects, Chicago, IL; and Franz Josefs Kai 3, Vienna, Austria. She is a 2018-19 Grant Recipient of The Franklin Furnace Fund and has directed and produced A Speculative Performance presented by The Institute of Super-Species Research and Experimentation in conjunction with the BRIC Biennial: Volume III, South Brooklyn Edition. Bernstein holds a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. She has been a teaching artist at CMA since 2014.