The Center Cannot Hold
Fitz J. Lewis, Sara Rockinger, and Stephanie Mercedes
June 13 — August 10, 2024
Fitz J. Lewis, Sara Rockinger, and Stephanie Mercedes engage with themes of gun violence, war, and cultural conditioning. Featuring a combination of performance, sculpture, and textile art, the collection of works questions societal norms, explores personal experiences and challenges the glorification of guns and war in our culture. The exhibition critically examines these issues and attempts to transform symbols of violence and loss into expressions of beauty, art, and transformation.
About the Artists
Stephanie Mercedes (they/she) is a Queer Latinx artist working between performance, sculpture, metalwork, techno and sound. She is interested in creating rituals of queer liberation and rituals of queer mourning.
Mercedes has performed/exhibited at the Kennedy Center, the Smithsonian, the National Gallery of Art, the Bronx Museum, Paço das Artes Museum, the Queens Museum, the Daura Museum, the Museum of the Americas and the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington. Their work has been featured on NPR's morning edition.
Sara Rockinger (she/her) grew up in the midwestern United States, spent her teen years in Europe, and has called Colorado home since 1990. She earned a BA in International Relations from the College of Wooster in Ohio and an MFA in Fiber Arts from Colorado State University in Fort Collins. She combines her interest in global justice issues with the medium of fiber to create work that expresses personal connection with global implications.
Sara has exhibited her socio-political fiber/installation artwork across the US and Canada. Her work has been shown in over 50 exhibitions including at the Smithsonian’s Textile Museum in Washington D.C.. It has been published in Fiber Arts Magazine, Surface Design Journal, and the books Freestyle Machine Embroidery by Carol Shin and Dimensional Cloth: Sculpture by Contemporary Textile Artists by Andra Stanton. Her work has been highlighted on Colorado Public Radio as well as Fox News in Mesa, Arizona. She is a recipient of the Sustainable Arts Foundation grant and the Bernina Award for Innovation in Machine Embroidery, among others.
Fitz Joseph Lewis (they/them) (b. 1983, Mark Joseph Fitzsimmons, Kansas City, Mo.) is a Denver based interdisciplinary artist working with recognizable symbols and objects to ask what is more important: the objects and symbols coveted by our society or the people and concepts they represent. Their work is an effort to deconstruct the aspirational ideals that were violently instilled within them. An artist that went to the military rather than one that comes from it, their ambitions were to gain a history of violence so as be believed by their intended audience.
Lewis was Honorably Discharged from the Army in 2014, holds a BFA from the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design in Fine Art - Painting, and an MFA from the University of Kansas in Expanded Media. Their work has been included in solo shows at Edgar Heap of Birds Family Gallery and Dateline Gallery, with group shows at Friend of a Friend, Leedy-Voulkos Art Center, and RULE Gallery.
