“Lovie Olivia poignantly inserts the past into our present by exploring the history of materials in her multilayered pieces. Her process of searching and gathering gives expression to collective memories intimately connected to Southernism. The intricate reworking of surfaces and images masterfully illustrates her capacity of giving shape to forgotten narratives.” – juror Frauke Josenhans, Deputy Director and Chief Curator, Dora Maar Cultural Center
“Olivia has displayed an exemplary understanding of narrative, language, and identification with regard to the lived experience of queerness. Her understanding of Abstraction diverts our attention to what is vanished in acts of interpretation, a rare quality that holds more resonance today than ever.” – juror Pia Singh, Independent Curator
American artist – born, living and making in Houston Tx, best known for her works that span collage, printmaking, painting and installation that are assemblies of found and articulated materials and objects. Her vibrant works curiously mine the archives of Black, Queer and Womanist experiences and reimagines possibility through comprehensive stratums of memory, gesture and improvisation. Her decades-long practice has granted her museum exhibitions, public and private installations and countless other engaging projects and awards.
Lovie Olivia’s multimedia collages visualize her interests in cultural re-memory, re-covery and re-generation. Olivia revises classic compositions through a cumulus of found objects like medical, pharmaceutical, personal and familial detritus, interwoven with delicate (graphite, indigo, squid ink and plant ink) renderings on sheets of vellum, cotton and vintage documents. Her bountiful ‘works on paper’ detail her impulse to engage a Black, Southern, Womanist archive – reimagining racialized, socialized and gendered experiences. Illustrations of botanical and figurative forms commingle in and out of hand-scored vintage folders, unveiling a poetic dialogue of marks, forms, time and touch. Cutting, carving, scraping, mining, casting, excavating is evidenced in Olivia’s paintings as well. She disrupts the methods and modalities of classic fresco in her distinct handling of plaster wherein dyed and stained plaster and paint is applied to gypsum board for months at a time achieving an aggregated surface to paint on and ultimately excavate. Plaster fresco has historical and cultural associations in western painting and her larger-than-life paintings explore techniques from watercolor to impasto to sgraffito and back, celebrating both the history and futurity of painting. Together, these two seemingly disparate practices regularly merge into immersive installations.
