Following the successful 2024-2025 solo exhibition of HOUSE OF at Craft Contemporary Museum in Los Angeles we’re excited and honored to present SCHISM, Ramekon O’Arwisters’ first one-person exhibition at PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY in DTLA!

SCHISM, by definition, is a fracture, division, disharmony in beliefs or rules by which we live and understand relationships, politics, religion, community. The choice of SCHISM as a title is not so much a reflection of discord within O’Arwisters but an acknowledgement of chaotic shifts and swings in predictability and safety. Targeting, overreach, and coded responses are not new to Black Americans; finding ways to navigate being Black and Queer between the hazards is the theme of this upcoming exhibition, a watery ground of coded abstraction. On view in the exhibition will be the artists’ iconic bound leather sculpture, Black on Black; tapestries from the Bound in Black series and selections from their B&W self-portraits!

Ramekon O’Arwisters’ abstract sculpture and tapestries dive into the abyss and the beautiful. With round leather pouches, shredded fabric, ceramic shards, and black zip ties, the sculptures and tapestries stand as cultural totems, embodying the couture of drag, Black history & culture, African American quilting, and religion.

The tapestries on view, Bound in Black tell a personal story, but also a harrowing story of the Underground Railroad. To escape the treacherous yoke of slavery, the path to freedom through the Underground Railroad required an organized shared system of coded language. Notifying safe houses, detours, alerting danger, and safety needed to be clear and understood by all. Using railroad nomenclature, agents along the path were informed by conductors to expect “packages, Bound in Black,” often hidden in wagons in plain view, under boards and rags. The network of the Freedom Train undertook this grave historic journey, saving over a hundred thousand lives.

Growing up in Jim Crow South during the Civil Rights Movement, O’Arwisters had a safe haven, quilting with his Grandmother where he was “embraced, important and special.” These early memories prompted his nascent series of unique crocheted/ceramic sculptures using ordinary household ceramics, Mending (2016).

In his 2019 series Cheesecake, O’Arwisters transformed his sculpture from something broken, to fully determined and self-aware. Being Black and Queer, the full complexity of the moniker Cheesecake, used to objectify an attractive, sexualized man or woman was not lost to O’Arwisters. Instead he embraced it, subverting the demeaning implication in describing his said, “objects”. Combining lacy, embellished fabrics with ceramics contributed by students and faculty from California State University at Long Beach, O’Arwisters sculptural hybrids embodied both danger and seduction in this bold ‘coming of age’ series.

Bitten (2022), takes off and embellishes upon Cheesecake and Flowered Thorns, 2020-21. With Flowered Thorns, O’Arwisters exaggerates sharp ceramic shards to align with the biblical reference of Adam and Eve, the symbol of original sin derived from sexual pleasure. Bitten continues with soft and sharp elements as he laces implements of punishment and threat throughout the sculpture: black zip ties, rope and clamps. O’Arwisters recontextualizes danger as an erotic entanglement of sexual fantasy and play, placing the sculpture on a new metaphoric plane.

Schism promises to be just as provocative and breathtaking!