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Shoshanna Weinberger was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1973. Weinberger is a visual artist whose work draws from her Caribbean-American background, exploring the overlapping complexities of cultural identity, femininity, and heritage.

Early Life and Education

Shoshanna Weinberger was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1973. Her family moved to Montclair, NJ, when she was a young child. Weinberger received her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in 1995 and a MFA from Yale School of Art, Yale University in 2003.

Art

Shoshanna Weinberger’s work relates to her Caribbean-American background and draws strongly on the complexity of heritage and assumed norms as she goes about defining the female archetype. Referencing herself among a sea of antiquated stereotypes, adolescent memory and current subjects as a source, Weinberger renders her female muses as excessive, sexualized, some passive and others dominant that question notions of beauty.

In her work, she locates herself among a number of antiquated stereotypes. Adolescent memory and current events are sources of inspiration. Weinberger renders her female muses as excessive, sexualized, some passive and others dominant that question notions of beauty.

The drawings identify with beauty both physiologically and politically. Weinberger references adolescent female awkwardness, growing-up in a society engrossed with a warped view of beauty. Her work includes images of malformed and decapitated bodies, with cornrow braids, Afros, unkept locks and pigtails; mutations of multiple-mouths, breasts and buttocks.  The artist refers to the figures as modern-day Hottentots. The Hottentot form is found in prepubescent pageant toddlers, strippers, Hollywood-icons, West-Indian Dancehall performers, extreme plastic surgery and in the artist herself.  

Weinberger’s series “Pin-ups” features abstracted renditions of the black female body that combine history, cultural expectations, body image and cultural expectations. Her seemingly abstract images are actually a grotesque essence derived from the global vision of what the black female body is. 

R1: http://superselected.com/art-the-black-female-body-deconstructed-by-shoshanna-weinberger/

Selected Exhibitions

Weinberger has exhibited at the The Delaware Center of Contemporary Art, Wilmington, MD; Royal West of England Academy, Bristol, UK; The Newark Museum, Newark, NJ.

Van Every/Smith Galleries, Davidson College, Davidson, NC; William Paterson University, Wayne, NJ.

Weinberger was included in the 2013 Martinique Biennale; four-time participant in the Jamaica Biennial, National Gallery of Jamaica, from 2006 and last in 2014.

She was the recipient of the 2014 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, a 2015 Joan Mitchell Center, Artist-in-Residence, New Orlean and recently, awarded a 2016 Fellowship, New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Solo Exhibitions

Shoshanna Weinberger | invisible fruit: stories of camouflage from the periphery, Project for Empty Space, Newark. (2018)

RE-AL-IZED, curated by Schwanda Rountree, Carol Jazzar Contemporary Art, Miami. (2014)

Group shows

Modern Heroics: 75 Years of African-American Expressionism at the Newark Museum, Newark Museum, Newark. (2016).

Mutations | ruby onyinyechi amanze, Shoshanna Weinberger, Douglas Rodrigo Rada & Helô Sanvoy, Tiwani Contemporary, London. (2014)

Art Fairs

Project for Empty Space at PULSE Miami Beach 2017, Project for Empty Space. (2017)

Project for Empty Space at PULSE Miami Beach 2016, Project for Empty Space. (2016)

SMAC ART GALLERY at FNB JoburgArtFair 2015, SMAC. (2015)

Awards

She was the recipient of the 2014 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, a 2015 Joan Mitchell Center, Artist-in-Residence, New Orlean and recently, awarded a 2016 Fellowship, New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

References

***there is a hierarchy of references cited***

***whenever possible cite books, journals, academic institutions, major newspapers, and magazines*** 

External Links

http://shoshanna.info/