Keisha Prioleau-Martin

Garden Party

May 26 - July 16, 2022

Olympia is delighted to present Garden Party, Keisha Prioleau-Martin’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Named for dreamy lands of soil overgrown with leaves and twigs, garden parties are pillowy sites for conversation, indulgences, and communal growth. In these works, fantastical narratives of everyday interactions press against urban life, full of light, color and pattern. These are calm and searching scenes, that bask in queerness and joyful unity.

Spending most of her life in New York City, Prioleau-Martin’s paintings show settings of uninhibited lusciousness in domestic and outside spaces, sometimes drawn from personal memories of summer hang outs with friends in New York City parks, where figures are often reclining in groups of two or three. In her paintings, plant life and other symbols of wildness become hopeful beacons for untouched growth. Prioleau-Martin is as concerned with how to paint the forces stimulated by the feel of grass and leaves, a raw and sumptuous nature we experience within ourselves and that comes alive when we share that nature with others.

Inspired by the shapes people make when they come together or when blissfully alone, and the funny, intimate stories that are told when individuals connect, Garden Party is a celebration of relationships, and of the utopian spaces that can be lived in when there are no hierarchies– only the pure interactions between people. Included in the show are a new body of three-dimensional works, which brings the artist’s paintings to a new physical dimension. 

Keisha Prioleau-Martin (b. 1995) is an artist based in Queens, NY. She earned her BFA at SUNY Purchase in 2017. Keisha's work has been shown across New York, in Los Angeles, and Seattle,  including a solo show at Art of Our Century Gallery in New York (head over handlebars) and a lighthearted 2-person show at Ortega y Gasset (Footloose). Keisha is also a co-director at Underdonk in Bushwick.