Personal transformations lead to ‘Vessels in Red’

Colors can draw out intense responses in people. 

Artist and musician Christina Navarro, for instance, has historically recoiled from the color red, generally favoring cooler shades of green and blue in everything from her paintings to her wardrobe choices. 

“You can’t hide from red, and even when you’re wearing it, it’s not forgiving,” said Navarro, who credited some combination of personal growth and her role co-curating a new exhibit with helping to shift her stance toward the color. “It’s interesting to have red come up at such a distinct time in my life, where there’s been this metamorphosis in regard to my personal power. … I’ve gone through a transformation where I’m not scared of certain things anymore, like being seen in certain ways, especially with my craft and in my art.”

Navarro said what began as an internal evolution has recently evidenced itself in her creative choices, leading her to set aside her brushes and paints in favor of the guitar. “A visual artist can maybe get away more with hiding, but when you’re making music and performing, it’s that’s really difficult,” she said.

Aspects of this fearlessness surface within “Vessels in Red,” which Navarro curated alongside fellow artists Miriam King and Ashley Martin, and which kicks off with an opening reception at Urban Arts Space tonight (Friday, May 16). Throughout the gallery space, the color red takes on myriad forms and meanings, representing passion, anger, love, shame, sensuality, vitality, and resistance – concepts given life by more than two dozen creatives working in a variety of mediums and disciplines that stretch from visual art (David Butler, Diamond Young, Alek Shabazz) and dance (King) to poetry (Ajanaé Dawkins) and music (Navarro, Concrete Gardens).

“I find it really fascinating that everyone’s perception of color is unique, but is also very tied to emotion,” King said. “And I think that’s why we wanted to represent so many diverse perspectives, because color can mean such different things to different people.”

The “Vessels” concept originated a couple of years back when King began to unpack the complex feelings given rise in her by the word “home,” which she said could feel “like an ocean in my body.” “I’m often asked the question, ‘Where’s home for you?’” King said. “And it’s tricky, because home for me is many places.”

For “Vessels in Blue,” staged last year at the downtown gallery Blockfort, King put out an open call asking artists to create works rooted in the concept of “the body as a returning home,” describing the resultant exhibition as “an immersive color bath” of blues that incorporated the work of 50 artists. 

The pivot from blue to red for this second iteration in many ways mirrors the personal 180s described by the three curators, with Martin stating her determination to enter into the new year “standing 10 toes down for the person I want to be.” 

“I want to make work about anger and grief, but also falling in love,” Martin said. “And those are things that have always been present in my work in some way, but I noticed the more I create, the less afraid I become of those emotions. It’s taken me a long time to become who I am. … And I think my work in this exhibition is a … testament to being who I am fully. I’m allowing my emotions to take up space without hesitation.”

King, in turn, sees aspects of her own growth reflected in the evolution from “Vessels in Blue,” which she described as centered on more open-ended ideas such as processing and learning, to the comparatively resolved “Vessels in Red.” 

“This one is more like, we’re here, we’re present,” she said. “And now we’re pushing to create the future that we want to see.”