Carla Repice: The White Problem, February 2020

February 1-29, 2020
Opening Reception: Saturday February 1, 6-9pm

COOP Gallery is pleased to present The White Problem, a multi-faceted project by New York based artist Carla Repice addressing the dehumanizing effects of racism on the human psyche. Carla aims to expand and deepen what and how meanings of whiteness are transferred, understood and shared through the language of painting. Using found images online as reference, her paintings stand at a distance from the found photographs, but not to the subject matter, witnessing a complex narrative of targets, shields, divisions, violences, and other social forces shaped by Western thought. The White Problem “pulls back the curtain of white racism and the physical, psychological and spiritual violence that it breeds. We see how racism and white violence has severely corrupted the humanity of white people.” – Robyne Walker Murphy.

More about the Artist
Carla Repice is a first generation Italian American born to Southern Italian immigrants Post-World War II. Her work investigates systems of oppression, and probes the effects of racism and dehumanization on the human psyche. Repice received her MFA in performance art from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and studied painting and feminist theory with Rose Shakinovsky and Claire Gavronsky at The Lorenzo de Medici School of Art in Florence, Italy. She has shown her work at Equity Gallery, NY, NY; The deCordova Museum, MA; Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY; The San Diego Museum of Art, CA; The New York Historical Society, NY; The Radical Archives Conference organized by Mariam Ghani and Chitra Ganesh, NY; Trinity Church in the City of Boston, MA; Five Myles, Brooklyn, NY; Chashama, Ridgewood, Queens; and LinkSoul Lab, Oceanside, CA. Her art and teaching practice has been written about in Art Journal Open, The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, Hyperallergic, Art Fag City, The Huffington Post and NPR. She has been awarded residencies at Yaddo and SPACE at Ryder Farm in upstate New York. Repice founded and was the Artistic Director of The Bronx Art Collective, a nationally recognized social justice and visual arts program for high school youth at the DreamYard Art Center in the South Bronx. She is currently the Senior Manager of Education, Engagement, and Interpretation at Bard Graduate Center and lives in New York City.