University at Buffalo (UB)
Maria A. Guzmán Capron: Fitting Room
Maria A. Guzmán Capron, Encuentrame (detail), 2023. Fabric, thread, embroidered quilted jacket, batting, stuffing, spray paint, and acrylic paint, 37 x 26 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Nazarian/Curcio.
Fitting Room is an exhibition of Maria A. Guzmán Capron’s tactile, textural wall works, as well as new site-specific moveable curtains and a large-scale commissioned piece of a hand-standing figure who will welcome visitors to the light well.
Guzmán Capron’s work explores cultural hybridity, a non-binary sense of self, and the competing desires to assimilate and to be seen. As someone who has moved between and within multiple cultures, geographies, and communities, Guzmán Capron’s works respond to and celebrate the varying identities that we inhabit. Working predominantly with recycled and thrifted fabrics, the artist melds different materials—velvet, silk, cotton, linen—with silkscreening and painting, which provide additional layers conceptually and physically. Fabrics are central to our sense memory, and in the performance of ourselves. Clothing in particular is deeply personal yet outward-facing, and our bodily expressions can be both celebrated and criticized, for being too much, too excessive, or too revealing—or too quiet, too stale, or too unimaginative. This exhibition gives space to the idea of excess, layering, nuance, and of changing on our own terms.
The title, Fitting Room, is drawn from the ideas of change, movement, and transformation. As Guzmán Capron states, “I call it Fitting Room as a way to encourage looking inward at all of the possibilities that we encapsulate. When people come in, all of the elements are a way of setting up a person to try something different. The exhibition is an invitation to think of themselves and their body as something constantly changing over time.”
Maria A. Guzmán Capron (b. 1981, Lives and works in Oakland, CA) was born in Italy to Colombian and Peruvian parents. She received her MFA from California College of the Arts in 2015 and her BFA from the University of Houston in 2004. Select solo exhibitions include The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; the Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, TX; Nazarian/Curcio, Los Angeles, CA; Texas State Galleries, San Marcos, TX and Guerrero Gallery, San Francisco, CA. Select group exhibitions include Boston University, Boston, MA; Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; Berkeley Art Center, Berkeley, CA; Nazarian/Curcio, Los Angeles, CA; The Mistake Room, Los Angeles, CA; Public Gallery, London, UK; NIAD Art Center, Richmond, CA; CULT Aimee Friberg Exhibitions, San Francisco, CA; Deli Gallery in Brooklyn, NY; and the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art, Buffalo, NY. Her works have been written about in Hyperallergic, Variable West, Bomb Magazine, and Art in America.
Capron’s work is in the collection of the de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA, the Jorge M. Pérez, Miami, FL, and the Speed Museum, Louisville, KY. As a 2022 recipient of SFMOMA’s SECA Award, her exhibition Respira Hondo was presented at SFMOMA through May 2023.
Fitting Room is curated by UB Art Galleries Curator of Exhibitions, Anna Wager, Ph.D.