Artist Statement:

For more than four decades, my work has moved across painting, photography, installation, and socially engaged practice, using direct encounter as both method and material. I explore how identity is carried, performed, and contested through the body—through gesture, physical presence, and human interaction.

What story is carried by our bodies and faces? The self is both witness and instrument of what a culture remembers, desires, and forgets. The body holds its own knowledge, and my practice is a form of searching: a way of moving through chaos to uncover something that can only be spoken visually.

My process is deliberately restless, with the choice of medium shaped by the conditions of the encounter rather than a predetermined outcome. I create situations—portraits, actions, physical interactions, improvisations—and respond to what unfolds in real time. Whether photographing women artists in spaces that reflect their lives and practices, staging unscripted actions in public space, or constructing sculptural situations others activate, I am interested in exchange itself: how bodies move, negotiate space, react, and assert agency within a given moment.

The work moves between portraiture, performance, documentation, and lived experience, while asking how physical presence operates within a culture increasingly shaped by image circulation, systems of visibility, class, and market forces.

Bio:

Grace Roselli is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, photography, printmaking, installation, and socially engaged practice. For more than four decades, her work has explored how identity, power, and cultural memory are carried through the body and shaped through human interaction, creating works that move between portraiture, performance, documentation, and lived experience.

A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design (1982), Roselli studied with Emilio Vedova at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work has been exhibited in galleries, museums, artist-run spaces, and public venues in New York, Philadelphia, Europe, and beyond, with solo exhibitions including Beneath the Skin at Pentimenti Gallery, Philadelphia (1993), Shadow Maps at Pentimenti Gallery (1996), Falls the Shadow at Anita Friedman Fine Arts, New York (2007), The Uncanny Lady M at Mar Silver Design Lab, Westport, Connecticut (2014), and Naked Bike at MotorGrrl Garage, Brooklyn (2017). Recent and upcoming projects include exhibitions at the Carney Gallery at Regis College, Weston, Massachusetts (2025), and Bloodlines at Broodworks and NextWave Gallery, Brooklyn (2026).

Roselli is the creator of Pandora’s BoxX Project, an ongoing photographic portrait series she has built over seven years through direct encounters with women artists, curators, writers, and cultural practitioners across generations. The project has evolved into a significant intergenerational visual record examining visibility, authorship, and cultural memory within contemporary art.

Her work and ideas have been featured through lectures, panels, screenings, and public conversations at the Kreeger Museum, Brooklyn Public Library, Silver Eye Center for Photography, Artists Talk on Art, Zürcher Gallery, and the West Chelsea Festival of Art. Roselli is the recipient of awards from the New York State Council on the Arts, Brooklyn Arts Council, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the Puffin Foundation. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, ArtCritical, Brooklyn Rail, Nectar News, and Woman Rider.