VISUAL ARTS + MUSEUMS

Geri Hooks and Hooks-Epstein Galleries are very proud to present Robert Pruitt: You Are Your Own Twin. The exhibition opens at 11:00am on Saturday, September 17, 2011 and is followed by a reception for the artist from 6:00 to 8:00pm. The exhibition continues through Saturday, October 15, 2011.

Robert Pruitt’s work has always trended toward W.E.B. Du Bois’ notion of “double consciousness”. This was a concept developed by the American sociologist to describe the felt contradiction between social values and daily struggle faced by blacks in the United States. In You Are Your Own Twin, the many ways of this division, has been expressed through style and dress. Even more specifically, how we supplement this appended identity through science, history and culture. The drawings are portraits of people existing in flux; they modulate between themselves and some higher notion of being. Pruitt states, “I am looking at traditional African ideas of twin veneration, family lineage, costuming, Artificial Intelligence, and other ways we envelop ourselves within divided perceptions of self.”

Robert Pruitt graduated in 2000 with a BFA from Texas Southern University in Houston, TX. In 2003, he received an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin. He has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions. Pruitt was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, NY. In 2009, he was included in Drawing for Projection at SITE Santa FE and P.S.1/MoMA. Pruitt has received numerous awards and grants and is in several museum collections such as The Dallas Museum of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and The Cleveland Museum of Art. He will have an upcoming exhibition, This Rejection of the Conqueror, at the Art Museum of Southeast Texas in Beaumont, TX in January 2012. Robert Pruitt is a visiting professor at Texas Southern University in Houston, TX.

Pictured: Stunning Like My Daddy, 2011, 50 x 38", charcoal and conté on hand-dyed paper.