Deborah Anzinger is an artist and founder of New Local Space (NLS), Kingston, Jamaica. Anzinger works in painting, sculpture, video, and sound to interrogate and reconfigure aesthetic syntax that relates us to land and gendered and raced bodies. Her work has been exhibited at museums including the Institute of Contemporary Art (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia), Kent State University Museum (Kent, Ohio), the Pérez Art Museum Miami (Miami, FL), and the National Gallery of Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica). Awards include a fellowship to Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2016), the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2018), the Soros Arts Fellowship (2020), a MacDowell Fellowship (2022) and a residency at Denniston Hill (2023). At MacDowell, Anzinger made a new body of paintings with cookshop charcoal, an essential but undervalued and loosely protected natural resource in Jamaica. Within the paintings the sublime quality of nature itself is the focal point as the charcoal transforms from its intrinsic and urgent worth as essential fuel for survival in local informal economies, into an aesthetic gesture of surrealism and a luxury consumer by-product whose value is tied to parameters removed from local realities of black communities in the global south. Deborah’s paintings at MacDowell continued the building of a visual language for reconfiguring how the body is understood beyond a legacy of imperialism, physically shifting how we see the value of resources, and ultimately positing the question, how does this value shift feedback into the local socio-economic and environmental reality in a life-giving way? In addition to paintings, Deborah continued editing video footage and audio tied to her work in Maroon Town, Jamaica as part of a 2020 Soros Arts Fellowship. Deborah will present about this work at the Loophole of Retreat: Venice conference in 2022.
