"Spettacolo" Fay Ku
“Spettacolo” is New York City-based artist Fay Ku’s first solo exhibition in Las Vegas, NV, but Ku is no stranger to the city and its community. Ku was a 2009 visiting artist-in-residence at UNLV, and she has since maintained a professional and personal connection to the city through several group shows, through her artwork in the permanent collection of the Marjorie Barrick Museum, and in her friendships with former students and colleagues. “Spettacolo” celebrates her long-standing affection for the city and its people, with much of the work made recently and in anticipation of her return.
Ku has long made works on paper where a cast of characters—most often women and children—engage (often disturbingly so) in the full spectrum of human behavior. Through her background as a double immigrant (born in Taiwan to a family originally from China), she draws inspiration from cultural and art histories, mythologies, and language.
The newest work is playful and lighthearted; spettacolo means performance or spectacle, and Ku’s cast of characters involve themselves with display, performance and/or movement—literal movements at times. Here, acrobats and performers have limbs or other components that can be moved by the viewer: a dancer dangling a threaded triangle can have her bent leg swivel out, for example, or an acrobat flies with flapping wings.
Fay Ku is a Taiwan-born, Brooklyn-based artist whose work is figurative, narrative and connects with past and present cultural histories. She is the recipient of a 2007 Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant and 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship grant and has exhibited both nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Honolulu Museum of Art (Honolulu, HI), Marlboro College (Marlboro, VT), New Britain Museum of American Art (New Britain, CT) and Snite Museum of Art (South Bend, IN). Her work is in the collection of Honolulu Museum of Art (Honolulu, HI), Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art (Las Vegas, NV), New Britain Museum of American Art (New Britain, CT), and the Wadsworth Atheneum (Hartford, CT). She has been an artist-in-residence in over a dozen residencies, including Wave Hill (The Bronx, NY), Lower East Side Printshop (New York, NY), Tamarind Institute (Albuquerque, NV), and Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (Omaha, NE).
Ku is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. She earned a B.A. in Literature and Visual Arts from Bennington College (Bennington, VT), and a M.F.A. in Studio Art and M.S. in Art History from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. Ku is represented by H Gallery, Paris, France.
