Bockley Gallery to represent Grace Rosario Perkins

Bockley Gallery is pleased to announce representation of Grace Rosario Perkins (Diné/Akimel O’odham). Perkins was born in 1986 in Santa Fe, NM and lives in Brooklyn, NY. 

As a self-taught painter and queer Indigenous woman, Perkins uses abstraction, materiality, and ritual to disassemble her personal narrative in place of the didacticism Native artists are often requested to provide from institutions and dominant culture. Through layered words, objects, colors, and signs, her gestural and maximal surfaces transmute hope, grief, and feeling to something more expansive and collective alluding to people, peoples, the past, and the present. Her negotiations between addition and redaction result in multimedia paintings that combine enamel and acrylic with found language, plant material, and personal ephemera. She variably installs her paintings as a nod to traditions of public signage: suspended, wall or floor based, with or without stretchers and frames. 

Perkins’ new paintings are currently part of Summer Gathering, Bockley Gallery’s seasonal group exhibition of gallery and guest artists, which follows her inclusion in our 2023 group exhibition Now You See It, Now You Don’t. We are thrilled to build on this exhibition history with her first solo exhibition in the Midwest, at Bockley Gallery in Spring 2025.

Perkins spent 15 years as an arts educator and most recently served as associate professor of Painting and Drawing at Mills College in Oakland, California. She completed a residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, studied at the Curanderismo Summer Institute at the University of New Mexico studying traditional folk healing, and has lectured at the Yale School of Art, Cooper Union, and Tulane University.

Select museum exhibitions include at MOCA Tucson and Oakland Museum, and recent gallery exhibitions include with De Boer, Company Gallery, and Andrew Kreps. Her painting is in the collection of SFMoMA, among many others. Perkins’ work is included in New American Painting: West #168 (2024) and she has been nominated for a United States Arts Fellowship. 

Perkins is also represented by Cushion Works, San Francisco.