Two-Fold: Tyanna Buie and Santiago Cucullu

Simone DeSousa Gallery is pleased to present the works of Tyanna Buie and Santiago Cucullu in a two-person exhibition that includes installation, painting and sculptural works.

A Chicago, IL and Milwaukee, WI native, Tyanna Buie was born the youngest of four siblings on the city’s south side. By the age of four, Buie and her siblings were placed in the foster care system where they were temporarily housed, moving from one home to another throughout Illinois and Wisconsin. Buie’s life and work have been highly influenced by this experience. Early on she was guided toward the art-making process as an outlet for self-expression and to cope with a challenging environment. In the midst of this chaos, Buie was free to create and this gave her a sense of release and enjoyment to find her voice, her creative vision and a connection with the outside world. Through the memory of these childhood experiences aided by a few family photos from her Aunt, Buie has the ability to reclaim and rewrite her own past in her work; to not just focus on the hardships, but to highlight the celebrations. Buie believes in maintaining a connection to the community around her by hosting printmaking workshops and demonstrations and participating in Healthy Neighborhood Initiatives through the production of public art created for underserved neighborhoods and communities in Milwaukee, and Madison, WI.

Tyanna Buie received a BA from Western Illinois University, and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has been a visiting artist lecturer in Tennessee, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Missouri, Rhode Island, and Arizona while continuing to exhibit her works in numerous juried, group and solo exhibitions throughout the country. In 2012, Buie received an emerging artist Mary L. Nohl Fellowship and is the recipient of the 2015 Love of Humanity Award from the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, and the prestigious 2015 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant. Tyanna Buie is currently living in Detroit, MI where she is Assistant Professor/Section Chair of Printmaking at the College for Creative Studies. She is a 2019 Kresge Fellow in Visual Arts.

Argentinean born Santiago Cucullu creates multi-media works, spatially unified installations, wall-sized murals, sculptures and vibrant paintings on paper. Cucullu emphasizes the subtleties of intuitive pacing and spatial orientation by creating works using a duality of materials and appropriation to indicate that an exhibition space can act to trigger memories and experiences that we may encounter as rarified moments. Reflecting quotidian familiarity, the works act to displace and highlight frictions and narratives that we form to survive. Often his works disrupt ideas of a uniformed reality by displacing representations of culture onto one another; these representations stand in for the artist and ask the viewer to adopt their nuances onto their own experiences.

Since 2014 Cucullu has collaborated with Ching Suru Radio Hour on Riverwest Radio WXRW 104.1 with Chuck Quarino and Marc Fench. The radio show is an amalgamation of free form electronic effects that clash and meld noise soundscapes into a turbulence of humanity.

Santiago Cucullu was born in 1969 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and currently lives in Milwaukee. He received his M.F.A. from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1999 and his B.F.A. from the Hartford Art School in Connecticut. In addition he was a resident at the Core Program at the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Solo projects include exhibitions at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; and the Hammer Museum. Group exhibitions include New Perspectives in Latin American Art: Selections from a Decade of Acquisitions, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; the 2004 Whitney Biennial; How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Fresh: The Altoids Collection at the New Museum for Contemporary Art, New York.