Ramekon O’Arwisters
Mending #37, Cheesecake #14, Cheesecake #11, 2023
Fabric, ceramics from CSULB ceramic program, beads, and pins
Growing up in Jim Crow South during the Civil Rights Movement, Ramekon O’Arwisters had a safe haven quilting with his Grandmother, where he was “embraced, important and special.” These early memories prompted his series of unique crocheted/ceramic sculptures titled Mending.
The Cheesecake series combines broken shards of pottery and textiles that need mending, transforming them into objects with self-awareness. “Cheesecake” was used as slang during World War II to describe nude and semi-nude images of women, and was later adopted by Queer subcultures and drag artists to describe attractiveness. Dripping with fringe and lace, the embellished fabrics used in the sculptures wink at their titles. As an object cannot be further objectified, any demeaning or misogynistic overtones to the term are removed. O’Arwisters uses ceramic shards—usually discarded or thrown-away, jagged, abandoned, eternal, worthless, marginalized, hard, unsympathetic—as stands-ins for his anxiety, anger, fear, bitterness, and hopelessness associated with the permanence of racism and White-body supremacy.
O’Arwisters originally came to San Francisco to sleep on a friend’s couch with a plan to move to Los Angeles. He never made the move to Los Angeles, and thirty-one years later, still calls San Francisco home. While he has felt the city of San Francisco changing over the years, O’Arwisters knows that his power lies in how he reacts to those changes, negatively or positively.
Photos courtesy of Henrik Kam.
ARTIST BIO
Ramekon O’Arwisters’ abstract sculpture dives into the abyss and the beautiful. With large sharp ceramic shards knotted together using shredded fabric and black zip ties, the sculptures stand as cultural totems, embodying the couture of drag, Black culture, African American quilting and religion. Growing up in Jim Crow South during the Civil Rights Movement, O’Arwisters had a safe haven, quilting with his Grandmother where he was “embraced, important and special.” These early memories prompted his nascent series of unique crocheted/ceramic sculptures titled, Mending. Employing ordinary household, or decorative pottery, broken and discarded, O’Arwisters combined traditional crafts into a dimensional woven tapestry, stripping both cloth and ceramic of their intended function.
In his 2019 series titled Cheesecake, O’Arwisters transformed the sculpture from something broken, needing mending, to fully determined and self-aware. Being Black and Queer, the full complexity of the moniker Cheesecake, used to objectify an attractive, sexualized man or woman is not lost to O’Arwisters. Instead he embraces it, subverting the demeaning implication in describing his said, “objects”. Combining lacy, embellished fabrics with ceramics contributed by students and faculty from California State University at Long Beach, O’Arwisters sculptural hybrids embody both danger and seduction in his bold ‘coming of age’ works
