Season Fair

Mary-Ann Monforton leans fully into the pitiful and tender nature of her paintings and sculptures, embracing vulnerability, humor, and a kind of cosmic melancholy through her unorthodox use of materials. Drawing from a lineage of low brow and utilitarian aesthetics, Monforton repurposes everyday substances— chicken wire, plaster, and industrial moving blankets— transforming them into vehicles for emotion and speculation.

 

In her latest series, Future Perfect, these humble materials take on a futuristic reverence. Her signature sculptural forms— lumpy, raw, and deeply expressive— are joined by a new body of cosmic paintings rendered on moving blankets. These textured, patchwork surfaces, themselves made from recycled fibers and synthetic composites, become a fitting canvas for imagined galaxies and star clusters, where beauty exists not in high-definition clarity but in a densely layered, cartoonish, and makeshift sublime. This gesture bridges the celestial and the domestic, presenting the idea of space not as a final frontier, but as an extension of the flawed, patched-together world we already inhabit.

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Mary-Ann Monforton was born in Windsor Ontario, Canada and raised in Detroit. She was a resident of the Lower East Side of Manhattan from 1977 until 2002 during its Neo-Expressionist heyday. She lived in Brooklyn, NY from 2003 until the Spring of 2021 after re-establishing her own studio practice in 2013. Monforton is known for her involvement in the NY downtown art scene which began around 1978 as a music promoter blending her interest in avant-garde jazz with the emerging No Wave/Punk sound. In 1981, she shifted her attention to the visual arts, first as a collector, then as a curator, fundraiser, and publisher. As the former long-time publisher of BOMB Magazine, she established the BOMB Art Program which placed work in Museums and Institutions as well as organized their annual Gala and Silent Auctions until her retirement in 2021 when she returned to her hometown of Detroit, MI where she currently lives and works.