Charisse Pearlina Weston

Charisse Pearlina Weston (b. 1988, Houston, TX; based in Brooklyn, NY) is a conceptual artist who works across sculpture, writing, installation, and photography. Utilizing techniques such as concealment, repetition, and enfoldment, her work posits Black interior life as a central site of Black resistance.

Weston often integrates glass into her work due to its inherent nature. Whether it be through photographs, fragments incorporated into a canvas, or an element within a sculpture, the duality of the material speaks to Weston’s understanding of Black resistance. Both fragile and susceptible to shatter at the hand of an act of violence, glass is also highly malleable despite that risk. Etched and embedded into the surface of her works are poetic fragments, as well as historical and autobiographical images. These intimate moments are often concealed and ensnared through intentional folds, offering a layer of protection and privacy to the object on display.

The artist writes, “Central to the artistic methodology is the reuse and re-articulation of materials”. From photographs of past installations or fragments of discarded glass, Weston formulates “yet another representation of meaning’s capacity of shatter”. “These reoccurrences develop into new forms that represent the ways in which repetition is both a symbol of black cultural production and its reliance on an order of temporal engagement in which the second time encodes an emergent originality”. 

Weston received a BA from the University of North Texas, a MSc in Modern Art: History Curating and Criticism from the University of Edinburgh’s Edinburgh College of Art and a MFA in Studio Art, with Critical Theory emphasis, from the University of California-Irvine in 2019. She is an alumna of Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program and the Studio Museum in Harlem's Artist in Residence Program. She was named a 2023 Jerome Hill Fellow, and a 2023 Hodder Fellow at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, Princeton, NJ for the 2023–24 academic year. Her work has been included in the 2024 Whitney Biennial and the 12th annual SITE SANTA FE International. Recent solo exhibitions include the Queens Museum (New York, NY), Moody Center of the Arts at Rice University (Houston, TX) and Moss Art Center at Virginia Tech (Blacksburg, VA).