91´«Ã½

Lecture and Reception

November 11, 2025, 5:30–6:30 pm (Wilson Hall’s Concert Hall)

About the Exhibition

Fragile Intangibilities, a solo exhibition by New York-based artist Daphne Arthur (b. 1984, Caracas, Venezuela), features 11 hand-sewn silk organza camping tents. Each tent bears ink drawings inspired by interviews Arthur conducted with fellow first-generation immigrants and migrants in New York City and Connecticut. As a Venezuelan-born immigrant herself, Arthur draws on these conversations to create floating, translucent mobile homes that visualize unique, personal narratives as kaleidoscopic spectrums of blended memory. The tents depict personal mythologies passed down through families and reaffirm diaspora as a living condition—one shaped by resilience, family reunification, and the sacrifices made in pursuit of viable futures.

Arthur’s practice explores the interconnectedness of experiences beyond borders, tracing the kinship between human relationships and nature through the delicate threads that sustain ecosystems of cosmic existence. Situated at the intersection of the personal and the universal, her allegories weave together interior and exterior, micro and macro futuristic spaces where protagonists emerge—examining how history, memory, and mythology shape the transformation or erosion of the collective imagination within diasporic communities.

Daphne Arthur received her BFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007 and her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2009. Her recent residencies and fellowships include the Project for Empty Space Artist-in-Residence Program, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Ucross Foundation Residency, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Residency, Pocoapoco Residency, MASS MoCA Artist Residency, and The Alma B.C. Schapiro Residency. She is the recipient of the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation Fellowship, the Anne Critz Fellowship, the Al Held Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, the Vermont Studio Center’s Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship, and the New York Foundation for the Arts Queens Art Fund: New Work Grant. Her work was recently featured in New American Paintings Northeast editions #164 and #170. Arthur is currently based in New York City, where she also teaches at Columbia University.

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