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Title:	THE PLATFORM GALLERY: Calida Rawles
Date:	2/2/2024 - 8/30/2024
Address:	The Delaware Contemporary, 200 South Madison Street, Wilmington, DE 19801
Location:	Wilmington, DE
Hours:	12:00pm - 5:00pm
Cost/Cover:	Suggested Donation: $6 - $12
Web Page:	https://www.decontemporary.org/calida-rawles
Contact Info:	302.656.6466

Details:

This season’s Platform Gallery installation, the eighth in the public project series, features three recently completed works by internationally recognized painter Calida Garcia Rawles that constellate her signature motifs. Born in Wilmington and based in Los Angeles, this is the artist’s first ever exhibition in her hometown. Wilmington looms large in Rawles’ origin story. She sold her first drawings to her elementary school classmates for quarters, and the neighborhood pool is where she learned about Black people’s fraught relationships with water—from the Middle Passage to Jim Crow segregation to the ability to swim. Known for poetic, ethereal renderings of Black figures suspended in water, the artist uses bodily gesture and soft yet vibrant colors to counter the ways in which Black subjects are rarely afforded innocence, rest, vulnerability, and leisure. Often dressed in solid-colored garments that fold and billow in response to water’s force and movement, her figures flourish in imperceptible moments of submersion and release.