PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY is thrilled to present Our Lady of the Bathhouse, beaded jacquard tapestries by John Paul Morabito. Morabito spent their early formative years in the Bronx, more specifically in the Bronx of the immigrant Italian-American community. This milieu provided an environment resplendent with cultural particularities, memories of religious icons dotting walls and tables, heavy perfumes, scents from candles and cooking wafting through the air, lavish brocade and fringed furniture encased in plastic (stand-ins for liturgical garments), plastic runners shielding rugs from human presence, heavy mahogany-stained wood tables, and, of course, on the personal side, big hair, leopard prints, oversized gold jewelry, painted nails, false eyelashes, cigars, polyester everything, and gesticulating robust conversations. Every ethnicity has its own Bronx, this landscape of experience has been the stuff of film, writing, and art for generations, continuing today. And thus it’s true of Morabito, the perfect petri dish birthed from the very icons that shaped the cultural imagination of their youth. This visual landscape is mirrored in their tapestries and, with a shimmer and a wink, exaggerated through campy drag decadence.

Presenting this extraordinary series offers more than a window into Morabito’s life and studio practice, it reveals an effective propaganda tool of early church and state: tapestries. Begun in 2018 and completed in 2020, Morabito unveils their series of religious tapestries with a subtle but explicit intervention, cloaking 15th- and 16th-century Renaissance paintings of Madonna and Child in flamboyant colors of drag—a Queer allegory turning sacred to Camp. Morabito remediates devotional paintings by artists such as DaVinci and Botticelli with accentuated day-glow colors and a stigmata presentation shimmering with gold beaded fringe. With this joyful celebration of sensorial imaginings, Morabito deftly reframes and reclaims the historic stigmatization and hypocrisy of the Catholic Church through queer transubstantiation. The best blasphemy is a slow burn.

Our Lady of the Bathhouse includes one tapestry from For Félix (love letter), a tribute to Felix Gonzales Torres, who succumbed to AIDS in the 90’s. This sweeping 7’ beaded tapestry will hang in the gallery’s entry alcove. Upon entry, you will metaphorically walk through a veil between sex, life, and death, an exquisite corollary to the homoerotic beaded curtains of González-Torres. For Felix is the outgrowth from the remediated Renaissance tapestries featured in our exhibition, Our Lady of the Bathhouse. While Morabito’s beaded tapestry offers a ravishing tribute to González-Torres and generations lost to AIDS, the work also raises a celebratory fist to subsequent Queer generations. Like González-Torres, Morabito’s tapestries act in defiance of religious, political and institutional policies as the guiding moral orthodoxy. Beading the long strands of thread central to For Felix is analogous to the beaded Rosary, only instead of contrition, Morabito’s act is erotic, lacing their tapestry with power, desire, intimacy, exaltation, and remembrance.