Chris Friday is a multidisciplinary artist based in Miami. Her work explores themes of rest, privacy, and supplementing the archive as a way of advocating and claiming space for Black bodies that are historically excluded from it. Often incorporating a black-and-white Chalkboard aesthetic, which plays on concepts of learning and teaching, she analyzes mainstream media to identify problematic perspectives and their origins, question the legitimacy of such perspectives, and offer possible solutions in her work. Recent large-scale drawings depict Black bodies in acts of leisure, at play, and in repose, as a means of opting out of stereotypically portraying Black bodies in various scenes of trauma, pain, or over-sexualization. Accompanied by comic-style graphic illustrations that allude to desired and imagined environments and context, she gives her subjects the rest and privacy they are entitled to, even while on display reflecting the longing to achieve this for herself, her family, and her community in waking life. Friday’s portfolio features large-scale works on paper, murals, video, ceramics, projections, photography, comic illustrations, installations and social practice / activism. Friday’s work has been included in exhibitions locally, nationally, and internationally. Recent shows include solo exhibitions “Good Times” (2023) curated by Laura Novoa (2023), “One More River” presented at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee, and group exhibitions such as “Rest is Power” (2023) curated by Deborah Willis and presented at New York University’s Center For Black Visual Culture, “The Cartography Project” presented by the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. (2022). Friday has received numerous awards, fellowships, and grants, including being named the 2023 South Arts Southern Prize and State Fellow for the State of Florida, a Knight Foundation “Knights Champion” support grant (2022), and residencies with Mass MoCA (2023), Anderson Ranch Arts Center (2022), and the Visual Arts Residency at Chautauqua Institute (2019).
Record of Care
Chalk on Black Archival Paper. Approx. 138 inches x 48 inches
“Record of Care” aims to make visible, the often-invisible relationship between Black female bodies and the general public that readily consumes their likeness/culture/community work as a form of entertainment or sustenance by investigating the degree of care put towards their well-being and protection.
A response to the exhausted Black female figure in Annie Lee’s Blue Monday, “Record of Care” depicts a Black woman in a position of leisure.
Playing on concepts of learning and teaching, the figure is drawn in chalk, unfixed, and on paper, rendering it delicate, despite its monumental size.
As a result, the work is extremely awkward to install, forcing all those who take on the job of handling this body, to do so with care. One sudden move and the figure is altered, oftentimes irreversibly so; illustrating the destructive capability that ignorance, indifference, or carelessness can have.
With each inevitable crease, smudge, rip or fingerprint, the figure itself acts as an official record of how it has been cared for, making viewers and handlers of the artwork alike, a part of the performance of the power
