Cyrilla Mozenter

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Cyrilla Mozenter is an American artist working in drawing, sculpture and installation. She is the recipient of two fellowships from New York Foundation for the Arts and her work has been belongs in various public collections including The Brooklyn Museum and The Yale University Art Gallery.

Education and work[]

Mozenter was born in Newark, New Jersey and received a MFA (1972) and a BFA (1970) from Pratt Institute.^[1]

Over the course of her career, Mozenter has worked with a variety of techniques and materials that range from the ready-made to the hand-made. In an installation entitled Homage to Francis Ponge (1990–91), Monzenter worked with autobiographical elements and a dematerialized process by arranging a grid of bars of soap of different sizes, shapes and color that had been confiscated from hotel rooms among other sites.^[2] Myrtle leaves, allspice, arnica, beeswax,^[3] Chinese laundry soap and dried eggplant skins^[4] are all among the unlikely materials that the artist has employed in her practice over the course of her career.

Today, Mozenter's primary materials are industrial wool felt and paper. Pieces range from felt wall works to freestanding paper constructions, all made up of forms that are deceptively simple geometric forms. Mozenter's practice actively maintains a tension between form and medium, with a sustained focus on the inherent properties of a given material. On the trying process of hand-stitching industrial felt, she has noted, "the simultaneous provoking and resisting felt's natural inclination to buckle, droop, and torque."^[5] Similarly, standing pieces are made without armature or stuffing of any kind,^[6] with Mozenter instead working with the natural flexibility of the felt to produce a more natural planting.

In addition to material concerns, Mozenter's practice concerns itself with the subject of language and literature, most prominently with the work of Gertrude Stein. Though certain works such as More Saints Seen make direct reference to Stein, the writer's presence is felt more as an overall underlying inspiration in Mozenter's oeuvre. As critic Jonathan Goodman remarked:

The drawings, like the sculptures, feel like they are the visual equivalent of Gertrude Stein's words, which possess a lyrical acuity all their own. Mozenter's work shows us how Modernism may still be accessed in a postmodern world, for its forms build a relationship in which the art is supported by its references to other media. In that sense, the work is remarkably open and expressive, living as it does between the directness of its own statement and its connection to another work of art.^[7]

Mozenter has taught at Pratt Institute (1985-2015),^[8] Cooper Union (2001), and at Parsons School of Design (1994-1997).

Exhibitions and commissions[]

Mozenter has had solo exhibitions at Lesley Heller Gallery, New York; Garrison Art Center, Garrison, NY; Adam Baumgold Gallery, New York; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Dieu Donné Papermill, New York; The Drawing Center, New York; and Espaço Cultural Municipal Sérgio Porto, Rio de Janeiro.

Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY; The Drawing Center, New York; Lesley Heller Gallery, New York; the Asheville Art Museum, Asheville, NC; among others.

In 1995 Mozenter was commissioned to create an installation in conjunction with the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra's Orientalism series for the Majestic Theater at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Grants and fellowships[]

Mozenter is the recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts (2001, 1986); The Fifth Floor Foundation Grant (2005, 2001); The Coby Foundation (2005); Pratt Institute Faculty Development Grant (2012, 2009, 2001, 1996); Dieu Donné Papermill, Artist Sponsorship Program (2001); and Artists Space Artist Grant (1985, 1988).

She has been an artist-in-residence at the Dieu Donné Papermill, New York (2001); Pianpicollo Selvatico, Alta Lange, Piemonte, Italy (2017); Instituto Municipal de Arte e Cultura‚ Rioarte, Rio de Janeiro (1995); John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI (1995).

Public collections[]

• The Arkansas Arts Center
• Birmingham Museum of Art
• Brooklyn Museum of Art
• Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives
• CG Jung Center/ARAS
• The Hood Museum of Art
• New Mexico Museum of Art
• New York Public Library Print Collection
• Portland Art Museum
• Pratt Institute Libraries
• The University Gallery, University of Massachusetts
• University of Richmond Museum
• Walker Art Center
• Yale University Art Gallery

References[]