SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- Jenkins Johnson Gallery announced the representation of Lavar Munroe.

Lavar Munroe (born 1982, Nassau, Bahamas) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work encompasses painting, drawing, sculpture, installation art, and a hybrid medium that spans between sculpture and painting. A participant in the 56th Venice Biennale’s All the World's Futures, curated by Okwui Enwezor. Munroe questions our perceptions and eulogizes difference. Influenced by his personal experience of being called an “exotic other” upon arrival in the United States, Munroe began examining the 19th and 20th centuries’ sideshow phenomenon of the “human zoo.” Monroe specializes in dismembering the underpinnings of the carnival freak shows, circuses, world’s fairs, and ethnic exhibits in Western culture during the height of colonialism. A human zoo primarily consisted of individuals with physical deformities or rare features shown in cages or alongside wild animals. These "anthropological exhibitions" localized and spurred racial epithets, ingraining the concept of the “other” into our culture memories. Munroe’s work explores colonial systems that eroticize behaviors and philosophies of the past in an effort to further understand the hierarchies, prejudices, and racist ideals of the present. His mixed media assemblages and sculptures highlight the human zoo’s impact on the politics of representation in contemporary art and society.

Munroe’s large-scale works on canvas straddle painting and sculpture. Embracing elements of assemblage and collage, Munroe stitches and glues composite pieces into a larger whole. The central motifs of these large-scale pieces are anthropomorphic figures that vacillate between the playful and the macabre. Munroe uses tearing, suturing, cutting, and stapling of found or discarded materials to point to the history of exploitation and cruelty that was and still is faced by underrepresented bodies within society. The exoticized “other” is often paired alongside wild beasts, referencing the systematic representation of human difference within the contemporary human zoo. Munroe’s reclamation of his identity is realized in the physical representation of wounds being sewn together. His varied media highlights Munroe's interest in history, anthropology, and sociology.

Munroe is currently featured in the multi-venue solo exhibition Journey Elsewhere: Musings from a Boundless Zoo at his Alma Mater, Savannah College of Art and Design’s Museum of Art, where three of the works shown in the 56th Venice Biennale are on display; the exhibition continues at Gutstein Gallery with a series of new large-scale works and drawings, including an installation that engages personal biography and references his childhood in the Bahamas. In May he will participate in the 2016 Dakar Biennale (Senegal, West Africa) with a site-specific sculpture installation. He has exhibited in institutions including: the Contemporary Art Museum, Raleigh, NC; Nashar Museum of Art, Durham, NC; Kemper Museum, St. Louis, MO; Art League of Houston, TX; and, The National Art Gallery of the Bahamas, Nassau. In 2010 Munroe represented the Bahamas at the Liverpool Biennial, United Kingdom.

Lavar Munroe earned an MFA from Washington University, St. Louis. He is also an alumni of the Skowehegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He has been awarded numerous grants, fellowships and residencies, including: the Joan Mitchell Foundation Artist in Residence; Nirox Foundation Residency; MacDowell Colony Artist in Residence; the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant; a National Endowment for the Arts grant; and a Fountainhead Residency. Munroe has received other grants and awards from The Central Bank of the Bahamas, the Krause Family Foundation, the Savannah Beach Institute, the Washington University in St. Louis Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts, The Mary Beth Hassan Fund and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of North Carolina, where he also received the Postdoctoral Award for Research Excellence. Munroe was a finalist for the Headlands Center for the Arts Chiaro Award in 2014. He has been featured in a plethora of publications such as The Washington Post, Art in America, Forbes, Artnet, Houston Chronicle, Glasstire Magazine, Artcollector, Caribbean Beat, and The Nassau Guardian.

Lavar Monroe will exhibit with Jenkins Johnson Gallery this year in our Conceptual and Abstract Show with a solo exhibition in 2017. We also look forward to exhibiting his work at this year’s Seattle Art Fair, Expo Chicago, and more.