So What? Painting

Brooklyn native Cheryl Gross is an illustrator, painter, writer and motion graphic artist living and working in the New York/Jersey City area. She is a professor at Pratt Institute. Cheryl’s work has appeared in numerous films, TV shows, publications, and graces the walls of many corporate and museum collections including: Zebra Poetry Film Festival, Berlin, New York Times, Riverside Museum, Riverside, Ca., The Museum of The City of New York, Mississippi Museum of Art, Laforet Harajuku Museum, Tokyo, Japan, Artist-In-Residency, Kunstlerhaus, Saarbruken, Germany. Finalist Elizabeth Hulings Foundation, 2014, Artist-In-Residency Program, Dilsberg, Germany, 2015, four-time recipient Eileen Kaminsky Family Foundation Residency, Jersey City, 2018-2021, long time contributor: Broadsided Press, Art Fair 14c, Jersey City, NJ, 2021. “The work, metaphorically travels through two different forms of representation: abstract and realism, thereby creating a narrative that embraces a socio-political point of view.” Extinction and Duplication: A Way to Remember. Animals, Cowgirls and Women Boxers as a Metaphor. To begin, my work always follows a narrative while embracing socio-political topics such as extinction, duplication, gender obliteration and diminishing the role of women in a male dominated culture. My concentration metaphorically replicates our reality. The goal is not to forget the past. My main influences at the moment are Walton Ford, Henry Darger, Frans Masereel, Yayoi Kusama, T.V. westerns from the 50’s and 60’s, as well as Shintoism. Quite the combination. In creating the work, I combine abstract and realism, traveling through two very different forms of expression, but completely related to one another. My work has often been compared to Dr. Seuss on crack.