Home Artist Programs Supported Artists Pamela Council

Pamela Council

Bronx, New York

Tenderheaded is a metal tiered fondue fountain, filled instead with pink lotion, which cascades down the tiers and also spills over onto the vintage pink and blue quilt covering the box on which the fountain stands. Suspended above the fountain is a white plastic sex toy with a wheel of pink silicone tongues which spins and laps at the lotion below.

Tenderheaded

2017

i may be young, but youre ready is a sculptural installation in a white-walled gallery, with 5 rectangles of velvet in light pink, yellow, fuschia and red, suspended and clipped together and to an oversized pink pencil puncturing the wall. The surface of the velvet has been burned out to read “ I may be young but youre ready.” A light is cast through the fabric, and the words also read on the wall behind it. On the floor is a white coiled conveyor belt, and a tan and green geometric object that holds down a corner of the light pink velvet.

i may be young, but youre ready

2017

Fountain of Your Youth is a fountain formed of a plastic tube with a rotating spiral pushing white and blue plastic pony beads up to the top, where they spill out into the stacked bowls below, a fluted concrete bowl lined on the inside with lime green, and a wide pink colander below that, both filled with accumulated pony beads. The fountain sits on a column of pink, blue and orange pool noodles coiled to look like a column, wrapped with transparent mesh.

Fountain of Your Youth

2017

Ring Holder

2016

wtf is juice / gw smile is a plastic party fountain filled with cascading purple liquid operates on top of a column formed by a stack of images of President Washington's dentures with yellowed teeth. White velvet stained purple in places flows down from the top of the column, with a tan brick resting on the edge of the fabric.

wtf is juice / gw smile

2016

Hand me down to the ground (Auntie)

2015 - 2016

Ringholders series

2015 - ongoing

Stuck at Mashashimuet Park

2014

Artworks shown are selected from works submitted by the artist in their grant or residency application. All works are copyright of the artist or artist’s estate.

About Pamela Council

Laughing and sitting on an astroturf bench, Council rests elbows on knees, hands holding a tan brick. They have short dark bobbed hair, medium dark skin and wear gold eyeliner, bright yellow nails, bright pink nylon paints, a lime short sleeve knit top over long sleeve multicolor linear patterned sleeves, and light pink boucle platform boots.
Photo by Ally Caple

Pamela Council was born in Southampton in 1986. They are an interdisciplinary artist using sculpture, writing, and performance to create multisensory dedications. Unlike typical memorials, these dedications, including Council’s series Fountains for Black Joy, mine history then use dark humor and bright color to critique hierarchies of power. Council’s cathartic transformation of everyday materials and forms, like sneaker outsoles, fountains, and acrylic fingernails, offers new ways of seeing our relationship to the material world. Council coined the term BLAXIDERMY, a portmanteau of Blaxploitation and taxidermy, to describe their distinctive Afro-Americana camp aesthetic, which marries the absurdity and horror of the precarity of Black life in a colorful exploration of the material, cultural, and metaphysical.

Council has created commissions for The Studio Museum in Harlem, Times Square Alliance, and VOLTA NY. Council’s exhibition history includes Aldrich Art Museum, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, UTA Artists Space, New-York Historical Society, MoCADA, The Luminary, Williams College Museum of Art, and The New Museum for Contemporary Art as part of Simone Leigh’s Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter. Council has been awarded residencies at Joan Mitchell Center, MacDowell Colony, ISCP, Bemis, Mass MoCA, Red Bull, Wassaic Project, MANA Contemporary, and more.

They are a recipient of a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship Award, 2017 Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptors Grant, and 2020 Harpo Foundation Grant, and hold an MFA from Columbia University, and a BA from Williams College, which awarded Council the 2022 Bicentennial Medal as a distinguished alumna.

Program Participation

Painters & Sculptors Grant, 2017

Joan Mitchell Center Residency, 2023

Website / Social Links

“ I make sculptures, prints, installations, and performances that transform materials. I’m interested in how we soothe, protect, fashion, and enhance ourselves. I freestyle with mass-produced products like sneaker rubber, beauty products, backscratchers, and crackpipes, combined with artist-produced objects made from materials such as clay and velvet—telling stories, making dedications, erecting structures, and leaving evidence.”

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