Born in Tacoma WA, United Sates (1990), Christopher Paul Jordan is a painter and public artist. He was awarded our open call opportunity in partnership with Yale School of Art and Yale University Art Gallery. As well as a research and development residency at the Mahler & LeWitt Studios, Jordan benefitted from a series of mentoring sessions with Margaret Ewing, Horace W. Goldsmith Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Yale University Art Gallery.

Jordan’s work investigates the mutability of memory and the ways we change because of our losses. He adapts techniques traditionally used in art conservation and theft, simulating conditions of removal, replacement and repair. Often he uses reclaimed textile substrates to peel his paintings from their original surfaces, removing and relocating elements to explore how these changes carry, or convert, meaning. He says: “The fabric mesh behaves like a recording device, retrieving stories, textures, and images from the world. I often soak and graft discrete screens together with colour. As their melded surfaces are pulled apart, the paintings mark each other. They live on as cognates, retelling sequences of union and departure.”

Jordan, who has a background in muralism, uses techniques in his painting which are close to ‘strappo’, a method for detaching frescoes from their original walls using textile, often to exploit their commercial value. He says: “To be what the art historian Lionello Venturi referred to as a ‘plucked flower’, detached from your place of origin and sent across the world: this is the kind of historical displacement that my painting practice tackles on personal, social, and environmental scales. Venturi famously left Europe to find historic Italian frescoes that had been taken from church walls and dispersed across the United States. I am to be in Italy to spend time with the walls some of these paintings left behind, to see the remains and the traces – reminders of the fragility and resilience (the survival and transformation) of human culture. I am interested in how communities fight to preserve their cultural heritage in a changing world, and in understanding how we make sense of life in the wake of loss. These are the seeds of inquiry which I expect to grow in unpredictable ways during my residency.” In Spoleto, Jordan had the opportunity to work and study with expert art historians and conservators who share his research interests.

Through parallel practices in performance, installation, and sculpture, Jordan’s enquiries are often enacted or permanently embedded in public space. His first museum exhibition: In The Interim – Ritual Ground for a Future Black Archive, buries African American predictions of the end of the world on the grounds of the Frye Art Museum until the year 2123. His 20ft bronze, aluminum, and steel sculpture andimgonnamisseverybody (2021) is the centerpiece for The AIDS Memorial Pathway in Seattle. Jordan is a Leslie Lohman Museum Fellow, A Queer|Art Fellow, and holds an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art (2023).

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