Chin Up Butter Cup Laura Atria
2024
Oil, Resin, Gold & Bronze Leaf on Canvas
36" x 18"
$1,700

Girls Just Want To Have FUN-damental Rights - Laura Atria
2024
Oil on Canvas
24" x 20"
$1,675

ARTIST BIO:

Laura Atria-Newitt is a seasoned public art professional, currently serving as the Public Art and Artist in Residence Program Manager for the City of Pompano Beach and as the President of the Florida Association of Public Art Professionals. With over thirteen years in public art administration, she has a successful track record in developing and implementing art programs and serving on various boards and panels, including the Broward Cultural Council. She holds dual degrees in Studio Art and Art History from FAU. Her expertise has been key in creating Public Art Master Plans, securing grants, and earning accolades, including a one million-dollar Bloomberg Philanthropies Grant.

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Laura Atria is a professional artist whose work often focuses on voyeurism, the female, self-healing, and self-definition. She often creates personified characters in her paintings as a way to document her desire to process past traumas and better understand the world.

This series, "Let's Have a Picnic: How to Entertain Like a Lady," Atria illustrates a comical depiction of aspects our society tends to put negative conversations towards: women's rights and the LGBTIQA+ community. Often, these social constructs are portrayed negatively. This Broward County Cultural Division Grant-funded series explores societal constructs that are presented to the viewer in a playful and whimsical light. Politely poking at the patriarchy, the series connects art with politics and human rights with an artistic and humorous perspective on serious topics.

Gender has been in many ways socially constructed. Both the male and female genders have been expected to play specific roles: woman- mother, domesticated, submissive, modest, soft, obedient; man- strength, power, unemotional, head of the household, worker. Humans are so much more than the gender-specific roles that have been bestowed upon them. Being a human is more than biological. It goes well beyond critically looking at gender as a social construct.

We live in a society where human beings are being stripped of their rights. It is extremely important to create safe spaces for everyone to exist, connect, rejoice, and grow especially in the face of censorship and cancel culture. Florida in particular, has extremely harsh laws pertaining to LGBTIQA+ rights with the "Don't Say Gay" law. In recent years, female reproductive rights, basic human rights for a woman, have been stripped away through the overturning of Roe vs. Wade. These laws violate humanity because of a person's gender expression and sexuality.

This series is an exploratory commentary, bringing humor to the homophobic and anti-woman. Laughing at adversaries helps generate the ability to heal. Up until very recently the female and LGBTIQA+ points of view have largely been ignored. There is fear and shame around abortions and being LGBTIQA+. This series strives to bring attention to this stigma while mocking its challengers.

"Let's Have a Picnic: How to Entertain like a Lady" is a parody, mocking the system and creating a playful scene filled with subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, references to sexuality. This series is about reproductive and LGBTIQA+ rights, both of which are about the right to own your own body. The viewer may not have gone through these types of discrimination, but there must be a shared understanding that human safety and acceptance are universal.

CONTACT THE ARTIST:
[email protected]
954.632.3006
IG: laura_atria_art