Madonna of the Girl Child

P·P·O·W is pleased to present Madonna of the Girl Child, an online project by Ann Agee. Known for her Hand Warmers, a series of ceramic shoes exploring craft traditions, industrial production and the erosion of the handmade world, Agee extends this practice to the digital realm showcasing a series of ceramic sculptures based on folk Florentine clay salt cellars in the shape of the Madonna and child. Reimagining such devotional domestic objects, Agee transforms the Christ child into a female. In a myriad of styles, slips, and glazes, each bearing the logo of Agee’s fictional enterprise, “AGEE MFG”, Agee celebrates the sororal relationship between mother and daughter and proposes a feminist iconography venerating baby girls. 

In an expression of their domestic utility, Agee situates her sculptures within digitally collaged rooms, combining iPhone images of her Brooklyn home with silkscreened diagrams detailing her first apartment in New York, the place where she first began to work in clay. In many ways an autobiography of lived space, her sculptures and their fantastical environments present the domestic as sacred, and as a site of inspiration. 

In conjunction with Madonna of the Girl Child, P·P·O·W will host a digital conversation between Ann Agee and Glenn Adamson, a curator and writer who works at the intersection of craft, design history and contemporary art. Currently Senior Scholar at the Yale Center for British Art, he has previously been Director of the Museum of Arts and Design; Head of Research at the V&A; and Curator at the Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee. 

Ann Agee (b. 1959) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She has presented installations at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA. Her work has been included in notable group exhibitions, including Bad Girls at the New Museum, NY; Dirt on Delight at the Institute of Contemporary Art, PA and the Walker Art Center, MN; and Conversations in Clay at the Katonah Art Museum, NY. Agee has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, among others. Her works are included in the permanent collections of The Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY; The Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; The RISD Art Museum, RI; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; The Henry Art Museum in Seattle, WA; and The Kohler Art Center in Sheboygan, WI, among others. P·P·O·W will present a solo exhibition of Agee’s recent works in 2021, her third exhibition with the gallery.