2021 Burke Prize Winner

Born in Houston, Texas, and based in Brooklyn, Charisse Pearlina Weston is a conceptual artist and writer whose practice is grounded in profound material and symbolic investigations of the intimacies and interiors of Black life. In her practice, formal explorations of glass, poetic texts, abstraction, sound, video, and photography are used to articulate the artist’s concerns with the complexities and consequences of violence, which she views as an intimate act of power and subjugation. Her glass installations and sculpture not only confront the everyday risk of anti-Black violence, but also gesture toward resistance and survival.

In glass, Weston explores the uses of glass in contemporary architecture and surveillance technology as signifiers of intimacy, freedom, and power. Considering how this seemingly neutral material has affected Black intimacies, interiors, and spatial movement, the enfoldment and layering of the glass are meant to suggest withholding and concealment. In this inner “fugitive” realm, Weston posits, there is space for Blackness beyond the reach of harm.

Weston received her MFA from the University of California-Irvine, an MSc from the University of Edinburgh, a BA from the University of North Texas, and completed the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program. Recent exhibitions include solo exhibitions at Abrons Art Center and Recess (forthcoming), as well as group shows at the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, and ArtPace, San Antonio (forthcoming).She was also an Artist Fellow in the Museum’s 6th floor Artist Studios.