Mosie Romney

A very large 3-D printed bell hangs from the ceiling of Mosie Romney’s East Williamsburg studio. Their space is airy and decorated with talismans, curio, and a fig tree that has suddenly come back to life. Oopsie, Mosie’s lab-pit mix walks around carrying a croissant squeak toy, nudging me to play. A few big, blank canvases line a far wall, prepped for work that will appear in May in Los Angeles at Nicodim Gallery. 

I first met Mosie as a writer when we shared a reading bill at Codex in the East Village. Their new work is currently on view at Gern en Regalia in New York City. 

Mosie Romney’s facility with color and composition perhaps gives even more force to the supernatural flights and otherworldly moments that frequent their paintings. Romney, a Jamaican American artist based in New York and newly represented by Nicodim, often portrays figures who have something more—multiple faces, wings—or whose environments slip into loosely geometric abstractions or wide washes that make for an ethereal figure-ground relationship.

Los Angeles gallery Nicodim now represents Brooklyn-based painter Mosie Romney, who will have a show at the gallery later this year. Romney’s canvases play at the intersection of figuration, abstraction, and collage, often depicting a lone figure amid a surreal background. Previous exhibitions to include their work are “Mosie Romney and Juan Guiterrez” at Meredith Rosen Gallery in New York and “Evening Lark” at Y2K Group in New York, both in 2020.

Queens, New York-based painter Mosie Romney debuts four new works for their first solo exhibition Evening Lark via Y2K group in New York. Inspired by photographic familial record and found objets such as bells or broaches acquired online, they intertwine symbolism into an emotional dreamscape with biographical and ceremonial undertones.

In this interview with Dessane Lopez Cassell, Mosie discusses their time as an archivist at the Studio Museum in Harlem, queerness, community, and celebrating 2020's LBGTQ Pride Month in quarantine.