JARRETT KEY

ABOVE AND BEYOND

MARCH 14 - MAY 4, 2025

If you want to fly, you have to give up the things that weigh you down.
- Toni Morrison

FIERMAN presents Above and Beyond, multidisciplinary artist Jarrett Key’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Comprised of new cement fresco triptychs, the show reflects Key’s ongoing investigation of Black folk tales from the American South. Key’s figures are depicted in flight, soaring in the sky, both re-contextualizing common narratives and inspiring the belief in the possibility of touching the clouds.  Key’s cosmos contains both Raphael-inspired cherubs and figures from James Van Der Zee’s celebrated photographs of the Harlem Renaissance.  

Key’s cement frescos recall and update the ancient art of fresco painting, a style embraced from classical antiquity to the Italian Renaissance to Twentieth Century Mexico. By mixing paint pigment with construction materials, frescos serve to explicate, solidify, and reiterate cultural narratives by literally cementing them in stone. Key’s cement frescos, using the industrial material that defines American cities, continue this tradition as they archive Black folktales, the memory of their own ancestors and family.  As three individual cement slabs reach across the walls, a tableau is created. The wall becomes a living landscape, seeking its breath from the audience’s gaze. This installation implicates the viewer to fill in the field embedding the figures.  

These paintings, full of red and white stripes with accompanying blue, assert a restratification of American visual identity.  Key’s works foreground Southern American folktales of flying Black people as a new way to imagine America from above, a place where a larger and longer history is being viewed and understood. This frame shifts away from the myth of American exceptionalism, colonization and military expansion.  Key notes: “ I am Black, I am queer, I am American; this is my country, my history, my legacy.”

Jarrett Key (b. 1990, Seale, AL) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. After growing up in rural Alabama, Key pursued their fine art practice in New York City after graduating from Brown University in 2013. They received their MFA in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2020. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include Hair Painting No. 40, The Shed (upcoming Summer 2025); The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition, The Brooklyn Museum (2024-5); 1969 Gallery, NY (2024, 2022); The Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Ana, CA (2024); Quench Gallery, Margate, UK (2024); Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, FL (2023); Green Family Art Gallery, Dallas, TX (2023); New England Triennial, Fruitlands Museum, Harvard, MA (2023); Somewhere In Advance of Nowhere: Freedom Dreams in Contemporary Art, Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, New Paltz, NY (2023); among many others. Key’s work is in the collections of the New York Historical Society, the Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection, the Columbus Museum, Brown University, RISD Special Collection, the Schomburg Center, the Museum of Modern Art Library, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art Library, among other institutions. The artist's Hair Painting Series series has been featured at the Studio Museum in Harlem and at the Harlem Arts Festival in Marcus Garvey Park.