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body grounds: the intimacy of memory, myth, and loss
September 11 – October 9
Join us for Body Grounds: The Intimacy of Memory, Myth, and Loss, a group exhibition on our 2nd floor featuring work by four past artists-in-residence at Ace Hotel New York, presented through our recent year-long co-curatorial partnership.
Body Grounds: The Intimacy of Memory, Myth, and Loss brings together Lauren Cohen, Stephanie Santana, Jacob Olmedo, and Pacifico Silano—four past artists-in-residence at Ace Hotel, presented through our recent year-long co-curatorial partnership. These artists’ practices examine how personal narrative, identity, and cultural memory are shaped by systems of power, trauma, and resilience. Through humor, mythology, materiality, and loss, each artist navigates and investigates the body as a grounding site—where intimacy is in flux and memory is both a burden and a place of resistance.
On view: September 11—October 9
Located on 2nd fl
Bios
Lauren Cohen
Lauren Cohen gathers content for her paintings, sculptures, graphic novels and comedic performances by documenting a constructed life that blurs truth and fiction. Her work draws directly from job experiences as well as historical events and characters to construct a universe where control, power, sexuality and violence are recurring themes.
Jacob Olmedo
Jacob Olmedo (they/them) navigates textile making from the reaction of the fragile barriers of American frameworks and the demise in connection with the liberation of queer futures. Working across mediums, their work often takes shape in tender textile forms that are abstracted with harsh building materials that show familiar circumstances of restrictions and reveal the fragilities of instructed ways of being. Olmedo often works upon their personal and cultural resonance of grief, joy, rage, power, and vulnerability through experimenting with color, texture, and radiance.
Stephanie Santana
Stephanie Santana constructs mixed-media textile works and prints that explore interior worlds, mythologies, navigational tools and resistance strategies of African diasporic origin. Rooted in archival research while employing a range of printmaking, quilting and embroidery techniques, her practice locates alternative spaces of knowledge and self-definition.
Pacifico Silano
Pacifico Silano explores print culture, image circulation and LGBT+ identity by re-photographing gay pornographic magazines of the ’70s and ’80s — an era connecting the progressive legacy of the sexual revolution with the advent of the HIV/AIDS crisis. He assembles these images into a range of installations that point to the tensions underlying the source material.
Ace Hotel New York artist-in-residence
Top left: Jacob Olmedo, sample work for Catch me I’m falling, please hear me calling, 2025.
Top right: Pacifico Silano, Elegy to the Void (Detail), 2025
Bottom left: Stephanie Santana, Seen (Detail), 2024
Bottom right: Lauren Cohen, The Art World Chess Set (Detail), 2024