ALICIA PILLER

» Since earning her MFA at CalArts a few years ago, Alicia Piller has propelled her sculpture—made from iPhone photos of flowers and press images of Black Lives Matter protests printed on resin-coated paper, archival family slides, repurposed canvases, all varieties of vinyl, jewelry, leather, and minerals—into the permanent collection of the Hammer Museum; a sprawling survey, Alicia Piller: Within, curated by Jill Moniz, at Craft Contemporary; and a recent New York Times feature naming her as one of “5 Artists to Watch at the California Biennial.” The divergent roads running throughout her oeuvre emerged from an unlikely origin story: Piller is the youngest daughter of a Jewish physician father and a Black legal secretary mother who supported his medical pursuits by enlisting an adolescent Piller to work clown gigs at birthday parties. (She uses balloons in her work to this day.) At Craft Contemporary, her examinations of capitalism, colonialism, trauma, the accumulation of material, and the sinuous layers of the body (informed by her father ’s anatomy books) will come full circle. aliciapiller.com