Opening Reception Friday, January 1, 2027, 6-9 p.m. Exhibition on display weekends through January 31, 2027
Closing Reception & Screenings of Lucille’s Film “Becoming a Window” Saturday, January 30, 6:30 p.m. & 7:30 p.m.
Five15Arts | 1301 NW Grand Avenue, Phoenix, AZ 85007
Gallery Hours: First and Third Fridays 6-9 p.m., Saturdays and Sundays 11-2 p.m. Closing Reception Saturday, 1/30 6:30 p.m.
Phoenix artist Charissa Lucille presents dehydrate, a new body of mixed media and textile works revealing the forgotten histories of a closed boarding school in the Sonoran desert that she attended at age 15. dehydrate opens Friday, January 1, 2027, and will be on view weekends through January 31, 2027, at Five15Arts @ Chartreuse on Grand Avenue in Phoenix.
In dehydrate, Lucille grapples with the punitive ideologies that compel the existence of camps, borders, detention centers, boarding schools, and prisons. The long-standing forced assimilation practices that leaders use in Arizona-based boarding schools are demonstrated with sharp fencing, scissors, and blocks while the people impacted are represented by wrapped quilts.
Lucille’s artworks are based on her background attending a disciplinary labor-based boarding school, conversations with survivors and experts, and investigative research into similarly oppressive systems throughout Arizona.
Themes of surveillance, isolation, punishment, education, and labor extend into three-dimensional quilted scenes, incorporating muted Sonoran desert colors, barbed wire, saguaro skeletons, and ocotillo branches, suggesting survival fused with degradation.
Lucille will stream her short film, “Becoming a Window,” at the closing reception on Saturday, January 30, 2027 at 6:30 p.m. and again at 7:30 p.m.
dehydrate invites viewers to sit down at a school desk and transport into Lucille’s experience suspended in time, where memories alone exist as truth.
Five15Arts @ Chartreuse, located on Phoenix’s Historic Grand Avenue, is a collective art gallery dedicated to showcasing monthly exhibitions by member artists and invited guests.
