John Paul Morabito
Take Me To Heaven
Patricia Sweetow Gallery, Downtown Los Angeles, CA
January 18 – February 22, 2025
The title of the exhibition, Take Me To Heaven, references the famed Black, Queer, disco icon of the 70’s and 80’s, Sylvester! Sylvester’s music, lyrics, and gender fluid persona gave voice to the cultural and political shifts in America when sexual energy pulsed in clubs throughout urban centers, where seduction, drag, sparkle, protest, coming out, demands for equal rights and decriminalization began ripping through the hetero-normative walls of the United States. Morabito’s luminous tapestries tower as a metaphoric rallying cry, “This is a retracing of the queer resistance born in urban discos of a prior generation. As social and political forces once again seek to eradicate queer people, I, like those who came before me, reach for the promise of queer futurity.”
Improvisation guides Morabito’s woven abstractions; bold intersecting geometry with electrifying gold and hot neon colors are the intuitive gestures of “the body pulsing to the rhythm of the beat.” Morabito’s work delivers “a spark of divinity,” reaching back in time to the cultural zenith that celebrated queer spaces. However, citing health as the orthodoxy of reason, AIDS provided political heft for the erasure and censure of queer public centers in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Morabito’s unabashed emphasis on metaphor, beauty, and sensuality fuels the recovery of queer identity, community, and place—“where glamour, glitter, sweat, and low light open embodied pathways to find something greater than yourself.” Glass beads, hand-dyed wool, and cotton in the hands of Morabito become the sacrament of possibility, defying voices that would choose to turn back the clock of time.