Drawings and Watercolors Tales of Intrigue, Danger, and Humor, an exhibition of arrestive figurative expressionism illuminating Carmen Cicero’s seven decades of creating work on paper – drawings and watercolors – narratives that arouse disquiet about incidents common to most lives will open at the June Kelly Gallery, 166 Mercer Street, on Friday, October 18.  The exhibition will remain on view through January 14, 2025.

Widely known for sarcastic humor in bold, cheeky, boisterous, lifelike pictorial statements, Cicero’s narratives are replete with the portrayal of agitated, contradictory feelings and complex enigmas of unfulfilled desires, jealousy, despair, and isolation.  Cicero’s imagery incites viewers’ pursuit of understanding the narrative energy depicted with color and line, and as art writer John Yau describes Cicero’s mastery of nuance.

Cicero continues to bring a remarkable inventiveness to his work, with wit that stirs a sense of mystery and foreshadowing.  Typically, his paintings evoke lightning like moments when recognition becomes illuminated, and whereby the development of his visual argument replaces illusion with perceptible reality.  Cicero uses calculatedly dramatic figurative forms to convey a serious statement.  Enigmatic paintings expose surreal alliances, quirky, and often hypnotic.

Art critic David Ebony, author of the newly released publication Carmen Cicero Drawings and Watercolors Tales of Intrigue, Danger, and Humor, writes Cicero, a born storyteller, imparting tales in his visual art as well as in person is never judgmental or sanctimonious.  In ‘The Human Condition,’ a statement Cicero wrote in 2020, “Artists tell how it is; moralists tell how it ought to be.”

Ebony also writes the images Cicero presents in his drawings and watercolors as well as in his paintings, are full of dramatic proposals, complex social conundrums, and intriguing innuendo. Yet to complete the story, viewers are invited to find their own way to absorb, navigate, and reflect upon the quixotic ingredients he offers.  The tale becomes the viewer’s as much as the artist’s.

A native of Newark, New Jersey, Cicero holds a BA from Newark State Teachers College and an MFA from Montclair State University.  He lives in New York City and summers in Truro on Cape Cod. He is also an accomplished jazz musician.

Cicero’s work is represented in numerous public, corporate, and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Newark Museum, Montclair Museum of Art, National Academy Museum, Provincetown Art Association and Museum, MA; West Publishing Company, St. Paul, MN; and Musei Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands.

In 2024, a monograph, Carmen Cicero Drawings and Watercolors, was launched at his gallery exhibition of the same name.  In 2016, Carmen Cicero received the Jacob Lawrence and Gwendolyn Knight Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2012, Carmen Cicero received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Provincetown Art Association and Museum; and in 2007, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. A monograph, “The Art of Carmen Cicero,” was published in 2013 by Schiffer Publishing in Atglen, PA.