Claire Oliver Gallery goes to EXPO Chicago (Booth 223) bringing new works by BK Adams (United States), Elsa María Meléndez (Puerto Rico), and Gio Swaby (The Bahamas). EXPO Chicago takes place from April 9-12, 2026, at Festival Hall, Navy Pier, 600 East Grand Avenue, Chicago, Illinois.
Overview: Bringing together artists known for materially rigorous and conceptually layered practices, our installation centers on texture, accumulation, and the expansion of traditional media into new sculptural and tactile terrains.
Working with dried flowers, cast-off clothing, aged books, embroidery thread, and canvas, Adams and Meléndez transform familiar materials into works that feel unearthed rather than composed. In a cultural landscape increasingly defined by speed, digital mediation, and surface-level spectacle, their practices insist on density, labor, and physical presence.
Adams constructs heavily encrusted surfaces by coating dried flowers in black paint, creating solemn, almost funerary compositions that operate as contemporary memorials. His works honor ancestral sacrifice while exploring themes of inheritance, resilience, and spiritual continuity. Meléndez builds layered, theatrical tableaux populated by women, jesters, matadors in high heels, and puppet-like figures. Through embroidery, paint, and textile interventions, she destabilizes archetypes and exposes the performative roles society assigns, particularly to women and cultural protagonists.
Elsa María Meléndez lives and works in Caguas, Puerto Rico, and has built a 30-year career with collective exhibitions in more than 95 venues across the United States, Uruguay, Cuba, Ireland, Romania, Portugal, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. Her practice has earned wide recognition, including a mid-career retrospective, Perreta al argumento: 18 años de producción (2014), at the Museo Antiguo Arsenal de la Marina in San Juan.
In 2024, she received the Establish Artist Grant from TENDER: A Caribbean Arts Regranting Initiative (Fresh Milk Art Platform and the Barbados National Cultural Foundation) and the 10th UBS Prize for Contemporary Artists from the Puerto Rico Museum of Art. That same year, she represented Puerto Rico at the 15th Havana Biennial at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana. Her recent honors also include the 2023 Studios at MASS MoCA Puerto Rico Fellowship and the People’s Choice Award at the 2022 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.
Gio Swaby was born and raised in Nassau, The Bahamas and is currently based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She is a Bahamian visual artist whose practice is an exploratory celebration of Blackness and womanhood. Her work centres on Black joy as a radical act of resistance. It works through the philosophy of love as liberation and explores pathways of healing and empowerment. It allows space for both the strong and soft to coexist.
Swaby’s mother, Judy Carey-Swaby, taught her to sew as a young girl and she now creates portraits using a range of textile-based techniques.
Swaby’s work is included in collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Canada, the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas and more.
For more information, see https://www.claireoliver.com/exhibitions/75-remains-and-reliquaries-at-expo-chicago-2026-booth-223/works/
[Shown above: 1) “Impugnaciones: Vamos a seguir apretando bien duro” – reverso (Rebuttals: We are Going to Keep Pushing Really Hard – back view), 2023; 2) Gio Swaby’s “Baby Hairs 6,” 2025.]
Claire Oliver Gallery goes to EXPO Chicago (Booth 223) bringing new works by BK Adams (United States), Elsa María Meléndez (Puerto Rico), and Gio Swaby (The Bahamas). EXPO Chicago takes place from April 9-12, 2026, at Festival Hall, Navy Pier, 600 East Grand Avenue, Chicago, Illinois. Overview: Bringing together artists known for materially rigorous and
