New Icons Exhibition Catalog

Visual artist Grace Athena Flott intended to find her place in the canon of Western art history but as a painter with a non-normative body she realized her image existed only in medical textbooks, horror movies or tragic news stories. New Icons is the artist’s response to the cultural erasure of what it means to look different. In Flott’s second solo exhibition at the Port of Seattle she celebrates the variable faces and bodies of her burn injury community and uncovers our societal myths about health, beauty and gender by showcasing the scars we are taught to hide.

Through realist portrait painting, recorded interviews with each subject and abstract self-portraits inspired by the artist’s own body, New Icons taps into a universal human desire for belonging and a recognition of the power of being truly seen in the eye’s of another. 

This exhibition catalogue contains full-color reproductions of all seven of Flott’s meticulously painted realist portraits and five self-portraits along with detailed images of selected works. Excerpts from interviews with the subjects offer direct insights into representation, identity and media from individual burn survivors.

Three essays by esteemed authors and journalists John Seed, Jas Keimig and Dina Peone offer diverse perspectives on the issues Flott raises in her work. Flott’s exhibition New Icons makes a historic contribution to the documentation of visible difference and scars as a dynamic identities while asserting the need for liberation of all bodies — no matter how they look. 

Grace Athena Flott is an award-wining visual artist living in Seattle, Washington. She is a grant recipient of the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture and is published in Fine Art Connoisseur and Realism Today. Her work is exhibited and collected internationally.

Self-published. Printed by Girlie Press Inc. Graphic design: Scott Méxcal. Edited by Dina Peone.