We invite you to visit the library anytime in October to see our Art Show of the Month- Gigi Perez: Bowery Layers.
Bowery Layers explores identity, beauty, popular culture, memory, and the visual energy of downtown New York through mixed-media collage, painting, photography, and found materials.
At the heart of the exhibition are actual street posters collected from the Bowery, Houston Street, and First Avenue. Torn from the walls of the city, these fragments carry traces of advertisements, events, typography, weather, graffiti, and the constant transformation of New York’s streets. They are not simply backgrounds; they become part of the history, texture, and meaning of each work.
My process is built through layering and accumulation. I work directly on the canvas, building one layer over another with found photographs, fragments of street posters, paper, and printed imagery. Some images disappear beneath new layers, while others remain partially visible, creating unexpected connections between what is hidden and what is revealed.
Over these layers, I add acrylic paint, spray paint, drawing, marks, texture, and other mixed-media materials. I tear, cover, scrape, paint over, and expose parts of the surface until the composition begins to tell its own story. The layers underneath are just as important as what remains visible on top.
This process reflects the way memory, identity, and cities are built: through fragments, repetition, change, and traces of what came before.
In Bowery Layers, familiar faces, fashion imagery, cultural icons, and found street materials are reconstructed into new narratives. Glamour meets grit, beauty meets imperfection, and polished imagery collides with the raw surfaces of downtown New York.
Each work becomes both a portrait and an urban archive, a story built from paint, paper, photographs, and pieces of the streets themselves.
BIO
Gigi Perez is a Venezuelan-American multimedia artist based in Nyack, New York, whose dynamic work merges street art, pop art, collage, and contemporary urban expression. Drawing inspiration from the raw energy, rhythm, and visual textures of New York City, she transforms found street posters, bold typography, acrylic paint, and mixed media into vibrant, richly layered compositions. Her artwork has been exhibited in galleries and pop-up exhibitions throughout New York, Berlin, and Japan. Gigi Perez studied advertising and later pursued art studies at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Before dedicating herself fully to her studio practice, she spent more than a decade as a visual merchandiser and stylist for iconic institutions and brands such as Ralph Lauren, Diesel, Gucci, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art , experiences that continue to shape her distinctive approach to composition, color, and visual storytelling.