ROMANCE
NADA Miami: TD Bank Curatorial Spotlight
Faith Icecold
Dec 2–6, 2025
This solo presentation features paintings, textile works, and sculpture by New York-based artist Faith Icecold, who also goes by faith****. Icecold works between the online and off, just as our present moment moves. “New relic” is a phrase coined by the artist to reflect on their objects and paintings drawn from dollar-store and internet detritus as much as ancestral memory: in spiritual altars and ancient musical instruments, or 19th century traditional jacquard weaving. Within this context, the artist radically embraces both the virtual and the handmade, adopting artifice and exaggeration as an intentional aesthetic register while paying homage to sacred adornment in rituals passed down over generations, such as the Haitian ritual of beading objects for ceremony. What are the contemporary relics of a time in which intimate experiences are always recorded and on display, the past thus constantly present, and the present instantly made past? What are the objects and images that we will leave behind?
Whether in tapestries “woven” from digital collage and image-transfer paintings dusted with dried flowers, or densely beaded surfaces, Icecold’s work is rebelliously ornamental, refuting the theory and history of decoration as “merely craft” or “camp” stripped of their context that gives these categories meaning. In doing so, the artist fills in the gaps left by Susan Sontag’s definition of camp as “something of a private code,” in her words, “a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques.” Icecold relishes the “urban” and camp as fundamentally Black-coded and invented with subtle allusions threaded through the work’s exuberant patterning and cute miniatures. Slyly indicting power relations rooted in our overloaded image culture and its seemingly benign everyday minutiae, Icecold’s Neo-Dada-esque irony and critique of modern life is, crucially, tempered by sincerity.
Art historical allusions are central to this dialogue: to the Gee’s Bend quilters or legendary artists like Janet Olivia Henry, Howardena Pindell, Raymond Saunders, and Stanley Whitney who received their due far too late in life. As Icecold constellates a star map of visual culture and symbols both collective and personal, their works ventures into otherworldly associations: ones that suggest the mystic poetry and songs of the universe (angel numbers, music notes and instruments, celestial bands of glowing light) that live in the insistently everyday (grapes, bunnies, fall leaves, New York ephemera, an empty storefront, or de-installed museum gallery). Together, these references form a collective archive that considers how meaning and art get made: not through a single authorial voice, but through the implicit beauty in the natural world the artists who came before.
Faith Icecold (b. 1989, New York) lives and works in New York. They will have a solo show at Romance (Pittsburgh, PA) in March 2026. Icecold’s work has been included in group exhibitions at Below Grand, New York (2025); Foreign & Domestic, New York (2025); Et. al., San Francisco, CA (2023); and Bridget Donahue, New York (2022). They have had solo shows at HOUSING, New York, NY (2023) and Smart Objects, Los Angeles (2020) as well as a two-person show with Caleb Jamel Brown at take it easy, Atlanta, GA (2023).