ROMANCE
NADA Miami: TD Bank Curatorial Spotlight
Faith Icecold
Dec 2–6, 2025
This solo presentation, sponsored by TD Bank’s Curatorial Spotlight for NADA Miami, features works by Faith Icecold. The New York-based artist, who also goes by faith**** is known for their highly idiosyncratic camp aesthetics and sensitive material language and attuned to a textured craft vernacular rooted: one that relishes in the handmade but moves between the digital and the physical, whether in tapestries “woven” from digital collage or tacticle image-transfer paintings speckled with delicate dried flowers, or densley beaded surfaces. Rebelliously ornamental, the work registers the theory and history of decoration as “merely” feminine, or dismissing the deep impact of adornment in rituals passed down over generations, like the Haitian ritual preparation of beaded necklaces for ceremony.
“New relic” is a phrase imagined by Icecold whose work draws from ancestral memory in spiritual altars and ancient musical instruments, or 19th century traditional jacquard weaving, to the experience of our contemporary world of our most intimate experiences always being on display, moving at warp speed as images circulate online and off. With imagery, pattern, and color rooted as much in dollar-store and internet “detritus,” memes and phone snapshots of natural phenomena, and art historical allusions to the Gee’s Bend quilters or legendary artists like Janet Olivia Henry, Howardena Pindell, Raymond Saunders, and Stanley Whitney, Icecold constellates a star map of visual culture and symbols both collective and personal.
Through juxtaposition and collision out of context, works with otherworldly associations suggest that the mystic poetry and song of the universe (angel numbers, music notes and instruments, celestial bands of glowing light) lives in the insistantly 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 shared labor of the natural world’s beauty, ancestral knowledge, and 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).