Jairo Sosa: Boomerang by CUE Art

JAIRO SOSA

Mentored by Hugh Hayden Presented by CUE Art

June 26 – October 18, 2025 CUE Art

JAIRO SOSA

Exhibition Mentor: Hugh Hayden Catalogue Essayist: Alliyah Allen Essay Mentor: J Wortham

Hoop Dreams Deflate series, 2024 Glazed stoneware 8.5 x 9.5 x 9 inches

Hoop Dreams Deflate series, 2024-25 Glazed English porcelain 8 x 8.5 x 8.5 inches

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Boomerang is a solo exhibition by New York City-based artist Jairo Sosa, nominated by Hugh Hayden. The exhibition presents new ceramics-based works informed by personal and collective memory. Sosa’s rigorous practice builds from the tension of slip-casting and press molding to compose a sculptural language attuned to the space between hope and collapse, ascension and return. The works in the exhibition echo nostalgic and familiar forms. Sosa brings them from the street to his studio, engaging in a process of abstraction, repetition, and fragmentation that coalesces into a passionate poetics of endurance. Utilizing meticulous systems of replication, he transforms these objects through a shift in materiality—interrogating what can be held, and for how long. An alchemical charge moves through Sosa’s gestures; water carries a consciousness, heat catalyzes strength, and together they draw form into being through forces both exacting and unpredictable. Even in repetition, the clay resists ease—its coarse surface presses back, leaving an impression not only on the work, but on the body that shapes it. Across this process, Sosa works with an embodied agility: a practiced responsiveness— and at times, a surrender—to form, friction, and volatility. Boomerang draws from these material logics to reflect on the looping trajectories of departure and arrival—on the ways in which aspirations of escape or success often arc back toward origin. Sosa’s sculptures, cast and recast, embrace recursion and accumulation. In the work, ceramic is neither fragile nor decorative; it becomes a resilient syntax through which to circumnavigate questions of inherency, survival, mobility, and the nuanced weight of longing for transcendence.

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Sosa’s works are not singular or self-contained. Presented in their multiplicity, they invoke reverberations of home, while also unsettling the assumptions embedded in homecoming. A sparrowhawk—a solitary bird of prey adaptive to the city—appears as a figure of vigilance and restraint, hovering at the edges of visibility. Candles often found at street vigils trace collective and ephemeral presence. Basketballs in various states of inflation and rupture are vessels of gravity, velocity, and illusion. These are the materials of lived proximity—objects that mark loss, precarity, and motion in shared space. Each form is precise, yet provisionary—imprinted with residue of its original and of those made before it, yet altered by recalibration and reaching toward something incomplete. Memory appears as sediment, as the source material of dreams and grief fractured over time. Boomerang is a meditation on resilience as a form of momentum shaped by return, variation, and accumulated force. Through the works in the exhibition, Sosa offers us an invitation to circle back to, rebound from—and perhaps even reconcile ourselves through— memory, history, and the unfinished work of becoming.

Installation view of Boomerang by Jairo Sosa, 2025

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JAIRO SOSA

ARTIST STATEMENT JAIRO SOSA 6

Jairo Sosa is a Dominican-American multidisciplinary artist born, raised, and based in New York City. He studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York. He went on to complete a Bachelor of Fine Arts at The Cooper Union for the Advancement for Science and Art in New York (2017), during which he studied abroad at the Universitat de Barcelona Escuela de Bellas Artes in Barcelona, Spain (2016). He also received a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University (2023). Sosa’s work has been presented in the solo exhibition Be True To The Game at Room 3557, Los Angeles, CA (2024), as well as several group exhibitions, including: Dark Matter at KatesFerri Projects, New York, NY (2023), Stand-outs: Selections from the Columbia MFA Program at Fredric Snitzer Gallery. Miami, FL (2023); 11:11 at At Peace Gallery, New York, NY (2020); and Traces at Mana Contemporary, Jersey City, NJ (2017), among others.

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I create works that teeter between the sacred and the worn, the hopeful and the tragic. Rooted in the observation of found form and rituals that shape community, my sculptures and spatial interventions become vessels of memory and artifacts of contemporary mythology that carry the residue of cultural signifiers and historic preservation. Though not autobiographical, my work is informed by my lived experience growing up in a working-class neighborhood in The Bronx, where survival and ascension was anchored by rootedness— and galvanized by migration and velocity. My sculptures, whether suspended or grounded, are immersive and draw out the tensions between flight and fall, the ancient and the enduring, and weight and ephemerality. My practice is a meditation on elevation, asking us what it means to carry weight and still attempt to lift. Drawn to rupture and circumvention, I capture the atmosphere of moments when purpose breaks down and materiality pushes shifts in meaning. By decentering function, I invite the viewer into a space that is slow—one where reflection takes precedence over performance, and where we are confronted by the duality of expansiveness and emptiness. The familiar is unsettled, and like a metaphorical boomerang, it returns altered, carrying traces of its undoing. In that soft unraveling, cycles of rebirth emerge, and we gain a chance to question, to mourn, and to imagine anew.

JAIRO SOSA

Hoop Dreams Deflate series, 2024-25 Glazed porcelain 7 x 6.5 x 8 inches

Hoop Dreams Deflate series, 2025 Glazed stoneware 7 x 8 x 8.5 inches

Hoop Dreams Deflate series, 2025 Glazed English porcelain 6 x 5.5 x 5.5 inches

Hoop Dreams Deflate series, 2025 Glazed stoneware 7.5 x 9 x 9 inches

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JAIRO SOSA

Installation view of Boomerang by Jairo Sosa, 2025

Sparrowhawk, 2025 Glazed stoneware 3 x 18 x 12.5 inches

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Installation view of Boomerang by Jairo Sosa, 2025

MENTOR STATEMENT HUGH HAYDEN 14

Hugh Hayden nominated Jairo Sosa for this opportunity. Hayden’s practice considers the anthropomorphization of the natural world as a visceral lens for exploring the human condition. Raised in Texas and trained as an architect, Hayden transforms familiar objects—often using wood with layered histories such as discarded trunks, rare timbers, or Christmas trees—into composite forms that reflect complex cultural narratives. His work challenges perceptions of identity, social structures, and our relationship to the environment. Hayden was born in Dallas, Texas in 1983 and lives and works in New York City. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University. Recent solo exhibitions include Gulf Stream at the Boston Public Art Triennial’s Lot Lab (2024), Huff and a Puff at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (2023), and Brier Patch at Madison Square Park Conservancy (2022), later shown at both the North Carolina Museum of Art (2022) and Dumbarton Oaks Gardens (2022-23). Other solo exhibitions include shows at the Rose Art Museum, Nasher Sculpture Center, Lisson Gallery (NY, LA, London), Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Blaffer Art Museum, C L E A R I N G (Brussels), and Princeton University Art Museum. Hayden’s work is held in numerous public collections, including at The Met, LACMA, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and The Whitney Museum of American Art.

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When I first met Jairo, he was an MFA candidate at Columbia University, the recipient of a fellowship that I helped to establish for students pursuing sculpture in the visual arts program. At that moment, he was a second year student working toward his thesis exhibition. We met for a studio visit, and I became acquainted with his practice. It has been fantastic to witness the growth, development, and expansiveness that have since ensued: vectors of time, space, and resources that have enabled his work to soar. Some of my thoughts about the exhibition: Musings on a lived reality in fragile forms The hybridity of familiar and technical Fairytales and dreams of a way out Hope and mourning Iridescent seductiveness Rubble and danger Power and soaring Somberness and smoothness A game of bouncing rendered impossible To imagine that this is the result of such an attempt A shrine, or a memorial? A candy I don’t know The ravages of war or underfunding Clay feathers Aspiration and danger

JAIRO SOSA

Installation view of Boomerang by Jairo Sosa, 2025

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JAIRO SOSA

Hoop Dreams Deflate series, 2024 Glazed stoneware 9.5 x 8.5 x 8 inches

Hoop Dreams Deflate series, 2024-25 Glazed English porcelain 7 x 8 x 8.5 inches

Hoop Dreams Deflate series, 2024-25 Glazed English porcelain 8 x 7 x 8.5 inches

Hoop Dreams Deflate series, 2025 Glazed stoneware 7.5 x 7 x 7.5 inches

TRANSCENDING UBIQUITY: PRESENCE AS A MEANS OF FLIGHT ALLIYAH ALLEN

Alliyah Allen is a Newark-based independent curator and arts administrator whose work explores the intersections of Black visual culture, community archives, and alternative art spaces. Formerly Associate Curator and Program Director at Express Newark, she has led major exhibitions and community-centered programs that foreground marginalized perspectives and sustain socially engaged practices by contemporary artists at various stages of their careers. Her recent projects include Blues People (2024), Willie Cole’s Art Interventions (2023), and the forthcoming retrospective In Dreamtime: Aljira, A Center for Contemporary Art, 1983–2018, opening at The Newark Museum of Art in 2026. Allen holds an MA in Modern and Contemporary Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies from Columbia University. J Wortham (they/them) is a sound healer, reiki practitioner, herbalist, and community care worker oriented toward healing justice and liberation. J is also a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, and co-host of the podcast Still Processing. They occasionally publish a newsletter with thoughts on culture, technology, and wellness. J is the proud editor, along with Kimberly Drew, of the visual anthology Black Futures (New York: One World), a 2020 editor’s choice of The New York Times Book Review. J is also currently working on a book about the body and dissociation for Penguin Press. J mostly lives and works on stolen Munsee Lenape land (now known as Brooklyn, New York), and is committed to decolonization as a way of life. This text was written as part of the Art Critic Mentorship Program, a partnership between CUE and the AICA-USA (US section of the International Association of Art Critics). The program pairs emerging writers with art critic mentors to produce original essays about the work of artists exhibiting at CUE’s gallery space. For more information about the program, visit the ACMP page on CUE’s website at www.cueartfoundation.org.

No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior written consent from the author.

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Hoop Dreams Deflate series, 2025 Glazed stoneware 7 x 8 x 8.5 inches

Walking between the ceramic basketballs arranged on the floor as part of Boomerang, Jairo Sosa’s solo exhibition at CUE, I felt as though I was on a distant playground, or the courts I frequented with my brothers growing up in Trenton, NJ. In kneeling to look closely at the surface of the balls, I could perceive their pebbles—the small, upraised dots that help players grip to dribble and pass. Some of the balls retained a perfect spherical form, and others were distorted, as if punctured, slackened, or deflated. A few contained crystal-like pools of glistening glass or ceramic deep within

JAIRO SOSA

their hollowed pockets, as if they were collecting water that had begun to shimmer in the sunlight. Glazed in idiosyncratic metallics intermixed with hues of brown, orange, and gray, the basketballs were so lifelike that they almost felt like an illusion, triggering memories that transported me back to recollections of home, and to coming of age in the city—an experience Sosa and I learned that we shared when we first met in graduate school. The basketballs of my youth, and perhaps of Sosa’s—were an object of childhood play, but also a symbol of hope and

Installation view of Boomerang by Jairo Sosa, 2025

possibility. Within the context of the exhibition, their presence provokes questions about our relationship to place and memory, especially in complex urban environments. What is the material of our dreams, hopes, and aspirations? Upon choosing a path through the arrangement of basketballs within the show, one encounters three mound-like configurations in which Sosa’s ceramic works are interspersed with various types of broken glass and shattered remnants of his ceramic slip-casting process. Shards of green with a partial Heineken or Corona logo peek through luminescent tempered architectural glass; thick pieces of dichroic and stained glass are contrasted by sharp fragments of ultra-thin scientific lab glass. Here and there, one perceives a wing of a bird, a candy wrapper, or a supermarket flyer announcing deals on Kraft mac & cheese and Scott toilet paper. Sosa

transforms this everyday iconography—what some might see as urban litter—into a beautiful and transcendent world. Atop one of the compositions and nestled within the corners of a column in the gallery sit abstracted altars composed of tall, slender ceramic forms cast by Sosa. Though they are materially distinct, one immediately understands their resemblance to the glass encased prayer candles often used in street vigils to honor and remember the deceased. Bathed in a haze of ethereal light, they gesture towards the longstanding tradition of community gathering at sites of grief and loss. Toward a back corner of the space, hovering just within sight, is a ceramic sparrowhawk, suspended from the ceiling and positioned as if it were undertaking a swift plunge into the field of basketballs and shattered glass that forms Sosa’s abstracted urban landscape. Cast from a plaster mold of a taxidermized specimen and painted in a deep prismatic glaze, the sparrowhawk is a reminder of the presence of non-human life in urban spaces. A solitary bird of prey, it is known to adapt to the city, vigilantly scanning for its food and watching for opportunities that allow it to thrive. While this particular sparrowhawk soars high in the sky, elsewhere in the installation, its peers have met a different fate. Through Boomerang, Sosa presents a materially rich installation of seemingly disparate elements that astutely plays with notions of brokenness and fragmentation. Tragedy is visceral in the room; its sensation is embedded in the shards of glass, the deflated basketballs, the remembrance candles, and the broken wings—symbols that conjure a relentless tide of structural violence and systemic racism that undergirds the urban experience, and that can dampen the agency of even the most willful of souls. And yet, Sosa stages interventions of light, movement, and materiality that do not allow for despair to take hold. Where there is fracture, a spectrum of iridescent glazes (with titles such as Solar Rainbow and Dark Star) shines through, and our gaze is elevated through lighting that diffuses a soft array of

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pinks, greens, blues, and yellows upward throughout the gallery space. The colors imbue the space—and the reflective surfaces of the ceramic and glass-based works—with a cosmic saturation and a gentle atmosphere, one that is contemplative, transcendent, and untethered to any one particular meaning or conclusion. The movements one must make to step between and around the constellation of floor-based works become an embodied experience where agency and intention are evoked and upheld. The subtleties of texture and abstractions of form in the ceramic-based works offer opportunities for the viewer to push beyond—or discover what else might be—as we return to the familiar. Boomerang unsettles the ever-present city, sublimating Sosa’s use of iconography into mythic registers and transforming the space of the gallery into a meditative site that protects our deepest desires and intentions. Within this space, there exists a sense of peace but also tensions and questions that are palpable. How do we stay in the game when the pressure is immense—when the forces of gravity deflate our dreams? When do we alchemize loss into something greater than melancholy or pain? What is at stake when freedom is jeopardized or lost? Do we endure, tolerating what’s given, supposed, or left behind—or do we surrender to uncertainty with the understanding that even predators might not catch their prey? Throughout the work, Sosa’s conception of mobility is present, yet fleeting. There is an undeniable reality, however, that something—or rather someone: a teammate, neighbors, family, or friends, is still present. To recognize, appreciate, or even revel in this spirit might take leaving oneself, pushing beyond what we survive every day. Through Sosa’s works, I found myself contemplating how time and space can both limit and expand how we remember, especially in a context as complex and rich as urban life. What may look like decay and brokenness carries stories of systemic power imbalances, but also of humanity—of struggle and perseverance buried deep within the structures and

Installation view of Boomerang by Jairo Sosa, 2025.

JAIRO SOSA

spaces families and communities have occupied for generations. Perhaps they are waiting to be unearthed and read anew. Boomerang has left me with the resounding call that we are not passive in this field of uncertainty and possibility. Although the environment may appear fixed, rugged, and often unwieldy, our narratives take up space, spurring presence and visibility as a means of flight. Through the simplicity of the everyday, we can come to understand ourselves and our histories as vast and connective, uniting across cities and time. Sosa’s work prompts us to persist in the promise to find and carry our stories forward, anchored by remembrance and care.

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JAIRO SOSA

Installation view of Boomerang by Jairo Sosa, 2025

Solar Rainbow series, 2025 Glazed stoneware Dimensions variable

Native Rock series, 2025 Glazed stoneware Dimensions variable

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Mars Crystal series, 2025 Glazed stoneware Dimensions variable

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Dark Star series, 2025 Glazed stoneware Dimensions variable

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JAIRO SOSA

Installation view of Boomerang by Jairo Sosa, 2025

CUE Art is a nonprofit organization that works with and for emerging and underrecognized artists and art workers to create new opportunities and present varied perspectives in the arts. Through our gallery space and public programs, we foster the development of thought-provoking exhibitions and events, create avenues for mentorship, cultivate relationships amongst peers and the public, and facilitate the exchange of ideas. Founded in 2003, CUE was established with the purpose of presenting a wide range of artist work from many different contexts. Since its inception, the organization has supported artists who experiment and take risks that challenge public perceptions, as well as those whose work has been less visible in commercial and institutional venues. Exhibiting artists are selected through two methods: nomination by an established artist or selection via our annual open call. In line with CUE’s commitment to providing substantive professional development opportunities, each artist is paired with a mentor, an established curator or artist who provides support throughout the process of developing each exhibition. To learn more about CUE, visit us online or sign up for our newsletter at www.cueartfoundation.org.

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STAFF Jinny Khanduja, Executive Director Jasmine Buckley, Gallery Associate Keegan Sagnelli, Communication Associate Xinia Okoren, Gallery and Production Intern Rain Xiao, Communications Intern Winnie Ni, Communications Intern

BOARD OF DIRECTORS Theodore S. Berger, President John S. Kiely, Co-Treasurer Kyle Sheahena, Co-Treasurer Lilly Wei, Secretary Amanda Adams-Louis Blake Horn Thomas K.Y. Hsu Steffani Jemison Gregory Amenoff, Emeritus

SUPPORT Programmatic support for CUE Art is provided by Arison Arts Foundation, Evercore, Inc; ING Group; The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation; The William Talbott Hillman Foundation; and Corina Larkin & Nigel Dawn. Programs are also supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council; and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.

Installation view of Boomerang by Jairo Sosa, 2025.

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