John Paul Morabito: Our Lady of the Bathhouse

Patricia Sweetow Gallery Los Angeles · Downtown LA

Exhibition on view: Nov 1, 2025 - Dec 13, 2025

Patricia Sweetow Gallery presents Our Lady of the Bathhouse by John Paul Morabito, featuring beaded jacquard tapestries that transform Renaissance Madonna and Child imagery with vibrant drag colors and gold fringe. Rooted in their Bronx Italian-American upbringing, Morabito reclaims sacred art through camp, eroticism, and queer allegory. The series includes For Félix, a 7’ tribute to Felix González-Torres and generations lost to AIDS, celebrating desire, memory, and resistance.

Artist

John Paul Morabito

John Paul Morabito is a leading scholar-artist bridging performance, queer theory, and rhetoric. A Northwestern University professor, his work explores the rhetoricity of the body, queer archives, and the politics of aesthetics. He creates powerful performances that transform fragments of queer history, particularly the legacies of HIV/AIDS, into live, critical encounters. Morabito’s practice erases the line between theory and art, championing embodied knowledge as a vital form of cultural critique and historical transmission.

Works

John Paul Morabito: Our Lady of the Bathhouse

John Paul Morabito

Artworks in this exhibition