Charisse Pearlina Weston

Charisse Pearlina Weston (born November 6, 1988, in Houston, Texas) is an African American conceptual artist and writer whose practice spans sculpture, glass, photography, installation, writing, sound, video, and mixed media. Based in Harlem, New York, Weston investigates Black interior life, surveillance, violence, intimacy, and resistance, considering how architectural and ideological structures shape the ways Black people are seen, contained, exposed, and able to move through space. She holds a BA in Art History from the University of North Texas, an MSc in Modern Art: History, Curating and Criticism from Edinburgh College of Art, and an MFA in Studio Art with an emphasis in Critical Theory from the University of California, Irvine. She also completed the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program in 2020.  Glass has become one of the defining materials of Weston’s practice. She folds, bends, slumps, cracks, layers, etches, obscures, and suspends panes of transparent and smoked glass, exploiting the material’s simultaneous fragility, transparency, hardness, and malleability. Weston connects these properties to the precariousness of Black life and to the ways glass functions within contemporary architecture, surveillance systems, windows, screens, lenses, and theories of policing such as “broken windows.” Rather than accepting transparency as inherently liberatory, her work asks who is required to remain visible and who has the right to opacity, privacy, withdrawal, and interiority.  Weston describes strategies including repetition, enfoldment, concealment, withholding, and delay as “tactics of Black refusal.” These gestures recur not only in her treatment of glass but also in her photographs, poetic writing, and installations. Text and imagery are frequently etched into, folded beneath, or partially obscured by sculptural surfaces, withholding complete access from the viewer. Historical and autobiographical materials appear and disappear through these layers, producing works in which the inability to see everything becomes purposeful. Weston positions Black interiority not simply as something threatened by surveillance and anti-Black violence, but as a generative space of privacy, resistance, imagination, and possibility.  Weston has emerged as a significant voice in contemporary conceptual and material practice. She participated in the Studio Museum in Harlem’s 2022–23 Artist-in-Residence program, presented work in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, received a Creative Capital Award in 2024 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2025, and was awarded the 2026 Hermitage Greenfield Prize in Visual Art, which supports a new commission scheduled to premiere in Sarasota in 2028. In fall 2026, her work is featured in both Made in Texas at the University of Texas at Austin and the Toronto Biennial of Art, where her sculptural investigation of surveillance glass extends her ongoing examination of misrecognition, visibility, and Black refusal.