Melissa Joseph: Casserole Culture

Charles Moffett is pleased to present Casserole Culture, a solo exhibition of new works by New York-based multidisciplinary artist Melissa Joseph. This marks Joseph’s first solo exhibition organized by Charles Moffett since the artist officially joined the program in 2025. Working largely with found objects and needle felting on industrial felt — a process in which the artist binds the wool fibers together using a sharp, barbed needle —  Joseph’s practice alludes to the labors of women and the history and legacy of craft, as well as her personal experiences as a biracial American and the cultural mashups of diasporic life. Bringing together 15 new works, ranging from small mixed-media sculptures to wall-spanning needle-felted paintings, Casserole Culture testifies to the hardwon resiliency, ingenuity, and tender familial care that molded the artist’s origins in America’s midwest.  Born in Saint Marys, Pennsylvania to a mother from Pittsburgh with Irish roots and a father from Kerala, India, the artist’s work has long explored themes of family history and human connection. With her newest exhibition, Joseph excavates the power of place and the importance of regionalism to identity, particularly when the prevailing demographics or politics of a place might eschew the physical bodies living there.

Joseph landed upon the term “Casserole Culture” years ago when trying to explain her  experience growing up in rural America. For her, the phrase neither glorifies nor disparages; but rather, simply encapsulates the hardy, resourceful and community-minded tenets that surrounded her as a child and that remain an integral part of her life today. In 2022, anticipating the phrase may one day be of particular personal importance but uncertain exactly how, the artist even created a “Casserole Culture” website and Instagram account. Four years later, this exhibition marks what Joseph hopes is the first of many “Casserole Culture” projects.

While found objects, from abandoned wood fragments to stone-forged forks, recur among the works on view here, Casserole Culture also prominently showcases the artist’s rigorous pursuit of new realms for her needle-felted paintings. Spanning as vast as 8 x 10 feet, Joseph’s felted paintings compel the viewer to step back to absorb the full composition, engaging one in a visual and physical exchange akin to a traditional history painting or expansive landscape. Though she’s working with textiles, for Joseph, her approach to picture-making feels remarkably painterly, her needle acts akin to the paint brush, her felted wools to a  richly-hued palette.

For many works in the exhibition, the artist returned to her treasured wellspring of archival family photos, finding herself pulled toward photos that captured interior spaces, quiet moments, and seemingly banal vignettes—the instants that customarily go unnoticed yet together comprise a life. While rarely do people appear in these compositions, their nearby presence is palpable—in her father’s feathered-adorned hat left resting on a bedroom dresser, a dining room left empty after a birthday party, spoons placed in bowls of hot curries ready to serve. Alongside her domestic interiors and still-lifes, Joseph captures the rituals of the journey to and from home: the animal-crossing road signs that mark she's close to Saint Marys; the Fort Pitt Tunnel, traversed on the return from her grandparents' house in Pittsburgh; her father’s car ready to back out of the snow-covered driveway.  With each scene rendered in such personal detail, and through her painterly attention to the essential qualities of the light, colors, materials, scents, and sounds that animate each environment, the artist transports us to her hometown in its full melancholic beauty.

Since the passing of her mother in 2024, Joseph has struggled to create artworks visualizing her family. In many ways, Casserole Culture witnesses an artist striving to solidify an illusive place and time rooted in a sincere and steadfast commitment to community.  Even if the people themselves may elude the artist’s hand, she captures the spaces they enliven, the unremarkable yet prized moments that shape our lives. By generously sharing those spaces and moments with us, Joseph’s compositions beckon our own reflection on the mystifying powers of intergenerational storytelling — are we remembering the story of something or the event itself? Why do certain stories, customs, images, objects, places, even smells linger within us, and how do they define a sense of self? Are we good neighbors? Rendered through powerful vulnerability and a raw, self-reflective gaze, Joseph’s works are at once deeply personal yet also comfortingly familiar, touching upon the universal notions that make us human.

Melissa Joseph (b. 1980, Saint Marys, Pennsylvania; lives and works in New York, New York.; MFA Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 2018; MAT in Art Education from the Rhode Island School of Design, 2008; AAS in Textile Surface Design from Fashion Institute of Technology, 2006 ; BA New York University Individualized Study 2003.) Joseph first studied textile surface design at the Fashion Institute of Technology and worked as a textile designer for several years before embarking on a teaching career. Following her time in education, Joseph earned her MFA degree from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, PA. Her unique process combines a lifetime of diverse creative training, learnings, and experiences, from childhood crafting to academic painting.  Beginning with her own memories, treasured family photos, and untold histories, she takes found objects and accessible materials traditionally dismissed by the fine art world and translates them into captivating new forms. 

Joseph’s work has been shown at the Brooklyn Museum, Delaware Contemporary, Woodmere Art Museum, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, MOCA Arlington, Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, List Gallery at Swarthmore College, ICA San Francisco, and at Rockefeller Center presented by Art Production Fund. She has participated in residencies including Dora Maar House, Cove Park, Greenwich House Pottery, Artpace, Dieu Donné Workspace Residency, The Textile Arts Center, Fountainhead, the Archie Bray Foundation for Ceramic Arts, and the Museum of Arts and Design. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Akron Art Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Ruby City, the RISD Museum, ICA Miami, and the Flint Institute of Arts. She is the recipient of the 2025 UOVO Prize by the Brooklyn Museum and a regular contributor to BOMB Magazine.