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Tower of Babel
cassie renée peña

August 01 – September 14, 2025

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(Philadelphia, PA) Fuller Rosen Gallery is delighted to present Tower of Babel, a solo exhibition by cassie renée peña. Tower of Babel features new ceramic and furniture pieces highlighting renée peña’s passion for ancient and contemporary cultures. renée peña’s art practice investigates the spaces where disparate civilizations intersect and how physical artifacts show cultural transition and transference.

Join us for the opening reception of Tower of Babel at Fuller Rosen Gallery on First Friday, August 01 from 6-9 pm.

cassie renée peña, from Tower of Babel, 2025

In Tower of Babel, renée peña wrestles against the prevailing Judeo-Christian and Hellenistic depictions of Babylon as evil-sinful-foreign-oppressive-other. Colonial Europe and its subsidiary, the United States, have primarily looked to ancient Greece and Rome as its cultural progenitors ignoring Indigenous tribal cultures that contain most of Europe’s ancestral heritage. This is due to Hellenistic and Roman colonial control and its policy of suppressing or erasing Indigenous cultures. By creating re-imagined archaeological artifacts, renée peña envisions a culturally pluralistic present and future; a rejection of ethno-nationalism and imagining a West that could have been shaped differently if Persia had defeated Sparta at the Battle of Thermopylae.

Tower of Babel materialized over a year in response to witnessing American and European reactions to the genocide in Gaza and to Demian DinéYazhi’s work at the 2024 Whitney Biennial. DinéYazhi’s piece, text on a neon light that flashes: “we must stop imagining apocolypse/genocide + we must imagine liberation,” called cassie renée peña to move past observation to conceive a different reality. renée peña recognizes the tension with historical revision and imagined utopias. She does not want to ignore and minimize the current reality that land, artifacts, and lives are stolen today in the name of European supremacy as expressed through the ongoing genocide in historical Palestine, Sudan, against Armenians in Turkey, and in other countless ways in a mutitude of countries.

cassie renée peña, from Tower of Babel, 2025

For the creation of forms, renée peña looks to the text Ancient Pottery of the Holy Land: From Its Beginnings in the Neolithic Period to the End of the Iron Age by Dr. Ruth Amiran, Field Archaeologist of the Israel Museum. Published by Rutgers University Press in 1970, Ancient Pottery of the Holy Land is a dense archaeological record of pottery forms excavated from the Levant and Middle East. Through the practice of recreating these forms with the intention of borrowing and blending them with Hellenistic and modern European motifs, renée peña crafts a familiar but alternative world.

cassie renée peña, from Tower of Babel, 2025

The images of mass graves in Gaza scar renée peña’s mind and she reflects this through the covering of forms. This act notes the current reality of ancient and historical artifacts—that they are not only used as ethno-nationalistic trophies, but are hidden, covered, buried, and destroyed. Only a small portion of looted and stolen cultural history is ever repatriated.

The political turmoil between the United States, Israel, and Iran is a continuation of the surface story of Babel and Babylon. Babylon was the world capital for several empires, including the Assyrian and Persian Empires, until the rise of the Hellenistic world. In Judaism, Babylon symbolizes an oppressor and in Christianity, Babylon came to symbolize worldliness and evil. Until the historical city of Babylon was discovered, Europeans depicted Babylon as an “Oriental” amalgamation of the Egyptian, Greek, and Ottoman Empires.

For renée peña, the practice of creating an imagined past, the mythical Tower of Babel, represents an ideal of humanity; one where the cultures and languages meant to divide us are shared and celebrated. In this exhibition, collectivism and pluralism dismantle the Western mythologies that are meant to explain who is noble and who is barbaristic. renée peña provides audiences an opportunity to re-locate themselves in an egalitarian and democratic world that belongs to all cultures across all times.

cassie renee peña (b. 1984, Camp LeJeune, NC, she/her) is a self-taught artist whose focus is on functional-conceptual sculptures that evoke existential and spiritual themes through the practice of manipulating and recontextualizing pre-historic and historic ceramic forms. Bridging the relationship between use and meaning in craft, her art practice is meant as a form of both play and ritual-making rooted in the history of anti-capitalist art craft. renée peña has shown work in Philadelphia at the Clay Studio, Vicarious Love, Utility Works, and in other artist created arts spaces. She has also exhibited in North Carolina in various galleries and art spaces across the High Country.

Her work has been published in Heads Magazine and Art Maze Magazine. In conjunction with her studio practice, renée peña works in public health. She received her MA in Clinical Mental Health Counseling and Expressive Arts Therapy from Appalachian State University. renée peña currently resides in Philadelphia, PA.

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Tower of Babelcassie renée peña

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Tower of Babelcassie renée peña

Ryan Patrick Krueger

Current
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Tower of Babel
cassie renée peña

Upcoming
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Tower of Babel
cassie renée peña