It is not always easy for an artist to meet the demands of public scale—especially when their practice is grounded in material intimacy, process and the translation of deeply personal narratives. But Melissa Joseph, an artist who has rapidly gained recognition in recent years for her use of wool felt in work that reanimates emotional moments drawn from her family archive, was up for the challenge. Even as her mode of work lends itself to more contained formats that echo the quietness of memory through touch and introspection, she accepted commissions at the Brooklyn Museum and art storage firm UOVO’s Brooklyn location that showcase her work in expansive form designed for broader public engagement.
Reflecting her rising visibility not only in the market but also in institutional circles, Joseph was named a 2023-2024 Artist Fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center. This year, she was awarded the prestigious UOVO Prize in partnership with the Brooklyn Museum—an annual honor that recognizes an emerging Brooklyn-based artist with a solo exhibition at the museum, a $25,000 cash award and a large-scale billboard presentation at UOVO’s Bushwick facility, on view through June 2026.
Throughout her practice, Joseph gently reveals the layered complexities of the diasporic experience—the tension of cultural displacement, inherited trauma and identity in flux contrasted with the quiet grace of care, the solace of memory and the universal human need for connection. At the center of her visual lexicon is her experience as a first-generation Indian American, shaped by themes of familial legacy, labor and migration. Her chosen medium—wool felt that is tactile, soft and quietly absorbing—collapses the boundaries between sculpture and image, comfort and discomfort. Already embedded within the material is a sense of care, a desire to preserve the emotional residue of the everyday from the restless churn of time and the unexpected effects of global and historical rupture. Her work has always been an exercise in testing how memory can be held physically, culturally and affectively across bodies, generations and time.
In her most recent work in Brooklyn, however, Joseph moves beyond a purely personal lens to open her narratives to a more universal register that reflects the fundamental contours of the human condition across place and time. The recent loss of her mother, once the most immediate site of grief, opened a deeper space through which she could access something broader—an echo of what’s happening around the world, and the ambient uncertainty of the present. “This gives me some motivation to get back in the studio and provides me with a bit of solace to be able to find inspiration to work again,” she tells Observer, when we caught up with her following the unveiling of her commissions at the Brooklyn Museum and UOVO in Brooklyn.
Joseph was approached for this dual-site commission in November, at a moment when these reflections were already beginning to shape her practice. The UOVO Prize and Brooklyn Museum exhibition required her to consider how to engage directly with public space and the dynamics of community interaction. It became an opportunity to expand and deepen her work’s more universal dimensions that are attuned to shared experience and collective memory and the urgent needs of a society marked by isolation, alienation and a longing for communal care and attention. Out of these considerations came the title of her immersive outdoor installation at the Brooklyn Museum, Tender, which encompasses the full expanse of the museum’s entrance staircase.
In approaching the scale of this project, Joseph drew on her longstanding fascination with the intricately patterned floor of Italy’s Siena Cathedral. Here, she appropriates the hexagonal motifs and shapes of the 16th-century marble mosaics, transforming them into vibrant frames encasing familial images of care and affection. Floating on a similarly radiant orange-saffron background, these intimate vignettes spread across the Iris Cantor Plaza, with printed photos of her original wool-felt works enlarged to reveal the labor-intensive technique and sensuous texture that define her practice.
“The idea that I could create a space where people might just stumble upon these tender images by chance amid the daily hustle and bustle was really the goal,” Joseph explains. It marked a departure from her previous work, and even struck her as amusing. “Honestly, five years ago I would’ve thought that as way too cheesy, overly saccharine and embarrassingly sentimental.” Yet in this particularly fragile historical moment, she feels the world is increasingly in need of connection and of deeper reflection on what it means to be human. Tender, encountered daily by people beyond the art world, encourages those kinds of reflections. “We’re losing our ability to really connect and even communicate,” Joseph adds, mentioning a recent article she read about how children are no longer learning to write and how that’s impacting their ability to articulate ideas and to express their feelings and thoughts to others.
The museum’s plaza offered Joseph a unique opportunity to create a monumental platform for connection and exchange that would impact an unusually diverse array of people. “I don’t think I fully realized how much people engage with that space on a daily basis, and how many different kinds of people pass through—people who have nothing to do with the museum,” she says. “You’re interacting with people beyond the art community.”
The process of developing this work ultimately became an exercise in connection and collaboration, as Joseph worked closely with the museum’s team, who offered key support and guidance on how to best engage the space, drawing on insights from previous commissions while allowing her practice and narratives to fully unfold and resonate within that context. This also gave Joseph the chance to explore another side of her practice, one grounded in working collectively. “In this difficult time, I’m really finding a lot of meaning in working together collaboratively in any way I can,” she says. “It just opens up new conversations about what could be possible. This ongoing conversation and exchange between people and visions is what can really open up new creative possibilities.”
Coinciding with the vibrant site-specific installation that wraps the museum’s steps in color, Joseph unveiled a monumental 50-by-50-foot mural that transforms the facade of UOVO’s 105 Evergreen Avenue facility and presents her signature needle-felted portraits at an urban scale.
It was only recently, through the experience of working in public space, that Joseph came to recognize the inherent universality embedded in the images drawn from her family archive. Viewers, she tells Observer, often project their own stories onto them, revealing a shared emotional landscape that stretches beyond personal history.
“These images from my family photo archive—of my relatives in India—felt like stories I was learning at the same time as fairy tales,” she reflects. “I grew up hearing these family memories I couldn’t fully grasp, just like the fairy tales I was read. They all occupied the same kind of mythical, storybook space in my mind, in a way, because those relatives were so far away.” In the very fabric of her process, we can recognize the enduring human impulse to affirm presence, leave a trace and claim one’s existential place through the act of making.
In Brooklyn, Joseph’s practice moves beyond individual specificity and into a symbolic realm—one that speaks to the potential of images to tap into something archetypal and therefore universal about human behavior, life and fate. Ultimately, her work gestures toward a shared plane of humanity where individuals navigate the same essential challenges—life, love, grief, death—and the ever-present possibility of healing and renewal, as a soulful existence begins not only in the personal search for meaning but also in the generative space of interaction and exchange with others.
Tender is on view at the Brooklyn Museum through November 2, 2025.
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