Bill Arning Exhibitions presents at NADA Miami 2025 Ice Palace Studios

Tuesday, December 2 through Saturday, December 6th, 2025.

Secrets—Censored/Hiden/Revealed

Alexandria Deters and Jean-Paul Mallozzi

For NADA Miami 2025 Bill Arning Exhibtions / Kinderhook will present a two artist booth with  Jean-Paul Mallozzi and Alexandria Deters entitled “Secrets-Revealed and Hidden”

Visual art tends to be better at revealing rather than hiding its subjects.  The basic impulse is to “show,” even when what is being shown is framed as a secret. In fact it makes the impossible subject of “secrets” ever more tantalizing.  Theses are two artists the gallery has worked with since we opened who have both moved into the area of considering what is hidden, by whom and why, and why a secret revealed is still a secret.  While one is drawing from his personal story — what he has been coerced to hide —and the other is wrestling with larger social issues of public figures and religious movements defined by their secrets, now revealed in tell-all articles, Netflix documentaries and art. 

Jean-Paul Mallozzi, the son of Cuban and Italian immigrants raised in New York City, creates intimate, close-up paintings of gay leisure and intimacies, as well as mental and physical struggles, often set at home in which he finds refuge with his partner and their cats. Highly stylized yet always based on his most vivid yet quotidian memories this consummate painter invites everyone to finds points of relatability with his search for pleasure and safety in an increasingly uncertain world. Queer life was once termed by Lord Alfred Douglas “The Love that Dare not Speak its Name” and even today the places that secret musty still be kept are numerous. 

Mallozzi’s earliest exhibited works has erotic energy exploding as light from hoodies, and then a series of the portraits of frenemies from his earliest Gay years gossiping as they queer bonded over Cuban coffees. Today Mallozzi is best known for beautifully painted romantic images that focus on the impact of his health and mental trials on his queer romantic existence in very explicit ways. After a museum show forced him to hide his genitals in a painting about his anxiety and self-consciousness while masturbating to avoid potentially traumatizing sensitive students, he decided to allow it and see how exhibiting the censored piece would affect him. He found the implications of self-censorship were not entirely negative and instead revealed to him the myriad ways in which we are always concealing and revealing aspects of our fundamental beings in order to survive and maintain our closest relationships. 

Alexandria Deters is best known for her deeply researched, ongoing series of embroidered portraits of female cult and religious leaders who have caused significant harm, including theft, inducing mass suicides and murders. After studying and depicting over 40 she found a few new field of study.  She has created iconic male religious leaders who assert themselves to be incarnations of Jesus. She depicts them with the quotes in which they reveal the moments when they discovered their identity as the reincarnations of the divine savior.

For this presentation we will present her research on the promotion of a sexual religious devotion, the cutely named Flirty Fishing that was employed by the Children of God.  This cult published how-to comic books given to their female members instructing them on how they could help the church by making themselves “Hookers for Jesus,” picking up lonely horny men and after sex trying to preach to these drained men, get them to attend a sermon, join the church or at least make a donation in gratitude- not really different than a John paying a sex worker even with the Jesus cover.  

Deters makes collaged and embroidered paintings of the comic book images she has managed find that are often quite funny like early 70s Playboy cartoons. That darkens when you remember these quiet young women were coerced into selling themselves to strangers for the Church’s betterment. 

When the cult tried to remake their image, rebranding themselves as “The Family International” they tried to destroy all the existing copies of these comic books to cleanse their image. Deters training and indefatigable nature as a researcher and her dogged desire to expose these soul destroying practices has made for an unforgettable body of work. 

Most cults have some sexual secrets within their organizing principals- and Deters has started researching for future works the highly sexual cult of David Koresh and the Branch Davidian’s - most of whom died in the Waco Bombing.  Yet few took sex-for-God as far as the Children of God whose founder believed in a very male-pleasure centered version of Freelove Movement. 

Deters works always provoke incredulous conversations about such a cult was ever possible and how many continue today. Since our current political moment is defined by both cult like devotion to a very flawed human and an attempted return to repression for all sexual minorities in a culture of hetrosupremacy its seems a very good time to consider what is hidden and at what cost are secrets revealed.