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Saki Sonoda:
Welcome to the Greenroom

Special Project, Future Fair 2025

May 7-10, 2025For our first exhibition at Future Fair 2025, The Ritual Division presented oil paintings by Saki Sonoda in her Greenroom series, which uncovers the backstage world of nightlife performers at the legendary Brooklyn nightclub House of Yes. Over the past several years, the artist has taken up residence in the club’s greenroom, where she sketches performers before and after their shows. She then transforms these sketches into vibrant oil paintings, capturing unseen entanglements of public performance and personal reality through her sensuous strokes and expressive use of color. Since beginning this project in 2021, she has become a fixture of the House of Yes community and continues to capture greenroom scenes of the people who have become her colleagues and friends. 

In many cultures—including Japan, where Sonoda was born and raised—performers have often been seen as messengers between the human world and the divine. At the same time, dancers, clowns, and drag and circus artists have long been marginalized in society, their work and lives challenging social norms as they show the complexity of human emotions and identities. Known as Brooklyn’s “temple of expression,” House of Yes is a refuge where joy and beauty are celebrated daily, and we felt it vital to exhibit these works during a time when the rights of women, trans people, and queer communities are under constant attack by the world outside. This presentation featured several never-before-seen works, including a pair depicting "communal cathartic screams" that took place in the LGBTQ+-centered venue during events in the wake of the 2024 election. Sonoda's series offers a tender vision of the meeting of public performance and personal reality, highlights the fluidity of identity in a space that centers queer joy and belonging, and celebrates the unseen labor that powers the New York City’s cultural heartbeat.
ARTISTS: 

Saki Sonoda