Museum of Contemporary Art Long Island Hours:
· Thursday & Friday:
2:00 – 7:00 PM
· Saturday & Sunday:
1:00 – 5:00 PM

MoCA L.I. is curated by PAC’s curatorial team, Sr. Curators John Cino and Beth Giacummo. Read more about MoCA L.I. below!

PAC • MoCA L.I. programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

Current Exhibition

October 3 – December 6, 2026
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 3, 5:00–7:00 PM

Melanie Berardicelli, Tanya Kaiser, Johanna Goodman, and Lisa Candela

Dis-dressed examines clothing, adornment, and the human form as carriers of memory, identity, vulnerability, ritual, and transformation. Across sculpture, collage, painting, and mixed media, the four artists consider what it means to dress, cover, preserve, expose, embellish, fragment, and reconstruct the body.

In Dis-dressed, garments and bodies become more than subjects. They function as vessels for personal histories, cultural expectations, grief, faith, childhood, fantasy, and changing ideas of self. Clothing can offer protection or impose identity; adornment can commemorate, transform, conceal, or reveal. Through four distinct practices, the exhibition looks beyond fashion to consider the psychological and symbolic weight of what surrounds and ultimately represents the body.

Following the untimely death of her older brother in 2020, Melanie Berardicelli turned to art as a means of navigating grief, faith, and remembrance. Inspired by the elaborately adorned Roman Martyr Catacomb Saints documented in Paul Koudounaris’s Heavenly Bodies, Berardicelli hand-tailors, embroiders, and beads ornate garments for resin-cast skeletal écorchés. Her works reimagine traditions in which the dead were lovingly dressed and jeweled as acts of devotion and honor. Through sculpture, painting, and embroidery, she gives imagined identities back to these figures, naming them for heroic people from her own life and transforming mourning into acts of remembrance.

Berardicelli holds an MFA in Painting from the New York Academy of Art and a BFA in Painting and Drawing from SUNY New Paltz. She is a professor at the New York Academy of Art and has taught drawing, painting, sculpture, anatomy, and art history since 2014. A former studio assistant to the late Audrey Flack, Berardicelli has exhibited at institutions including the Mütter Museum, Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, Woodstock Artists Association Museum, and Sotheby’s. She is also an experienced forensic artist whose facial reconstructions have contributed to missing-person cold cases.

In Crystallized Innocence: The Fragility of Childhood in a Consuming World, Tanya Kaiser transforms children’s clothing and comfort objects by encasing them in sugar crystals. Objects traditionally associated with safety, care, faith, and belonging become simultaneously precious and inaccessible as their soft surfaces harden beneath crystalline growth.

Among the works is a First Communion gown handmade by Kaiser’s mother, transformed from an intimate family artifact into a meditation on faith, protection, memory, and the passage from childhood into adulthood. Sugar operates throughout the series as both material and metaphor—evoking sweetness and reward while also suggesting consumption, excess, vulnerability, and entrapment.

Kaiser is a Cleveland-based interdisciplinary artist, curator, and educator working across installation, ceramic sculpture, mixed media, and experimental media. She holds an MFA in Studio Art from Stony Brook University, and her practice investigates bodily autonomy, religion, censorship, institutional power, and the ways authority is constructed and resisted. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and she currently serves as Exhibitions Chair and a Board Member for the Women’s Caucus for Art.

New York-based artist and illustrator Johanna Goodman presents work from her ongoing Catalogue of Imaginary Beings, a series begun in 2016 that now encompasses nearly 700 works. Drawing from more than two decades of portraiture and collage, Goodman constructs fantastical figures whose dramatically exaggerated bodies and garments exist somewhere between portrait, icon, fashion image, and imagined artifact.
Influenced by Magical Realism, Surrealism, Symbolism, talismans, idols, fashion, historical imagery, and contemporary visual culture, Goodman’s composite beings explore vulnerability, power, individuality, and the construction of identity. Monumental silhouettes, unexpected textures, and impossible garments transform the dressed body into something psychological, symbolic, and wonderfully unfamiliar.

Goodman is an internationally exhibited artist and widely published illustrator. She is a recipient of a New York State Council on the Arts/New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts and has received honors from the Society of Illustrators, American Illustration, and Communication Arts. Her work has appeared in exhibitions and projects with organizations including the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the Society of Illustrators, The Delaware Contemporary, and ArtsWestchester, and her illustration clients have included The New Yorker, The New York Times, Time, The Atlantic, National Geographic, the Smithsonian, and numerous international publications and brands.

Lisa Candela is an emerging artist based in New York City whose figurative work is rooted in her lived experience of the body. Her forms often appear contorted, stretched, elongated, or fragmented—sometimes in conflict, other times in harmony with nature—reflecting the trauma, tension, and shame imposed on the body. Her figures engage in dialogue with both art historical references and contemporary cultural imagery.
Candela’s recent exhibitions include Beyond Scale at Canopy Gallery, New York, NY; Women Celebrate Women at El Barrio ArtSpace PS109, New York, NY; The Lorax at The LIC-A Art Space at The Factory LIC, Queens, NY; Every Woman Biennial 2024 at La MaMa Galleria, New York, NY; and Transplants at Amos Eno Gallery, Brooklyn, NY.

She has participated in residencies at The Canopy Program in New York, ChaNorth in Pine Plains, New York, and the Byrdcliffe Guild in Woodstock, New York, in 2023. Candela received her MFA from The City College of New York in May 2023 and began her training at the School of Visual Arts and the Art Students League in New York.

The public is invited to celebrate the opening of
Dis-dressed at a free reception on Saturday, October 3 from 5:00–7:00 PM at MoCA L.I.
Programming continues on Saturday, November 7 at 12:00 PM with Coffee with a Curator, featuring exhibiting artist Melanie Berardicelli and an opportunity to explore the ideas, materials, and processes behind the exhibition in greater depth.

Dis-dressed remains on view through December 6, 2026.Special thanks to Crozier, our 2026 Official Art Services & Logistics Cultural Partner; Toast Coffee & Kitchen, our Coffee with a Curator sponsor; and Standard Rec, our reception sponsor.