Upstate Gnarly!

Patricia Ayres (b. New York) is a New York-based artist whose practice engages with materiality, the body, and psychological space. She holds an AAS from the Fashion Institute of Technology, a BFA from Brooklyn College, an MFA from Hunter College, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2019.

Ayres has presented solo exhibitions at Mendes Wood DM, New York (2023); Matthew Brown Gallery, Los Angeles (2021, 2024); and Tank Shanghai, China (2024). Her work has also been featured in Singular Views: 25 Artists at the Rubell Museum, Washington, D.C. (2023), and in New Acquisitions at the Rubell Museum, Miami (2022). She will debut a solo exhibition at Mendes Wood DM, Brussels in 2025.

Upcoming group shows include the SITE SANTA FE 12th International, curated by Cecilia Alemani (2025), and Invisible Luggage at Historic Hampton House, Miami (2025). Recent group exhibitions include Toward the Celestial at ICA Miami (2024); Flesh & Flowers at No Name Creative Projects, Paris (2023); Field of Vision at Zuzeum, Riga, Latvia (2023); and House in Motion at de la Cruz Collection, Miami (2023).

Ayres has been awarded residencies at Dieu Donné, Shandaken: Storm King, Fountainhead, MASS MoCA, and The Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program. She received the UrbanGlass Fellowship (2023), a NYFA Fellowship in Craft/Sculpture (2020), and was a Rema Hort Mann Foundation nominee (2019).

Her work is in the collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Rubell Museum; Bunker Artspace; TANK Shanghai; Muzeum Susch, Switzerland; and Zuzeum, Latvia.

Portrait photo credit: Kunning Huang

Artist’s website

Jordan Belson (1926-2011) was an American artist and filmmaker. Of his influences, Belson has said: "Over the years I have been interested in, and influenced by, many subjects – yoga, Buddhism, mandalas, Indian holy men, Tibetan mysticism, theosophy, Egyptology, Rosicrucianism, Gurdjieff and Rodney Collin, Kabbalah, Jung, magic, Tantra, alchemy, symbolism, astronomy, Japanese mon design, Arabic patterns, Non-Objective art, optical phenomena, science imagery, surrealism, visual art (all kinds, ancient through modern) and Romantic classical music... to mention a few."  Over the course of six decades, Belson rigorously explored these subjects in his art.  While Belson is best known for making films, he made a significant body of two-dimensional works and kinetic sculptures from the 1940s until his death in 2011. Like his films, his graphic art brings aesthetic, spiritual, and sensual experiences to the viewer, reflecting his deep interest in sacred art, cosmology and cosmogenesis. 

At the vanguard of the Bay Area art scene, Belson worked with his friend Harry Smith from 1948 - 52; they shared support and patronage from Hilla Rebay, one of the founders of the Guggenheim Museum, where Belson had his first exhibition of paintings in 1948. Belson also worked with Bruce Conner in 1953 at Lionel Ziprin’s Inkweed Arts when he lived briefly in NYC. Belson's 1957-59 "Vortex Concerts," staged with sound artist Henry Jacobs at the Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco, were an important influence on the multimedia "expanded cinema" of the 1960s, as was his singular body of film work. In the 1980s Belson renounced most public involvement in the worlds of the art and film, when he began a fruitful period of near-seclusion, which he maintained until his death in 2011.  A Guggenheim Fellow and Ford Foundation Fellow, Belson also twice received American Film Institute grants.

Self Portrait, pastel on paper n.d.

Artist’s website

Ashley Garrett is a painter and interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the energetic interplay between landscape, perception, and inner experience. Her paintings, often made through intuitive, full-body movement, create charged spatial atmospheres where form emerges and dissolves—evoking states of consciousness rather than specific places. Rooted in a daily engagement with the natural world around her upstate New York studio, her work is shaped by sensation, memory, myth, and the rhythms of light and weather.

Garrett has exhibited widely across the United States and internationally. Recent and upcoming solo exhibitions include Psyche at SEPTEMBER Gallery in Kinderhook, NY (2025). Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at institutions such as the Katonah Museum of Art, the Torrance Art Museum, the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum, and Art Omi, and in international venues in Seoul, Hiroshima, and Copenhagen. In 2023, she exhibited at UNTITLED Art Fair in Miami Beach with SEPTEMBER Gallery.

Her paintings are held in public and private collections and have been written about in The New York Times, the Brooklyn Rail, Chronogram, and Dovetail Magazine, among others. She is the recipient of the Martha Boschen Porter Grant and holds a BFA from the School of Visual Arts. Garrett is represented by SEPTEMBER Gallery and lives and works in the Hudson Valley.

Portrait by Brian Wood

Artist’s website

Spanning a career of over fifty years, Brenda Goodman has relentlessly explored the physical and psychological limits of abstraction and figuration. Regarded as a “painter’s painter” for her inventive handling of paint, Goodman’s paintings range from thick impasto to thin veils of color, creating deeply interior spaces of personal confrontation and reflection.

Between 1994 and 2007, Goodman created a series of self-portraits which critic John Yau called "one of the most powerful and disturbing achievements of portraiture in modern art." The series combines her expressionist tendencies with figuration to reveal the innate vulnerability and power within one’s own mortality. Goodman's current work reflects an expanded exploration of the potentials of abstract figuration. Incised marks on the surface, new ways of organizing space, and imaginative uses of color create a new clarity of vision. The paintings invite the viewer into Goodman’s imagination, forming deeper visual narratives within the versatile materiality of paint.

Brenda Goodman was born in 1943, in Detroit, MI. She received her BFA from the College of Creative Studies, from which she also received an honorary doctorate in 2017. Goodman began her career as a member of the Cass Corridor Movement in the 1960s, before moving to New York in 1976. In 2015, a fifty-year retrospective of her work was presented at the Center for Creative Studies and Paul Kotula Projects in Ferndale, MI. That same year, her work was included in the American Academy of Arts and Letters annual invitational, where she received the Award in Art.

Goodman’s work is included in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, among others.

Goodman lives and works in Pine Hill, New York.

Artist’s page on Sikkema Malloy Jenkins website

As a child, I saw Jean Cocteau's 1946 film La Belle et La Bete on television. I remember sitting on the floor of our modest California home in utter amazement, watching the film unfold, in French no less. I was especially transfixed by the beast’s indefinite, hair covered body and lonely, human eyes. I am quite sure that moment was the beginning of my interest in surrealism and the transformational power of art.

I was drawn to surrealism again when I rediscovered it as a young adult. I found creative potential in its exploration of the unconscious and the uncanny, and I admired its attempts to liberate social conventions from conformist structures. I was especially intrigued by women's involvement in surrealism, and their unique images of sexuality, vulnerability, violence, and rage.

Recently, and I think in response to our fractured political climate, the complexity of women’s identities is overly simplified – dislocated by the narrative espoused by a reenergized Patriarchy. There is a palpable sense of isolation, of receding or being silenced, which can be seen as acquiescing to those dominating the conversation.

My work in “Dreamers Awake” is a response to the lethargy and hopelessness one feels at times when expressing feminist views. This work is a journey exploring the mythological figures of Daphne and Venus as symbols of transformation and self protection against neglect and abuse. I also consider the Harpy as both fearsome and fetishized figure – or simply a power girl – and see fairy tales as cautionary roadmaps.

My sculptural forms are elemental, made of wasp’s nests and paper. Prints and cut-outs of flowers have tendrils and roots which might flutter in the passing breeze. Silhouettes of the female body dissolve into the landscape or outline vast internal constellations. Fur is indefinite yet tangible.

I turn my attention to the marvelous in the quotidian. The mythical and primordial can be both balm and pointed confrontation to current events. Isn't the Chimera in a sense the glorious she-monster of our time – magnificent, self-protecting, and fearsome, with its wings and claws and fire breath?

Artist’s website

Judith Linhares earned her BFA and MFA degrees from California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, CA. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA; and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; among others. Judith Linhares: The Artist as Curator, a major exhibition featuring five decades of work, was presented at the Sarasota Art Museum, Sarasota, FL, in winter 2022. The exhibition included a curated presentation of works by Bill Adams, Ellen Berkenblit, Karin Davie, Dona Nelson, and Mary Jo Vath, highlighting the longstanding influence of dialogue between artists. Linhares presented her second solo exhibition with P·P·O·W, Banshee Sunrise, in 2022. Recent solo exhibitions also include Honey in the Rock at Massimo de Carlo, London, UK, and Love Letters from San Jose at Parker Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. Several works by Linhares were featured in the highly acclaimed group exhibition The Way I See It: Selections from the KAWS Collection, The Drawing Center, New York, NY, which was on view through January 19, 2025. Her third solo exhibition with P·P·O·W, The river is moving, The blackbird must be flying was on view in spring 2025.

Portrait by Amanda Mason

Artist’s page on PPOW website

Born in 1955, Messer received a BFA from Cooper Union in 1976 and an MFA from Yale University in 1982. He was appointed senior critic at Yale in 1994 and became associate dean and adjunct professor in 2005. He also serves at the director of the art division of the Yale Summer School of Music and Art in Norfolk. Messer’s work is in the permanent collections of  The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. He has received awards including a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Artist’s website

Referenced by critics as a pioneer of installation-art, this oft-cited label for the sprawling career of Judy Pfaff provides an introductory sense of Pfaff’s legacy, but proves limiting to the ever-changing work she has been making for decades and still today. Born in London in 1946, Pfaff received a BFA from Washington University Saint Louis (1971), and an MFA from Yale University (1973) where she studied with Al Held.  Her work spans across disciplines from painting to printmaking to sculpture to installation, but is perhaps best described as painting in space. These spatial paintings inhabit and transform their environments, becoming ad hoc homes for viewers and the artist. Drawing upon a wealth of spiritual, botanical, and art historical imagery, Pfaff’s installations simultaneously and without contradiction reference the austerity of a cathedral and the temporality of a mandala. Like a mandala, the life of Pfaff’s work is brief and burning, deconstructed and sections discarded after a show comes down. Each installation considers the specific spatial geometries of the room, the ceiling, the street out the window, so that no two shows are ever alike. This tenacious generosity Pfaff offers her viewers, in which she and her crew labor for months or years for shows that last days or weeks, sets Pfaff apart from colleagues in other disciplines who can rely on sales of discrete objects. Refusing to give narrative meaning to her work, this urgent and ferocious need to labor for the visual and tactile is remarkable in an era where language dominates artistic activity.

She exhibited work in the Whitney Biennials of 1975, 1981, and 1987, and represented the United States in the 1998 Sao Paulo Biennial. Her pieces reside in the permanent collections of MoMA, Whitney Museum of Art, Tate Gallery, Brooklyn Museum of Art, and Detroit Institute of Arts, among others. She is the recipient of many awards including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center (2014), the MacArthur Foundation Award (2004), and the Guggenheim Fellowship (1983). Pfaff lives and works in Tivoli, New York.

Portrait photo credit: Peter Aaron / OTTO

Artist’s website

Kenny Rivero received a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2006 and an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2012. Rivero has taught painting, drawing, and sculpture at the School of Visual Arts, Montclair State University, and Massachusetts College of Art and Design. He is the recipient of a Doonesbury Award, the Robert Schoelkopf Memorial Travel Grant, and the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant, and has been awarded a Visiting Scholar position at New York University.

He has exhibited his work in the US and abroad in venues such as the Pera Museum in Turkey, the Stedelijk Museum in the Netherlands, the Contemporary Art Museum in St Louis, the Pérez Art Museum in Miami, The Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling in New York, El Museo del Barrio in New York, and the Delaware Contemporary in Wilmington, DE. His past residencies include the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Program in New York, the Roswell Artist in Residence Program in New Mexico, the Fountainhead Residency in Miami, the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture in Maine, and The Macedonia Institute. Currently, Rivero is a Lecturer at the Yale School of Art.

Artist’s website

Carolee Schneemann (1939–2019) was a pioneering artist whose work spanned a range of media, including painting, film, video, dance and performance, installations, and writing.

Her art is known for its radical formal experimentation and critical investigations of subjectivity, the erotic and taboo, images of atrocity, and the social construction of the female body.

Although widely recognized for her work in performance and other media, Schneemann began her career as a painter in the Abstract Expressionist tradition. She once stated, “I’m a painter ... and I will die a painter. Everything that I have developed has to do with extending visual principles off the canvas.” These “extensions” led to films in which she painted, burned, and baked the celluloid; performances in which she drew while suspended from a harness; and video installations in which mops and other signifiers of domesticity were covered in paint.

Schneemann has been the subject of numerous exhibitions and publications throughout her six-decade career, including the retrospectives Carolee Schneemann: Body Politics at the Barbican Art Gallery, London (2022–2023) and Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting, which was presented at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg (2015–2016), the Museum für modern Kunst, Frankfurt (2017), and the Museum of Modern Art/PS1, New York (2017–2018). Recent publications include the book of interviews, From Here and Beyond (Kunsthalle Winterthur, 2022); a book of her early writings, Uncollected Texts (Primary Information, 2018); and the monograph Unforgivable (Black Dog, 2015), along with notable monographs from Body Politics and Kinetic Painting. Schneemann received a B.A. in poetry and philosophy from Bard College and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Illinois. She holds Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degrees from the California Institute of the Arts and the Maine College of Art. In 2017, she was awarded the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the Venice Biennale.

Carolee Schneemann Foundation website

Aaron Michael Skolnick was born in 1989 in Erlanger, Kentucky. He received a BFA from the University of Kentucky in 2012. He is currently based in New York State. Previous solo exhibitions include Under the Eyes of a Dry Mountain at MARCH (New York, NY), Between Two Suns at MARCH (Taylor County, KY), Your Voice Lying Gently In My Ear at Institute 193 (1B) (New York, NY) and Feel It on Their Faith at Incident Report (Hudson, NY) in 2019, A Landscape that I Know at Fierman Gallery (New York, NY) in 2018, Running Where We Stand at Glacier Gallery (Cincinnati, OH) in 2016, and Pick Me Up and Turn Me Round’ at Institute 193 (Lexington, KY) in 2013. His work is in the permanent collections of the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College (Saratoga Springs, NY), the University of Kentucky Art Museum (Lexington, KY), and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (Kansas City, KS).

Skolnick has been included in exhibitions at Venus over Manhattan (New York, NY), New Discretions (Hudson, NY), scroll (New York, NY), September Gallery (Hudson, NY), United Artists Space (Los Angeles, CA), Atlanta Contemporary Art Centre (Atlanta, GA), KMAC (Louisville, KY), and the University of Kentucky Art Museum (New York, NY). He has given guest lectures at the Speed Museum (Louisville, KY) and the University of Kentucky (Lexington, KY) in 2014, and attended the Maple Terrace artist residency (Brooklyn, NY) in 2018. Skolnick received the Theophilia Joan Oexmann Original Art Award and the Merit Award of Excellence from the University of Kentucky in 2012.  He has been represented by MARCH since 2020.

Recent exhibition page on MARCH website

Brian Wood’s paintings, often called visionary, are structures to hold wildly disparate feelings, thoughts, and images in dynamic equilibrium. It’s as if every thought that can be thought and every dream dreamt might appear in these relentless paintings. His images embrace both tender personal warmth and transpersonal chill. Using intense idiosyncratic color, the entire history of painting arises through Wood’s mark making – the many and various speeds and textures amplify as they converse. From fast gestural brushings to smears with fingers or sticks to extremely detailed rendering, Wood attends to every part of a painting’s surface until the full emotional and spiritual force demanded by the image is realized. Figuration and abstraction are not competing strategies here but are deeply integrated distinctions of consciousness, playful and generative. Objects and spaces interpenetrate and transmute, trading fixed identity for mystical union. In each painting, the deep past and distant future interleave in an eternal present, softening the hardened split between then and now and what’s to come. The paintings’ continuous and tensile space traces the depths of the “inner” world to the far reaches of the “outer” world – with no borderline.

Holland Cotter, in his New York Times review of a Brian Wood solo exhibition, wrote: “…[Wood] creates a kind of Symbolist world in which emerging into life and being devoured by it are part of the same inexorable process. As in the early work by Georgia O’Keeffe and Arthur Dove, the erotic and the spiritual are of a piece.”

Brian Wood’s paintings, drawings, photographs, prints, films, and books are exhibited internationally. Wood is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, National Gallery of Art in DC, Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Museum of Modern Art in Prague, National Gallery of Canada, LA County Museum of Art, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, Blanton Museum of Art, and many others.

Wood has had 50 solo exhibitions in international galleries and museums and has exhibited in more than 200 group shows including at the Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, Walker Art Center, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, LA County Museum of Art, Museum of American Art in DC, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Seibu Museum in Tokyo, Documenta in Germany, American Academy of Arts & Letters, NYC, and many others.

Wood's awards include the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, the 2020 American Academy of Arts & Letters Purchase Award, and numerous Canada Council Grants. Brian Wood was a 2019 Rome Prize finalist.

Portrait photo credit: Rick Wenner

Artist’s website

Jimmy Wright's Freeman Alley, Bowery studio is home to five decades of work, the most prominent of which is a series of large scale billowing floral paintings that reimagine the subject's meaning, becoming what the artist calls "repositories of emotion" and a drawing series that chart his engagement with the subculture of New York City gay life before the HIV / AIDS epidemic. The collection of work marks a distinct moment in the artist's early career, celebrating the counter-cultural scene of his generation in a formally diverse, visually potent, and pulsating portrait of a heady time.

Wright, a native of Fulton, Kentucky, born in 1944 and a National Academician, received an Honorary Doctor of Arts degree from Southern Illinois University in 2024. The most recent exhibitions featuring his work include a field of bloom and hum, Tang Teaching Museum, Crosscurrents, Speed Museum of Art, Looking Back: The 15th White Columns Annual, White Columns, When the Lights Come On: Queer Nightlife as Emergent Space, Brew House Arts, Queer Stories, Queer Spaces: Southern Illinois Histories and Queertographies, Sharp Museum, Identity - Held in the Light, National Arts Club, Queer Love, Stephen Friedman Gallery, Pieces of Candy, New York Life Gallery, Hupcap Diamond Star Halo, Corbett vs Dempsey, Amigos y Amigas, Palazzo Tiepolo, Vience and Apalazzo Gallery, Brescia, Flowers at the Fin de Siècle, Wonnerth Dejaco Galeria, Vienna. His solo exhibitions include Fierman and Corbett vs Dempsey, The Armory Show: Focus, and Emotional Repositories at DC Moore. Fierman and Corbett vs Dempsey represent him.

Wright's work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, National Academy of Design Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Carnegie Museum of Art, Hammer Museum, Speed Art Museum, Springfield Museum of Art, Arkansas Center for the Arts, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Butler Institute for American Art, and numerous public and private international collections.

He attended Murray State University on a Regents' scholarship from 1963 to 1964. He received a B.F.A. with honors from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1967 and an M.F.A. from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He has continued his involvement in arts education at the Ox-Bow School of Art, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Southern Illinois University, and Murray State University. He serves as president of the Pastel Society of America.

Artist’s page on DC Moore Gallery website