Eric Firestone Gallery is pleased to participate in Art Basel Miami Beach 2025. The presentation layers contemporary and historic artists, reflecting the gallery’s commitment to developing scholarship on significant American artists, and foregrounding aesthetic connections across decades. 

The gallery’s presentation highlights the work of women artists and post-World War II abstraction. These works will be shown alongside contemporary artists with related approaches. On view are rare early paintings by Pat Passlof (1928–2011), made in the period when she lived on East Tenth Street, a highly concentrated New York block where Abstract Expressionist painters and sculptors gathered on stoops and created artist-run spaces to show their work. Elise Asher’s (1912–2004) work of this period utilizes expressive, energetic linear brushwork; by 1961, Asher introduced text from her own poetry into the painting—creating atmospheric clouds of color which blur the line between brushwork and writing. These thickets of paint are echoed in recent work by Huê Thi Hoffmaster (b. 1982): abstracted and calligraphic depictions of branches and blooms, growing amidst atmospheric grounds. Also on view is early work by Miriam Schapiro (1923-2015), pioneer of the Women’s Art Movement, who began her career as a New York School artist with rich, sensuous abstractions that explored feminine interiority and women’s roles. Contemporary paintings by Colleen Herman (b. 1982) carry the tradition of abstract painting and reflect seasonal changes and time spent in the Hudson Valley and Oaxaca, Mexico, and a call-and-response between nature, artist, and paint. Nina Yankowitz (b. 1946) has created dynamic works of abstraction, imbued with her formal and social justice concerns, throughout her six-decade career. Her multi-media work and installational paintings are the subject of a retrospective organized by the Saint Petersburg Museum of Art, currently on view at the Parrish Museum on the East End of Long Island.

The work of Black abstractionists Joe Overstreet (1933-2019) and Paul Waters (b. 1936) will be featured. They were peers who shared a commitment to their community of artists on the Lower East Side of New York. A monumental Mandala painting from Joe Overstreet’s Flight Pattern series is a centerpiece of the presentation. This work, Indian Sun, was known from a historic portrait photograph of the artist in Time Magazine, 1970. Recently discovered in the artist’s studio, it was previously assumed to be lost. It will be on view for the first time in over five decades. The presentation coincides with Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight, a survey exhibition of his work organized by the Menil Collection, Houston, now on view at the Mississippi Museum of Art, as well as a survey exhibition at Eric Firestone Gallery in New York. Paul Waters (b. 1936) also uses geometry and primordial forms in his experimental works. He exclusively uses his hands and fingers to apply paint, and a pair of scissors as his “drawing” tool. His canvases are filled with repeated silhouettes of natural patterns, flowers, and birds, made from cut canvas shapes.

Two significant women artists—Sari Dienes (1898–1992) and Jeanne Reynal (1903–1983)—who each form important links between European Surrealism and experimental American art, will be highlighted. Reynal, who worked in Paris in the 1930s, was a mosaicist who hand-cut her tiles and set them on a bias to reflect and create light. Her experiments with an intuitive process, rooted in Surrealist ideas, challenge our expectations of the ancient medium. Dienes was a groundbreaking artist known for her mixed media frottage paintings (painterly rubbings from textured surfaces) of rural and urban environments. Dienes believed that raw materials and forms exist everywhere, and her goal was to see and reflect them. This attitude influenced her younger contemporaries and friends in New York, including Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. In September, the gallery announced the representation of Dienes, and her work will be the subject of a solo exhibition opening in January 2026 at Eric Firestone Gallery’s New York location.