Basie Allen (b. New York, NY, 1989) is a poet and painter who mines his experiences living in urban and rural spaces as inspiration for his work. Through a process of layering text, paint, collage, and transfer, Allen seeks to mimic the dimensional chaos of a city or natural landscape. Allen paints his gestural abstractions onto camping tarps before transferring the image onto muslin and linen.

Allen completed his BA at Evergreen State College, where he studied Prison Reform, and his MA in Poetry at Columbia University, New York, NY. Allen’s work has been exhibited at Massimo de carlo, V1, Marlborough Contemporary, MoMA PS1, and Olympia. His debut collection of poetry “Palm-Lined with Potience” was nominated for the National Book Award in 2023. He has participated in residencies at Modern Ancient Brown, in Detroit, and the Mount Lebanon Residency at the Shaker Museum, New Lebanon, NY.

Javier Arce (b. Santander, Spain, 1973) is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work ranges from abstract scenes of nature painted on raw linen to assemblages incorporating traditional North African Fabrics and photography. Arce’s work draws on a variety of references, extracted from readings across the spectrum of plant philosophy, gardening, anthropology and poetry.

Susan Fortgang (b. New York, NY, 1944) is an abstract painter who has maintained a dedicated studio practice since the 1960s. She approaches each canvas as an experiment, working out a specific problem or trying something new with every painting. Through this mode of working, Fortgang has created decades-long series of works in which no two paintings are the same, nor is her practice codified. She creates paintings with a physical presence, often using thick layers of paint to create textured surfaces or iridescent medium so that her works create different optical effects depending on lighting or as the viewer moves in space.

In the 1970’s, Fortgang began using acrylic paint, creating work focused on systems. Using her experiences with knitting, crochet, and Bargello, she used these works to explore process, thinking about how each choice would affect the final painting. Taping off various elements, Fortgang created works focused on the grid. Her work of the mid-1970’s includes drips reminiscent of her earlier action painting, but by the end of the decade, she started to use only hard-edge lines to create works that look like weavings. Her work from this period was included in the important Pattern Painting exhibition, curated by John Perrault at P.S.1 in 1978. Fortgang has showed in important venues for contemporary art including the Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, CT and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In 2025 the gallery hosted Susan Fortgang’s first solo exhibition, Susan Fortgang: The Spaces in Between, which was reviewed by The New York Times.

Huê Thi Hoffmaster (b. Lancaster, PA, 1982) is a painter whose language of energetic lines and masses of color reads alternately as calligraphic script, abstract still lifes, and bodies in conversation. The son of Vietnamese and American parents, Hoffmaster now lives and works in Weston, Connecticut. He attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he studied with Jan Baltzell, Alex Kanevsky, and Bruce Samuelson, and spent his early career exploring the full spectrum of abstraction and representation; his current work reflects the formal breadth of his vision.

Oscillating between improvisation and meticulous rendition, the floral bouquets of Hoffmaster’s compositions combine delicate blossoms with heavy bursts of color. The arrangements alternatively materialize as portrait-like studies and playful scenes. Hoffmaster’s thickets of paint threaten to outgrow the boundaries of his canvas as he actively cultivates tension—between Eastern and Western aesthetic traditions, intuition and intention, stillness and action.

Marie Johnson-Calloway (b. Baltimore, MD, 1920; d. 2018) was an artist and activist who combined dynamic patterning, colorful abstraction, and autobiographical narrative within her paintings and assemblages. The daughter of a Baptist preacher and a teacher, Johnson-Calloway conjured memories of her childhood in segregated Baltimore through monumental images of family and community members and multimedia shrines composed of textiles and cherished objects. Her figurative constructions—presented alone or in complex tableaus—are cut from plywood, painted to achieve a three-dimensional effect, and clothed in recycled garments. Johnson-Calloway placed domestic and found objects alongside the vibrant batik fabrics and cowrie shells sourced during her travels to Ghana to honor the joy and resilience of her community.

Johnson-Calloway has been the subject of several institutional exhibitions, including Homecoming: Marie Johnson Calloway, Past and Present, Morgan State University, Baltimore, MD, 2006; and Marie Johnson Calloway: Legacy of Color, Museum of African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA, 2015. Her work was included in Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980, at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, 2011. Her work is represented in the collections of the San Jose State University, the California Museum of African American Art, and the Brooklyn Museum, NY, among others. A sought-after presenter and lecturer, Johnson-Calloway received awards from the Women’s Caucus for the arts of Northern California, the San Francisco Library Foundation Award, the Pioneers of African American Art, and the National Women’s Caucus for the Arts.

Matt Kleberg (b. 1985, Kingsville, TX) is an artist whose architectural vocabulary borrows from spatial and ornamental references such as altars, theater sets, and stages. While largely abstract in effect, Kleberg’s structural frameworks suggest locales of ritual or theatrical performance. The niches, beams, and arches of his compositions are rooted in the built world, yet are illusory spaces which do not recede in space and cannot be occupied. Appearing flat and graphic, upon closer inspection they reveal wobbly lines, rough edges, and spotted fragments of color formed by layers of paint and oil stick. The textured surface provides a depth that does not immediately reveal itself, but infuses his work with a kinetic tactility reminiscent of aged concrete or crushed velvet. Kleberg’s paintings are both doorways and barriers, vacant realms humming with the potential for fullness. This effect, and the absence of the figure or icon, mirrors an anticipatory relationship to divine presence – the creation and adornment of physical space for that which eludes physical form – and the continuous alchemy of elevating the mundane through architecture.

Ryan McMenamy paints seated male figures in graphite and gouache on natural wood panels, enhancing the negative space of the wood grain with soft shadows to represent the topographies of the body. These minimalistic portraits juxtapose the neutral tonalities of the surface with sharp graphic areas of color that subtly denote the subject’s surroundings and clothing. McMenamy locates an essential beauty and simplicity in his materials which foregrounds the quietude of his subjects. A graduate of Parsons School of Design, the artist also draws upon his extensive career as a fashion illustrator—working for brands such as Calvin Klein, Bergdorf Goodman, and H&M—in explorations of the relationship between fashion and image. He lives and works between Provincetown, MA and New York City, where he divides his time between illustration and fine art.

Jay Milder (b. 1934, Omaha, Nebraska) is a painter whose work is connected to European Sources Like Jeanne Dubuffet and the COBRA artists, as well as his travels to Morocco and Mexico. Milder became associated with a “second-generation New York School,” Figurative Expressionism. Back in New York, he co-founded, with Red Grooms, the artist-run City Gallery in their shared loft in the Flatiron District, giving Claes Oldenberg and Jim Dine their first New York exhibitions. Milder experimented early on with spray paint, and created “walls” of paint with his impasto surfaces; in this and his subject matter, he has been connected to graffiti and subway art. His work and personal symbology also references his lifelong study of Kabbalah and the belief that art can function as a vehicle for social commentary, humanity, and healing.

Milder’s work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum and the New Museum, both in New York; The Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA; and the Museo Nacional de Arte Centro Reina Sofía Museum, Madrid, Spain, among others.

Joe Overstreet (b. Conhatta, MS, 1933, d. New York, NY, 2019) was an artist and activist who pushed the boundaries of painting through decades of experiments in abstraction. He began his career in the Bay Area as a fixture of the Beat scene, living in the North Beach section of San Francisco. After moving to New York, he and his partner Corrine Jennings established Kenkeleba House, a gallery that has presented innumerable exhibitions of work by artists of color and women. As part of a generation of Black artists who fought for their visibility in an exclusionary art world, Overstreet was committed to creating paintings that stand alone on formal merit—independent of his identity—and taking an organizer’s role in providing exhibition opportunities to his peers. Overstreet’s work of the late 1950s to the mid 1960s assimilates his interests in Abstract Expressionism, Jazz, and African-American history. Many of his paintings are direct responses to the Civil Rights movement, racism, and the history of lynching.

Joe Overstreet: Taking Flight, a major survey, curated by Natalie Dupecher of the Menil Collection, is on view in Houston, TX, through July 13, 2025; the exhibition will then travel to the Mississippi Museum of Art. Overstreet was featured in the 2021-22 traveling exhibition The Dirty South, curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver for the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, VA. The work on view was recently acquired for the permanent collection of the VMFA. Overstreet’s work can also be found in the collections of the The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; The Brooklyn Museum; Art Bridges, Crystal Bridges, Bentonville, AR; the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; the Joyner/Giuffrida Collection of Abstract Art; Mississippi Museum of Art; Rose Art Museum of Brandeis University; the Rennie Collection, Vancouver, Canada; and the Menil Collection, Houston, TX.

Cybele Rowe (b. Sydney, Australia, 1963) is a multidisciplinary artist whose monumental bronze casts, clay sculpture and ceramic works are defined by an exuberant abstract language of flowing patterns, colors, and organic shapes. Rowe draws inspiration from nature, Aboriginal art, and the body.

Rowe takes inspiration from the landscape and climate of Joshua Tree, where has lived and worked since 2016. She found in the desert the perfect weather conditions for outdoor concrete and clay work. Rowe conceives of her work as responding to the energy vortexes that are present on her land, interacting with the surrounding environment and desert floor on a human scale. While much of her work reads as monumental, Rowe limits her practice to sculptures that she can build and handle herself. She builds her hollow freestanding forms over a matter of days, using a coil technique. Color is integral to the artist’s process, and Rowe applies layers of custom, hand-made glaze onto still-wet clay, allowing colors to absorb and inform the overall composition of her final works. She completes each work by erecting a kiln around the sculpture to fire it on-site.

Lauren dela Roche (b. Santa Rosa, CA, 1983) is a self-described queer punk feminist artist whose autodidactic approach integrates a broad range of references, including zines, European modernisms, and autobiography. While largely self-taught, her consumption of visual culture and art history allows her to draw upon long traditions of art history, remixing Egon Schiele’s line drawing with the influence of transgressive cinema, Persian miniatures, Greek mythology, and folklore into her own iconic, fresh style. Growing up in the Bay Area of California, and living for a period of time in both Seattle and Asheville, NC, dela Roche has resided in the Midwest since young adulthood and currently lives and works in St. Louis, MO.

In 2012–13, dela Roche was awarded the Jerome Emerging Artist Fellowship at the Jerome Foundation, Minneapolis. Between 2013 and 2021, dela Roche exhibited with Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis, MN. Dela Roche was the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant in 2018. In 2021, she was selected for the Bed-Stuy Art Residency in Brooklyn, NY. Her work is found in the collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the North Dakota Museum of Art.

Lauren dela Roche is represented by Eric Firestone Gallery. Her first solo exhibition at the gallery, No Man’s Land, was held in May of 2024.

Bruce M Sherman (b. New York, NY) is a ceramic artist who combines elements of figuration and abstraction in anthropomorphic sculptures. Sherman’s hand-thrown work joins flat planes and cylinders with stylized faces and disembodied expressions, maintaining a delicate balance between humor and reverence; surrealism and tradition; function and beauty. Sherman’s whimsical and totemic arrangements incorporate plants, hands, feet, and eyes, which act as symbols of rebirth, renewal and consciousness. While both celebratory and absurd, the recurrence of hands also references prayer. As the artist says, “working in clay is almost like a way of praying.”

Paul Waters (b. Philadelphia, PA, 1936) is an African-American artist whose work combines a thoughtful symbolic language with a highly intuitive and playful process. Waters 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 made from cut canvas shapes, which reflect his interest in teaching and children’s books, as well as both indigenous traditions and Western painting.

Between 1965 and 1972, Paul Waters made large-scale paintings in which painted and cut canvas shapes are collaged onto primed canvases. The silhouetted forms suggest dancers, birds, female warriors, and nature, as well as purely geometric, abstract shapes. They are lyrical works often stained with rich color that suggests naturally occurring hues and pigments. These works celebrate the mythical, aboriginal painting, as well as the work of Matisse.

Waters was the subject of a solo exhibition in 1968 at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum. He was included in several historic shows of African-American artists in the 1970s, including Afro American Artists: New York and Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA (1970); and Contemporary Black Art: A Selected Sampling, Florida International University, Miami, FL (1977). He was most recently featured in the exhibition Edges of Ailey at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 2024–25. He is represented by Eric Firestone Gallery where he was the subject of a major solo presentation in 2022, Paul Waters: In the Beginning, Paintings from the 1960s and 70s. Paul Waters still lives and works on the Bowery today.