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.

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. 

Ashley Garrett’s paintings explore nature as a conduit to spiritual experience. Garrett received her BFA from the School of Visual Art in 2008. Solo exhibitions include SEPTEMBER Gallery (Kinderhook & Hudson, NY), Gold / Scopophilia Gallery (Montclair, NJ), and Hood Gallery (Brooklyn, NY).

Group exhibitions include Katonah Museum of Art (Katonah, NY), Torrance Art Museum (Los Angeles, CA), COL Gallery (San Francisco, CA), NURTUREart (Brooklyn, NY), Turley Gallery, (Hudson, NY); Cross Contemporary Art, (Saugerties, NY), Berkshire Botanical Garden Leonhardt Gallery, (Stockbridge, MA), Woodstock Artists Association and Museum, (Woodstock, NY), Tappeto Volante, (Brooklyn, NY), and LouiseNevelson Chapel, St Peter’s Church, (New York, NY), among others.

Her work has been reviewed in Two Coats of Paint, The Brooklyn Rail, Art Spiel, Caesura Magazine, Dovetail Magazine, and She Performs. Garrett also collaborates with poets including Billie Chernicoff, Tamas Panitz, Robert Kelly, George Quasha, and Lila Dunlap.

Brenda Goodman was born in 1943, in Detroit, Michigan. She received her BFA from the College of Creative Studies, from which she also received an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts in 2017. After moving to New York City in 1976, her work was included in the 1979 Whitney Biennial and she has had 40 solo exhibitions. In 2015, a 50 year retrospective was presented at the Center for Creative Studies and Paul Kotula Projects. That same year, her work was included in the American Academy of Arts and Letters annual invitational where she received the Award in Art.

Recent solo exhibitions were presented at David & Schweitzer Contemporary, New York; and Jeff Bailey Gallery, Hudson, NY. Jeff Bailey Gallery also presented a solo booth of Goodman’s work at NADA, NY in 2017. Recent and upcoming group shows include those at the Landing Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Gregory Lind Gallery, San Francisco, CA; September Gallery, Hudson, NY; and Hollis Taggart Gallery, NY.

Goodman’s work is included in the public collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; the Detroit Institute of Arts; Cranbrook Art Museum; and Wayne State University Art Collection. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Valerie Hammond maintains a fluid artistic practice, distinguishable for her organic approach and deft interaction with different mediums. In all of her work, there is play between the material and the immaterial, the physical and the spiritual: the dichotomy between what is seen and the sensation it provokes. The works inhabit a space she is constantly searching for, straddling the indefinable boundary between presence and absence, material and immaterial, consciousness and the unconscious. Her artwork becomes emblematic not only of the people whose hands she has traced or the subjects she is drawing but of her own evolving artist process-testimony to the passing of time and the quiet dissolution of memory.

Her work can be found in both private and public collections such as the Walker Art Center, the Library of Congress, The Fine Arts Museum Houston, The Progressive Art Collection, the Fidelity Collection, the New York Public Library’s print and drawing collection, The Chazen Museum, The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, The Grand Palais Museum, Paris and the Getty Museum. She is a recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, and has exhibited in solo and group shows nationally and internationally.Item description

Rooted in the California Bay Area counterculture of the 60s and 70s, Judith Linhares (b. 1940) composes folkloric, figurative paintings from confident, abstract brushwork, utilizing broad strokes and brilliant fields of color to gradually develop her subjects. Harnessing portentous yet quotidian symbols, her uniquely irradiant paintings celebrate the female body and communal experience. Fueled by the permissive, psychedelic atmosphere of the 1960s, Linhares continues to investigate the relationship between the conscious and unconscious – her dreams often providing her work with their mythic narratives, characters, and kaleidoscopic compositions that pulsate with color. 

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. 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.

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.

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 Guggenhiem Fellowship (1983). Pfaff lives and works in Tivoli, New York.

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.

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.

Nicola Tyson was born in 1960 in London, England. She attended Chelsea School of Art, St. Martins School of Art and Central/St. Martins School of Art in London and currently lives and works in upstate New York.

Primarily known as a painter, Tyson has also worked with photography, film, performance and the written word. In 2023, Nicola Tyson: Selected Painitngs 1993-2022 was published. In 2011, Tyson released the limited-edition book Dead Letter Men, which is a collection of satirical letters addressing famous male artists. Her unique archive of color photos documenting the London club scene of the late 1970’s — Bowie Nights at Billy’s Club — was the subject of shows, both in New York and London, in 2012 and 2013.

Tyson has mounted solo shows at Petzel Gallery, New York (2024); Sadie Coles HQ, London (2021); The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, St. Louis (2017); The Drawing Room, London (2017); Nathalia Obadia, Paris (2015); Susanne Vielmetter Gallery, Los Angeles (2014); White Columns, New York (2012), among others.

She has participated in group exhibitions at White Cube, Paris (2023); Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles (2023); The Modern Art Museum of Forth Worth, Fort Worth (2022); Capitain Petzel, Berlin (2022); Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (2021); The Drawing Room, London (2021); The Drawing Center, New York (2020); Susanne Vielmetter Gallery, Los Angeles (2019); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2018); Skarstedt, New York (2016); Neue Galerie Graz, Austria (2015), and Wexner Center for the Arts (2013), among others.

Tyson’s work is included in major collections such as Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and Tate Modern, London.

Brian Wood is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum, Brooklyn Museum, National Gallery of Art, Ludwig Museum, National Gallery of Canada, LA County Museum, Houston Museum of Art, McNay Art Museum, Blanton Museum of Art, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, and many others.

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

His awards include the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, NYFA & NEA Fellowships, many Canada Council Grants, American Academy of Arts Purchase Award, and 2019 finalist for the Rome Prize.

Jimmy Wright was born in Union City, Tennessee in 1944. He earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1967. After graduating, he received a fellowship enabling him to study art around the world and he traveled to Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa before going on to earn an MFA from Southern Illinois University in 1971.

Wright’s work has been seen in solo exhibitions at Fierman Gallery, New York, NY (2022, 2016); Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago, IL (2023, 2016, 2007, 2004); DC Moore Gallery, New York, NY (2023, 2001, 1997); Roger Ramsay Gallery, Chicago, IL (1997); Midtown Payson Galleries, New York, NY (1994); and Tavelli Gallery, Aspen, CO (1993-94). In 2009, the Springfield Art Museum, MO, hosted the solo exhibition, Jimmy Wright: Twenty Years of Painting and Pastels. He has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions across the country. Wright's work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Art Institute of Chicago; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Speed Museum, Louisville; and other public institutions. Jimmy Wright lives in New York City.