Between the Lines:
A Digital Dialogue for Untitled Art, Houston, powered by Vortic
About the exhibition
This digital exhibition, presented by Vortic for Untitled Art’s Houston debut, celebrates artists pushing the boundaries of contemporary practice. Across media and geographies, their works spark conversations between the tactile and the virtual, the poetic and the political.
Curated by Michael Slenske
For 15 years, Slenske has profiled leading artists for major outlets including WSJ., Art in America, and The Los Angeles Times. He has curated exhibitions at Frieze LA, the Bradbury Building, and top galleries, and is preparing a solo museum show for Michelle Blade at Shanghai’s Powerlong Museum in 2025.
Artists 25
Artists 25
Works 30
About the exhibition
Presented by
Vortic & Untitled Art
Curator
Michael Slenske
Dates
15 Sept - 15 Nov 2025
This year’s selections build subtle conversations across media and geography. At Houston's own Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino, the optical precision of Carlos Cruz-Diez vibrates with kinetic intensity, while Pae White’s ephemeral structures from San Francisco-based Jessica Silverman Gallery explore the fragility of form and perception. Trevor Paglen’s lens (Altman Siegel) peers deep into the architecture of surveillance, counterbalanced by the poetic narrative paintings of Mason Owens (Megan Mulrooney) and the soulful realism of Reginald O’Neal (Spinello Projects). That tension—between the virtual and the tactile, the conceptual and the visceral—is baked into the curatorial DNA of this platform. Artists like Lita Albuquerque (Michael Kohn) use the digital stage to transcend physicality, playing with cosmic scale and meditative form.
John Brooks (Diane Rosenstein) and Nick Irzyk (KDR) dive inward, using color and gesture to navigate psychological space. Meanwhile, James Sterling Pitt’s sculptural forms (Seven Sisters) insist on the material, even through a screen just as Patrick Martinez (Charlie James) and April Bey (TERN) offer complementary visions of resistance and reclamation.
Elsewhere, local voices resonate with global reach. Randy Twaddle’s tangled linework at Moody Gallery quietly echoes the celestial abstraction of the late Dorothy Hood (McClain Gallery) and through the lens of Earlie Hudnall, Jr. (PDNB Gallery), lived Houstonian histories remain urgent and unflinching. There are also artists who interrogate the act of seeing itself. Houston's Francesca Fuchs (Inman Gallery) and New York-based Susanna Coffey (Serious Topics) ask us to slow down, to reconsider surface and gaze while Ana Villagomez’s painterly exuberance (Nino Mier), Yifan Jiang’s dreamlike logic (Meliksetian Briggs), and Aaron Morse’s mytho-futurist worlds (Philip Martin) suggest that storytelling remains a potent tool.
We’re also introduced to emerging voices like Sean Cairns (12.26) and Mustafa Mohsin (Rajiv Menon). In the end, this isn’t just a digital exhibition, it's a shared space where artists speak across borders of all kinds. The works assembled here don’t aim to resolve a narrative. They invite you to enter one.
Michael Slenske
Michael Slenske is an award-winning writer and independent curator based in Los Angeles. For the past 15 years, Slenske has been writing features about the art world and in-depth profiles of artists – from Ed Ruscha and Henry Taylor to Lauren Halsey, Danh Vo and Jimmie Durham – for publications including WSJ., W, Art in America, Interview, Modern Painters, The Hollywood Reporter, The Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Magazine and New York Magazine. His writing has also appeared in catalogs for Kenny Scharf, Jose Davila, Bari Ziperstein and Abraham Cruzvillegas, among others. In the past decade, Slenske has curated several notable group and solo exhibitions: at the Paramount Backlot as part of Frieze LA, at the iconic Bradbury Building in collaboration with NeueHouse, and at various galleries including Wilding Cran Gallery, Praz-Dellavalade, Nicodim Gallery, Jeffrey Deitch, Make Room LA, Megan Mulrooney Gallery, Diane Rosenstein Gallery and the Landing Gallery; and was a co-curator of DRIVE-BY-ART, a city-wide, public art exhibition in the spring of 2020. He is currently curating a solo museum exhibition for the LA-based painter Michelle Blade that will open at Shanghai's Powerlong Museum in November 2025.
Lita Albuquerque
About the artist
Lita Albuquerque (born 1946, Santa Monica, CA, raised in Carthage, Tunisia and Paris, France)
Since the early 1970s, Lita Albuquerque (born 1946, Santa Monica, CA, raised in Carthage, Tunisia and Paris, France) has created an expansive body of work, ranging from sculpture, poetry, painting and multi-media performance to ambitious site-specific ephemeral projects in remote locations around the globe. Often associated with the Light and Space and Land Art movements, Albuquerque has developed a unique visual and conceptual vocabulary using the earth, color, the body, motion and time to illuminate identity as part of the universal.
Beginning her career in the 1970s with works that intimately connected her to the earth, Albuquerque’s artistic evolution envelops the cosmos and the space between it and us. Her work emanates from years of practicing the exact science of Kundalini breath technique as well as automatic writing; both drive a deep investigation and scientific inquiry of who we are as individual beings on this planet. Albuquerque further connects to the exactness of physics by a meditation she, and astronomers, call the cosmic address. These daily practices are at the root of her art, precisely positioning self to cosmos. It is those discoveries she embeds in works of art that permit us, the viewer, to experience the connections she has made between these internal and external worlds.
Works presented in Between the Lines:...
Lita AlbuquerqueOn a sliver of sun, she travels toward the moon, 2021
Aaron Morse
About the artist
Aaron Morse (b. 1974, Tucson, AZ)
Aaron Morse (b. 1974, Tucson, AZ) received his BFA from the University of Arizona (Tucson, AZ) and his MFA from University of Cincinnati (Cincinnati, OH). Aaron Morse’s recent and upcoming exhibitions include, “Sea and Land” Philip Martin Gallery (Los Angeles, CA); "If the Sky Were Orange: Art in the Time of Climate Change,” Blanton Museum of Art (Austin, TX); Hammer Museum (Los Angeles, CA); Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley, CA); Santa Barbara Museum of Art (Santa Barbara, CA); Contemporary Arts Museum (Houston, TX); Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (Overland Park, KS); Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art (Logan, UT); Weatherspoon Art Museum (Greensboro, NC); Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery At Skidmore College (Saratoga Springs, NY).
Works presented in Between the Lines:...
Aaron MorseLightning Bronco, 2025
Reginald O’Neal
About the artist
Reginald O'Neal (b. 1992, Miami, Florida)
The gripping oil paintings of Reginald O’Neal depict narrative scenes influenced by his experience growing up in Overtown, a historically Black neighborhood in Miami. Reflecting on the complexities of the Black experience in his own community, O’Neal bases his works on original photographs and stories, both personal and collective. His work, characterized by a subdued color palette and a somber atmosphere—often addresses themes such as violence, marginalization, and loss. O’Neal’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States, and is held in the permanent collections of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, the Rubell Museum (Miami and DC), NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, Oolite Arts (Miami, FL), Jorge Pérez’s El Espacio 23 (Miami, FL), the Hort Family Collection (New York, NY), the Green Family Art Foundation (Dallas, TX), Marquez Art Projects (Miami, FL), the Mimi Dusselier & Bernard Soens Foundation (Brussels, Belgium), and the Jasteka Foundation (Jeffersonville, IN).
O’Neal received the South Florida Cultural Consortium award in 2019, was nominated for the Florida Prize in Contemporary Art in 2023, and has participated in residencies in Spain, Japan, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Bed-Stuy Residency. He has held solo exhibitions at galleries and museums including Spinello Projects, Vielmetter Los Angeles, and the Rubell Museum in Miami. His work has also been featured in group exhibitions at the Orlando Museum of Art, NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, The Bass, ICA Miami, EL Espacio 23, the Rubell Museum in Washington, DC, and Crisp-Ellert Art Museum (St. Augustine, FL); he has participated in Art Basel Miami Beach (2022, 2023). O’Neal lives in Miami, Florida, and is represented by Spinello Projects.
Works presented in Between the Lines:...
Reginald O’NealFrench Hornist, 2024
Randy Twaddle
About the artist
Randy Twaddle, born in 1957 in Elmo, Missouri.
Randy Twaddle, born in 1957 in Elmo, Missouri, is currently the Executive Director of The John Fairey Garden Conservation Foundation in Hempstead, Texas. He co-founded and founded the branding and communications firms, ttweak, and Small Town, respectively. Twaddle was a co-creator of the Houston. It’s Worth It. Campaign, a ttweak project. Twaddle has maintained a multi-disciplinary visual art practice for forty years including drawings, paintings, prints, sculpture, textile design, rug design, graphic design, and musical and spoken performance. He frequently collaborates with architects and designers on site-specific projects and commissions. Twaddle has exhibited throughout Texas and the nation since the early 1980’s. He has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Cultural Arts Council of Houston Harris County Artist Award, an Award in the Visual Arts, and an Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough Award from the Dallas Museum of Art. His work is in the permanent collection of the Dallas Museum of Art, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Brooklyn Museum, Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard University, Yale University, and other institutions, as well as numerous corporate and private collections.
Works presented in Between the Lines:...
Randy TwaddleThe Tree Is In Its Leaves, #1, 2025
Mason Owens
About the artist
Mason Owens (b. 1991) lives and works in Baltimore, MD
Mason Owens (b. 1991) lives and works in Baltimore, MD, and holds a BFA from the University of the Arts. Working in egg tempera on panel, Owens creates intimate, light-sensitive scenes drawn from memory and observation: rural landscapes, quiet interiors, and small-town vignettes rendered with pastoral clarity and an unhurried hand. His parallel work as a farmer, gardener, and landscaper informs his deep attentiveness to natural rhythms, seasonal shifts, and the subtleties of atmosphere. Owens has exhibited with Steven Zevitas Gallery and will present his first solo exhibition with Megan Mulrooney Gallery in fall 2025. His paintings invite stillness, reflection, and an awareness of the thresholds between interior and exterior worlds.
Works presented in Between the Lines:...
Mason Owenscards by candlelight, 2025
April Bay
About the artist
April Bay, b. The Bahamas, 1987
April Bey grew up in The Bahamas (New Providence) and now resides and works in Los Angeles, CA as a visual artist and art educator. Bey’s interdisciplinary artwork is an introspective and social critique of American and Bahamian culture, feminism, generational theory, social media, AfroFuturism, AfroSurrealism, post-colonialism Speculative futurism and Blerd culture.
Bey’s two-dimensional mixed media works and installations are from her ongoing Atlantica series. Bey incorporates fur, glitter, vinyl and woven textiles materials rich in queerness—to craft icons around the images of real-life figures from her community.
Bey’s work has been exhibited by and is in the collection of The California African American Museum, The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, The Center for Contemporary Printmaking, Escalette Collection, The 21C Museum, Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA, and more.
Bey is currently a tenured professor at Glendale College.
Works presented in Between the Lines:...
April BayA Diamond Didn't Become a Diamond When It was Found...A Diamond Was Always a Diamond, 2023
Yifan Jiang
About the artist
Yifan Jiang (b. 1994, Tianjin, China)
Yifan Jiang (b. 1994, Tianjin, China) is a Canadian artist currently based in New York City. Jiang received her Master of Fine Arts at Columbia University (2021) and her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver.
A project-based artist, Jiang uses elements of painting, animation, sculpture, and performance. Taking an irreverent approach to epistemology, she explores the grey intersection of the scientific, the psychological, and the magical. Jiang works by honing in on quotidian moments and combining them seemingly unrelated elements from multiple cultures and disciplines.
The artist has had number of exhibitions at Meliksetian | Briggs both solo and group, and recent exhibitions include Space City: Art in the Age of Artemis at the Asia Society, Houston (group), To your eternity - The 4th Future of Today Biennial, Today Art Museum, Beijing (group), a solo exhibition at Christian Andersen, Copenhagen, and Vacation, a two-person exhibition with James J.A. Mercer at the Roswell Museum, Roswell, NM among others. Jiang was a resident at the prestigious Core Residency Program at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston in the years 2022 to 2024. Selected exhibitions in 2025 include Second Body, David Kordansky, Los Angeles (group), Algorithms of Longing, Pace Gallery, Hong Kong (group) curated by Xin Wang, and AI, as Seen at the End of Ownership, Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou, China (group), as well as a project at the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University opening in September 2025.
Works presented in Between the Lines:...
Yifan JiangMalone's Window, 2024
Jesús Ruiz Durand
About the artist
Jesús Ruiz Durand (Huancavelica, Peru, 1940)
Jesús Ruiz Durand (Huancavelica, Peru, 1940) is a visual artist, designer, photographer, and professor whose aesthetic vision revolutionized Andean political graphics. A graduate of the National School of Fine Arts of Peru (1964), he combined training in mathematics and physics with an artist’s sensibility deeply engaged with social change. Creator of the iconic “pop-achorado” style, he redefined political poster-making through the groundbreaking Agrarian Reform campaign (1968–73), blending vibrant colors, op art, and Andean symbolism. His work is held in major collections, including the Museo de Arte de Lima (MALI), MALBA, and The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
Works presented in Between the Lines:...
Jesús Ruiz DurandReforma Agraria, 1968 - 1973
Jesús Ruiz DurandEl Azúcar, Primera Industria Sin Patrones, 1968 - 1973
Nick Irzyk
About the artist
Nick Irzyk was born in 1988 in New Bedford, Massachusetts.
Nick Irzyk was born in 1988 in New Bedford, Massachusetts. He received his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2014. Exhibitions include: Nexx Asia, Taipei, TW; PMAM, London, UK (solo); Mana Contemporary, Jersey City, NJ; My Pet Ram, Santa Barbara, CA; Ruschman, Chicago, IL; Afternoon Projects, Vancouver, Canad; Syracuse University, NY (solo); Critical Path Method, New York/Baltimore (solo); No Place Gallery, Columbus, OH; The Pit, Glendale, CA; 247365, New York, NY; and 106 Green, Brooklyn, NY (solo), among others. He was a Keyholder Resident at the Lower East Side Printshop, New York, NY, in 2019-2020. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Works presented in Between the Lines:...
Nick IrzykBand, 2025
Nick IrzykChaser, 2025
Trevor Paglen
About the artist
Trevor Paglen (b. 1974) lives and works between New York and Berlin.
Trevor Paglen (b. 1974) lives and works between New York and Berlin. Paglen mines the history of photography, both for its physical production and its subject matter, to construct questions around seeing. Concerns around surveillance, privacy, freedom, and servitude resonate throughout his practice. While Paglen takes contemporary technologies – artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computer vision – as his central subject, many of his works address the intertwined histories through which they were produced. For Paglen, the ramifications of emergent technology are more than strictly sociopolitical. His work has considered the extent to which artificial intelligence is invested in the very nature of opticality through this shift towards hard-edged, quantified forms of seeing.
Works presented in Between the Lines:...
Trevor PaglenCLOUD_162, 2025
Mustafa Mohsin
About the artist
Mustafa Mohsin is a Pakistani artist based in Brooklyn, NY.
Mustafa Mohsin is a Pakistani artist based in Brooklyn, NY, whose figurative paintings blend memory, humor, and cultural dissonance. Trained in perceptual painting at the Florence Classical Art Academy and holding an MFA from the New York Academy of Art, Mohsin now works from memory and emotion, constructing scenes that explore belonging, masculinity, and identity. His work draws from childhood memories, pop culture, and diasporic tension, often teetering between the tender and the absurd. He has exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Lahore, and Florence.
Works presented in Between the Lines:...
Mustafa MohsinEid ki namaz (Eid prayer), 2025
Mustafa MohsinChand Raat in Lahore, 2025
Ana Villagomez
About the artist
Ana Villagomez, b. 1991, Houston, TX, US. Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, US
Ana Villagomez develops her paintings in a series of layers that vary stylistically between loose painterly brushwork and clearly defined shapes that are rendered in vivid colors. Construction and excavation are two important ideas in Villagomez painting process that she utilizes in equal measure. Each of her painting's preliminary layers is sanded, peeled, scrubbed, and ultimately painted with a new layer - simultaneously concealing and revealing what has come before. In many instances, Villagomez uses digital technology to manipulate her drawings and project them onto her canvases, which adds another unique dimension to her richly layered images. The finished paintings culminate with a sense of history, motion, depth, structure, and brilliant color.
Works presented in Between the Lines:...
Ana VillagomezBubbled Dwellers, 2025
Francesca Fuchs
About the artist
Francesca Fuchs, born in London and raised in Münster, Germany.
Born in London and raised in Münster, Germany, Francesca Fuchs moved to Houston in 1996 as a Core Fellow at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. During her thirty-year career, in Houston and internationally, Fuchs’s painting practice has been a process of honing extended reflections on the nature of everyday objects and illuminating their fundamental truths. Fuchs’s critique of “importance” unfolds into rethinking the dismissal of the small, the intimate, and the beloved, insisting instead that these objects illuminate fundamental truths about ourselves, our communities, and our histories. She is represented by Inman Gallery and Talley Dunn Gallery.
Works presented in Between the Lines:...
Francesca FuchsStanding Woman (stone), 2023
Sean Cairns
About the artist
Sean Cairns (b. 1988, Sparta, IL) lives and works in Dallas, TX.
Sean Cairns typically portrays romantic and tranquil scenes of nature juxtaposed against the animated pulse of human activity. His vibrantly colored and rustic landscapes, which are inspired by color field painting and German expressionist painters, often reference or pay homage to his upbringing in the Midwest. Flat, rolling hills, sprawling farmland and vast prairies frequently dominate his canvases. Cairns typically utilizes sand, collage, pointillist, flat or impasto painting techniques to convey objects, surfaces, or landscapes. Through these techniques, he is able to blur the lines between the painted and the perceived, inviting viewers to traverse the realm where art and reality intertwine.
Cairns received his MFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (2014) and his BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design (2011). Cairns has presented solo exhibitions with Shrine, New York, NY (2025); 12.26, Dallas, TX (2024); Valley House Gallery, Dallas, TX (2023, 2021), among others. Cairns’ work resides in the permanent collection of the Dallas Museum of Art.
Works presented in Between the Lines:...
Sean CairnsOf a Morning, 2025
Hal Matsuda
About the artist
Hal Matsuda, b. 1998 in Iwate, Japan.
Hal Matsuda (BFA, Tsukuba; MFA, Kyoto Arts) creates prints, 3D sculptures, video, and installations exploring the boundary between virtual and real.
Works presented in Between the Lines:...
Hal MatsudaVirtual Altar, 2025
Dorothy Hood
About the artist
Dorothy Hood (1918–2000)
Dorothy Hood (1918–2000) was a pioneer of modernism and luminary abstract painter. She settled in Mexico City in the 1940s and spent two decades embedded in the cultural fabric of a city in the midst of post-revolutionary bohemia, befriending leading surrealists, artists, and intellectuals. In 1962 Hood returned to Houston and had solo exhibitions at many prominent museums throughout Texas and in New York. The Whitney and MoMA collected her work as early as 1944. Hood garnered an impressive exhibition history and support from influential critics, curators, and collectors during her lifetime. After her death in 2000, Hood's work saw a resurgence of interest when, in 2016, the Art Museum of South Texas (AMST), Corpus Christi, organized a major retrospective of her work and published a major monograph. In 2018, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston presented a two-person exhibition highlighting a previous unexplored kinship between the works of Louise Nevelson and Hood. McClain Gallery began representing the estate of the artist in 2019 and continues to strengthen her legacy via solo and group exhibitions.
Works presented in Between the Lines:...
Dorothy HoodUntitled, 1974–1975
Earlie Hudnall
About the artist
Earlie Hudnall, Jr. (b. 1946, Hattiesburg, Mississippi)
Growing up in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, Earlie Hudnall, Jr. learned the importance of community and culture and photography. His father was an amateur photographer, and his grandmother kept the family albums filled with valuable snapshots.
After returning from his tour-of-duty in Vietnam, Earlie Hudnall moved to Houston to study at Texas Southern University. There, he continued his interest in photography. While studying art, he met one of his most significant mentors, John Biggers, the painter and muralist that depicted African American life in the South. He had impressed Earlie to make art that was drawn from his own experiences. His images capture communities much like the one in his home- town of Hattiesburg. Earlie’s strongest work was made in Houston.
Earlie Hudnall’s images have been widely published. And his photographs are included in many major museum collections in the United States and Europe, including the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Art Institute Chicago and the National Gallery in Washington, DC.
Artists have been influenced by Hudnall’s work, including James Laxton, the Cinematographer of the 2017 Academy Award winner for Best Picture, Moonlight. Also, Tyler Mitchell, Brooklyn based photographer, film maker and Rahim Fortune, a writer, curator and photographer based in Texas.
Earlie Hudnall has continued to photograph and print his own work. He was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award in the Visual Arts by the Art League Houston in 2022. With that honor, a monograph was published, Earlie Hudnall, Jr.: Drawn to Communities.
Works presented in Between the Lines:...
Earlie HudnallAt Ease, 3rd Ward, Houston, 1991
Earlie HudnallLooking Out, 3rd Ward, Houston, 1991
Giuditta Branconi
About the artist
Giuditta Branconi lives and works between Milan and Teramo, Italy.
Giuditta Branconi lives and works between Milan and Teramo. An Italian painter, she explores the shifting boundaries between myth, body, and female subjectivity. Her emotionally charged compositions fuse sacred iconography, symbolic animals, and fragmented figures to reveal identity as fluid and plural. Drawing on religious and mythological sources, Branconi constructs visual worlds where human and animal forms coexist, transform, and resist fixed meaning. Through bold brushwork, compositional excess, and a palette moving from luminous to earthy tones, she shapes a visionary universe of perpetual metamorphosis. Here, the female body ceases to be an object of the gaze and emerges instead as an active presence wild, generative, and sovereign.
Works presented in Between the Lines:...
Giuditta BranconiSenza cena e senza dei, 2022
John Brooks
About the artist
John Brooks (USA, b. 1978) is an artist, poet, curator and writer based in Los Angeles.
John Brooks (USA, b. 1978) is an artist, poet, curator and writer based in Los Angeles. Over the last two decades, Brooks spent several years living in London and Chicago, but was based primarily in Louisville, Kentucky. He earned his B.A. from College of Charleston in South Carolina (2000). He received a solo exhibition, if the Lovers are Losers, at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Winston-Salem (2024); and solo shows with MARCH, New York City (2024), Moremen Gallery, Louisville, KY (2023), and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles (2022). Paintings and drawings were included in group exhibitions at the Speed Museum, Louisville, KY (2024); Diane Rosenstein Gallery, Los Angeles (2025); Michael Warren Contemporary (2025), Denver; Anat Ebgi (2025), UTA Artist Space, and Noon Projects, in Los Angeles (2024), ES49, in Vienna, Austria (2024); Shapin Nicolas Art Project, Louisville, KY and Bolivar Art Gallery at University of Kentucky, Lexington (2024). From 2017-2022 he operated Quappi Projects, curating twenty-five exhibitions in Louisville, KY.
Brooks’ paintings and drawings are in the permanent collection of the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; Grinnell College Museum of Art, Iowa; The Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, TX; and The Bunker Artspace, West Palm Beach, FL.
Works presented in Between the Lines:...
John BrooksThings That He Brings That He Found in the Sea, 2024
Jamie Sterling Pitt
About the artist
Jamie Sterling Pitt (b. 1977, Warwick, NY; lives in Houston, TX)
Jamie Sterling Pitt earned a BFA from the University of New Mexico and an MFA from Mills College. Pitt has presented solo exhibitions in San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles, New Mexico, and Berlin, and participated in group shows at Laumeier Sculpture Park (St. Louis), the Schneider Museum of Art (Ashland), and throughout the Bay Area and New York. Their work, recently shown in dialogue with JB Blunk at Blunk Space, is held in the collections of SFMOMA, the Blanton Museum, and the Berkeley Art Museum. Pitt’s sculptures explore memory, perception, and emotion, balancing tenderness and playfulness while reflecting on the impact of a traumatic brain injury.
Works presented in Between the Lines:...
Jamie Sterling PittUntitled, 2017
Susanna Coffey
Susanna Coffey (B. New London, CT, 1949) is a New York City based painter whose work is based in intense observation. She retired in 2018 as F.H. Sellers Professor in Painting at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and in 2023 from Columbia University. Coffey’s work is included in collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, The National Portrait Gallery, The Hood Museum, Yale University Art Museum, The Weatherspoon Art Museum, and others. Awards include an Artist x Artist Award from the Hirschhorn Museum, Guggenheim Fellowship, and NEA Award. Her exhibitions have been written about in The New York Times, Art in America, the New Yorker, and Hyperallergic, amongst others. Her book Night Painting was recently published in its second edition.
Works presented in Between the Lines:...
Susanna CoffeyKhondzi at NuBlu 2/24, 2024
Pae White
About the artist
Pae White (b. 1963, Pasadena, CA)
Pae White is a multimedia artist whose artworks and large-scale installations prompt a deeper look at familiar objects and encounters. With a playful and poetic vision, White coaxes the magic from ordinary materials. Merging art, craft, and design, ongoing explorations of materials, and production techniques have been central to her practice. Research into aluminum, ceramic, clay, glass, marble, paper, porcelain, and steel inform her iconic tapestries, mobiles, chandeliers, and spatial installations.
White received her MFA from Art Center College of Design and BA from Scripps College. Throughout her three-decade career, the Californian artist has had numerous institutional shows, public art projects, and commissions. She has enjoyed solo exhibitions at museums including Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Fabric Workshop, Philadelphia; SITE, Santa Fe; Art Institute of Chicago; The Power Plant, Toronto; St. Louis Art Museum, MO; STPI, Singapore; Saarlandmuseum, Saarbrücken; MAK, Vienna; 53rd Venice Biennale; and Skulpturprojekte, Münster, among others. Her numerous commissions include major projects at the Oslo Opera House, Norway; Los Angeles International Airport; Berlin-Brandenburg Airport; San José Museum of Art, CA; Norton Museum, West Palm Beach, FL; Swiss Re Klubhaus, Zurich; Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice; Bloomberg International Headquarters, London; and Beverly Center, Los Angeles. White lives and works in Los Angeles.
Works presented in Between the Lines:...
Pae WhiteSashay, 2025
Carlos Cruz Diez
About the artist
Carlos Cruz-Diez (1923, Venezuela - 2019, France)
A master of kinetic and optical art, Carlos Cruz-Diez devoted his life to exploring color as a phenomenon independent from form. Trained in Caracas and based in Paris from 1960, he created works that invite viewers to experience color in constant transformation. Series such as Physichromies, Chromointerférences, and Induction Chromatique turned visual perception into an active, participatory event. His public installations and urban interventions, found across the globe, expand color into space and time. Recognized as a key figure in 20th- and 21st-century art, his legacy lives on in the collections of MoMA, Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Works presented in Between the Lines:...
Carlos Cruz DiezPhysichromie 1886, 2014
Patrick Martinez
About the artist
Patrick Martinez (b. 1980, Pasadena, CA)
Patrick Martinez maintains a diverse practice that includes mixed media landscape paintings, neon sign pieces, cake paintings, and his Pee Chee series of appropriative works. The landscape paintings are abstractions composed of Los Angeles surface content; e.g. distressed stucco, spray paint, window security bars, vinyl signage, ceramic tile, neon sign elements, and other recognizable materials. These works serve to evoke place and socio-economic position, and further unearth sites of personal, civic and cultural loss.
Patrick’s neon sign works are fabricated to mirror street level commercial signage, but are remixed to present words and phrases drawn from literary and oratorical sources. His acrylic on panel Cake paintings memorialize leaders, activists, and thinkers, and the Pee Chee series documents the threats posed to black and brown youth by law enforcement.
Works presented in Between the Lines:...
Patrick MartinezWarrior with Roses, 2024
Daniela Libertad
Daniela Libertad’s artistic practice spans drawing, photography, video, and sculpture, exploring the relationships between geometric forms, everyday objects, and her own body. Her work examines weight, tension, and balance while confronting the intangible, mystical, and immaterial with the physical and habitual. Through exercises in precarious equilibrium, she reveals the fragile, poetic condition of daily perception. Libertad’s practice emphasizes contrasts—abstract and figurative, mental and material—bringing them into dialogue through her use of diverse media. She has exhibited internationally at institutions such as Museo Ex-Teresa Arte Actual, Museo de la Ciudad de México, Kunstverein Wiesbaden, Akershus Kunstsenter, and El Espacio23, among others. Her work is included in major collections such as Jorge Pérez, Fundación MARSO, and Fundación Otazu.
Works presented in Between the Lines:...
Daniela LibertadDibujo tejido 24, 2024
Daniela LibertadHanging Wires, 2025
A Diamond Didn't Become a Diamond When It was Found...A Diamond Was Always a Diamond (2023) by April Bey was first presented by TERN at The Armory Show in New York in 2023. Bey uses panel as her base to render the image of an Atlantican dark-skinned Black woman sporting a thick black afro that is sewn onto the panel using metallic thread. The woman, or rather, human — since gender doesn’t necessarily exist in Atlantica, is wearing a lemon dress with lemon and white shoulder pads and a green and pink mask in the shape of Minnie Mouse ears. The person is holding a bouquet of acrylic nails on Black hands as they stare intently at whoever is in their direct gaze. The background of the piece is a lush, unrecognizable garden somewhere in Atlantica. The title of the work is fitting as viewers stare back at the beauty and strength of the human who is placed against a background suggesting that their rareness and beauty, as is seen in diamonds, was always there, and that it doesn’t take them being “found” to validate their existence.
The subject was being interviewed by a local television news program in 1991. He worked on ships as a riveter. But the story was about his hobby as a model maker of boats and airplanes. During the interview, Earlie Hudnall photographed him from the back while he was in a relaxed stance, much like the ‘at ease’ position Earlie took as a Marine soldier in Vietnam. Thus the name of the photograph. The hands of the subject were also an important aspect of the composition since he was a tradesman working with his hands and also a craftsman working on small models. This was taken in the 3rd Ward neighborhood in Houston, Texas.
Having a background in printmaking, Irzyk explores abstraction in large, mosaic-like puzzles. His paintings frequently depict topographic grids, monolithic spherical structures, and endless landscapes. With the viewer's inability to see the image entirely within or outside the network, the systems he creates are never completed.
Villagomez’s titles hint at the figurative elements that can be drawn from her abstractions. Swaying between the two modes of painting, her intuitive scenes entangle the emotional and rational mind, while the recognizable and the mysterious engage in an ongoing dance. The cutout painted layers, sometimes highly recognizable, are removed from their original context, mirroring the human impulse to relocate and reinvent. The creation of Villagomez’s works is an intuitive, physical experience. Spreading her canvases across the floor, she approaches them with surgeon-like precision. The quick drying time of acrylic paint heavily influences the shapes that emerge, and often, forms only reveal themselves to her over time as she reassesses what she has entrusted to the canvas.
In this series, Trevor Paglen captures expansive luminous skies that at first appear serene and painterly, yet are covertly populated by satellites, drones, and data infrastructures. Using AI software to dissect these images into algorithmically recognizable forms, Paglen overlays analytical frameworks onto these cloudscapes, breaking them into white-lined subsections that reflect how machines perceive the world. By merging the visually seductive with the political, the artist draws attention to the hidden architectures of surveillance, inviting viewers to question how authoritative entities can quietly leverage control over even the most seemingly untouched natural environments.
Courtesy of the artist and Altman Siegel, San Francisco.
Copyright the artist.
“Chand Raat in Lahore” settles into the thick night before celebration. In a room washed in gold and shadow, young men lounge in the hush between performance and ease. There is a choreography to it, casual, practiced, tender in ways that cannot be named. The air is warm with anticipation, with unsaid things. It is a moment suspended between boyhood and something else, shaped by codes, rituals, and the comfort of being seen without speaking. Outside, the city prepares. Inside, they already know how to carry what cannot be shown.
Having a background in printmaking, Irzyk explores abstraction in large, mosaic-like puzzles. His paintings frequently depict topographic grids, monolithic spherical structures, and endless landscapes. With the viewer's inability to see the image entirely within or outside the network, the systems he creates are never completed.
Dibujo tejido 24 is part of Daniela Libertad’s exploration of the intersections between drawing, weaving, and sculpture. Created on paper that has been folded, pierced, and reconfigured, the work integrates thread and line into a single gesture, where drawing extends beyond the surface into a woven structure. The threads both mark and bind, generating tensions of fragility and resistance, while transforming the paper into a site of material dialogue. Color plays a central role, shifting from flatness to volume, inhabiting the work as contour and texture. Through this interplay of paper, thread, and pigment, the piece embodies a precarious balance between geometry and materiality, pointing toward a poetic reconsideration of drawing as both surface and sculptural space.
Eid ki namaz” drifts through a smog-laced morning in Lahore, where light feels thick and time loosens. The figures, caught between sleep and ceremony, inhabit a liminal space, suspended between festivity and fatigue, past and present. It is not the joy of Eid that lingers, but the hush before it: a moment of inherited devotion, of quiet submission, of going through the motions without question. In this in-between, where duty feels both tender and weighty, memory softens into something almost sacred.
Created during Peru’s Agrarian Reform in the early 1970s, these screenprints exemplify the fusion of modern graphic design with revolutionary political discourse. Produced as part of state-led campaigns, they employ bold typography, pop art influences, and vibrant color palettes to communicate messages of social transformation to a broad public. Both works stand as historical artifacts and visual manifestos, capturing a moment when art and design became active agents in reshaping collective identity. Their striking formal language and strong conceptual grounding secure their place within the canon of Latin American political graphics.
Reginald O’Neal’s acclaimed Jazz Figurine series—an evolving body of work first presented at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2023 will be featured in his forthcoming two-person presentation at Untitled Art, Houston.
O’Neal's Jazz Figurine series reimagines porcelain figurines of Black jazz musicians—typically found in New Orleans gift shops—as monumental, emotionally charged portraits. By enlarging these diminutive souvenirs and rendering them in lush, layered tones, the artist interrogates their symbolic weight: questioning their role in the commodification of Black creativity and exposing the cultural and historical implications of their objecthood. Through this lens, themes of visibility, erasure, memory, and resistance emerge.
A native of Miami’s historic Overtown neighborhood, O’Neal draws from personal and regional histories in his work. His figurines appear at once theatrical and ghostly—some isolated in traditional portrait-style poses, others arranged in groups that reference slave ship diagrams or ancestral drum circles. The figures become metaphors for the enduring exploitation of Black cultural labor within capitalist and colonial systems.
Currently featured in American Vignettes: Symbols, Society & Satire at the Rubell Museum DC, O’Neal is quickly establishing himself as a vital voice in contemporary painting. New Works / New York offers an intimate opportunity to experience this significant new series and engage directly with the artist during his NYC residency.
Nublu is a club on Ave. C in NY. Khondzi, a musician from Tibilsi, his wife singer Mariam Sharvashidze and her mother Nino are friends. It was a gorgeous gig, rosy on a cold Feb. night. It’s the only painting in night shift for which I referenced photos and on-site drawings as well as my aural memory of that night’s soulful music.
Aaron Morse’s work engages with human and environmental concerns, often with a view toward our greater narratives about ourselves and the world in which we live. Morse's paintings and works on paper invite us to consider myth, nature, and culture through dynamic compositions that combine their elements in colorful and complex layers.
Earlie discovered this boy taking a shortcut through a fence that had pickets removed for such purpose, as he was walking to a convenience store at Scott & Elgin streets in the 3rd Ward. Earlie did not ask the boy to pose, as he never takes that approach with his subjects, rather the photographer moves around the subject and the subject acts naturally. At that time in the summer, boys walked around the neighborhood shirtless wearing their jeans in hip hop style.
Inspired by Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies. An old man lies in bed, waiting to die. To pass the time, he writes lists of his belongings, tries to remember who he is, and watches strangers through his window, inventing stories about them. In his room, day slips into night without warning, and he can no longer tell the difference between dusk and dawn. The painting depicts the view of this fictional man: his world and his deteriorating mind.
In Of a Morning, sprawling landscapes of vivid, layered color bestow their vast grandeur atop the canvas, providing dimension to the textured surface. The purity of oil paint is crucial to Cairns, who views the material as an alchemical element derived from the core of the Earth through an eternal and ancient process; the dynamic endurance of the medium and substrate is critical.
Beginning her career in the 1970s with works that intimately connected her to the earth, Albuquerque’s artistic evolution envelops the cosmos and the space between it and us. Her work emanates from years of practicing the exact science of Kundalini breath technique as well as automatic writing; both drive a deep investigation and scientific inquiry of who we are as individual beings on this planet. Albuquerque further connects to the exactness of physics by a meditation she, and astronomers, call the cosmic address. These daily practices are at the root of her art, precisely positioning self to cosmos. It is those discoveries she embeds in works of art that permit us, the viewer, to experience the connections she has made between these internal and external worlds.
PHYSICHROMIES: COLOR IN MOTION
First created in 1959, the Physichromie marks the cornerstone of Carlos Cruz-Diez’s immersive and perspective-bending kinetic works. The name Physichromie is a neologism that combines Physis, which is Latin for nature, and the Greek word for color, Xrom. Composed of meticulously arranged strips of color in geometric compositions, each piece changes according to the intensity of the ambient light and the movement of the viewer in front of the work. Acting as a “light trap,” the Physichromie reveals constantly shifting combinations of additive, reflective, and subtractive color, projecting them into space. This vibrant interplay generates hues not physically present on the surface, evoking the subtle transitions found in nature. Physichromie Panam 69 (2011), Physichromie 1886 (2014), and Physichromie Panam 200 (2015) are striking examples of Cruz-Diez’s mastery and lifelong dedication to this groundbreaking series.
Created during Peru’s Agrarian Reform in the early 1970s, these screenprints exemplify the fusion of modern graphic design with revolutionary political discourse. Produced as part of state-led campaigns, they employ bold typography, pop art influences, and vibrant color palettes to communicate messages of social transformation to a broad public. Both works stand as historical artifacts and visual manifestos, capturing a moment when art and design became active agents in reshaping collective identity. Their striking formal language and strong conceptual grounding secure their place within the canon of Latin American political graphics.
Made with a Japanese paperclay base and automotive paint, White’s otherworldly wall-hangings defy medium. In this work, the artist evokes movement and rhythm in both the title’s mouthfeel and the swirling and swaying composition. Thousands of tiny carved blocks arranged in curving, undulating lines shift in tone from purple to teal to blue. White also considers how the act of ‘sashay-ing’ can communicate bodily confidence, or even defiance through motion. To sashay is to both engage in play and command space through assertion of presence.
Giuditta Branconi’s Senza cena e senza dei is a flamboyant, layered painting where figures, animals, and symbols pile into a restless landscape. Mischievous faces and creatures emerge from the undergrowth, suspended between idyll and disturbance, intimacy and excess. Colours shift from vivid to murky, delicate to opaque, creating a land of contradictions in perpetual motion. The atmosphere is at once erotic, hedonistic, and dreamlike, evoking half-remembered spaces that blur memory and imagination. Painted with her characteristic use of both front and back of the canvas, the work vibrates with porous intensity, dissolving boundaries between figure and ground, protection and exposure, eternity and transience.
Francesca Fuchs’ Standing Woman (stone) is one in a group of paintings of sculptures that she made as a young artist. In her recent repainting of these objects, Fuchs revisits the idea of the female sculpture trope that, as she notes, she previously just accepted and re-presented: the sitting woman, the reclining woman and the standing woman which are ubiquitous throughout art history. In the paintings, Fuchs revisits these with love and wonder, but also ponders why she didn’t question these recurring depictions earlier. She draws attention to the female sculptural object and how their positionings are often presented as the same and somewhat static throughout history (compared to the trajectory of male sculpture which is often imbued with motion). These paintings are likewise an avenue into Fuchs’ personal archive and memory through which she reexamines and asks questions.
The Tree is in its Leaves is a continuation and expansion of some charcoal Graft drawings I started doing two years ago, in which a variety of branches were attached (grafted) to an existing branch to create a hybrid plant. These had some resemblance to specimen pages in a herbarium.
In The Tree is in its Leaves, a slender, young tree that has itself been grafted onto a larger trunk, is the recipient of a series of grafts of smaller branches from other species, bound by a variety of means – ribbon, string, rubber band, wire, cord.
My intent was for this intervention with a tree, an icon of the natural world, to represent a spectrum of human output and intention: aspiration, folly, elegance, clumsiness, hope, hopelessness, wishful thinking, optimism, denial, fabrication, beauty, artifice, etc.
Brooks’ expressionistic paintings often depict his friends, as well as figures and sites sourced from historic and found photographs. He combines images “to create what I think of as the hint of a new narrative.” These paintings are part of a recent suite of portraits and tableaux, some with circus or theatrical settings, are “charged with a sense of longing, remote desire, empathy, as well as a kind of existential openness.
Untitled, painted between 1974 and 1975 by Dorothy Hood, was made during a residency in Switzerland which the artist attended. The painting comes from a group of works which have never been shown in the United States. It features her typically depicted and fragmented space as well as her adoption of the surrealist technique of decalcomania. The artist shows her mastery of color and her fearless experimentation in a small composition.
Jamie Sterling Pitt creates sculptures that trace the fragile edges of memory and perception. Working with hand-cut wood and paint, they fashion modest forms that feel at once handmade and elemental—pocked like stone, layered like earth, or shaped through imagined erosion. What began as a way to cope with memory loss has grown into an intuitive practice, where fleeting sensations, autobiographical fragments, and art historical echoes converge. The works invite intimacy while holding gravity, standing as poetic surrogates for memory’s instability and transformation.
In this work, he arranges elements from diverse cultures and the legacies of past civilizations on a single plane, remixing and combining them with those from my own country. It reflects the history of human imagery while exploring new creative possibilities. Presented as a virtual “kamidana” (Shinto altar), I manually transfer my data via silkscreen, giving the work a ritualistic dimension and meaningful significance.
“When I approach these pieces, I work with a community aesthetic vocabulary (neon, led signs, banner tarp, latex house paint, spray paint, acrylic and ceramic) and logic. I imagine a painter or muralist recreating these Cacaxtla warriors or figures on a stucco wall at a community center or on the side or a market or liquor store, then covered up over time by community graffiti and city abatement as well as the changing of business owners. These pieces explore the breaking down of walls in time that speak to art history and histories connected to people operating in the current LA landscape.”
In Cards by Candlelight, a dim interior frames a small table lit by a single warm glow. Beyond the window, the last daylight fades to blue, while inside, flickering light illuminates the suggestion of cards mid-game. Owens renders the scene with his hallmark intimacy, the contrast between interior warmth and encroaching night holding the moment in suspension, an image of quiet companionship, and of time marked as much by shifting light as by human presence.
