Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way – Buffalo AKG Art Museum
Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way explores contemporary Latinx artists’ innovations and interventions within established traditions of painting, inviting discussion on a variety of themes and revealing the diversity and expansiveness present within the field. The fifty-eight artists in the exhibition—and those in the Latinx field more broadly—encourage us to interrogate the continued relevance of boundaries, from political borders to disciplinary confines. This exhibition therefore, celebrates artists whose expressions are first and foremost personal and subjective, but whose heterogeneous and culturally specific interventions enrich one another and the history of American and contemporary art, two fields from which such artists have been historically excluded. Inspired by former U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera’s poem “[Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way],” the show celebrates abundance and presents a vision of Latinx art that is, like the diaspora itself, infinitely complex.
Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way is organized by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and curated by Curator Andrea Alvarez. It will be followed by a national tour including presentations at the Des Moines Art Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, the Phoenix Art Museum, and the Frye Art Museum, Seattle.
Let Us Gather in a Flourishing Way
On View March 6, 2026–September 6, 2026
Photo credit: Jeff Mace, Buffalo AKG Art Museum
Pundit Dream – Los Angeles
Pundit Dream
February 14–March 14, 2026
‘In ancient Sanskrit the word Pundit (or Pandit) was used to describe a person with great knowledge or ability in a specific discipline. In India the word is still used as an honorific, for example, Pandit Robindro Shaunkor Chowdhury (Ravi Shankar). By definition every artist in this exhibition is a Pundit, and every artwork that is exhibited in the exhibition is a Pundit Dream. By dream I do not mean the nighttime workings of the subconscious but instead as a term for ‘Aspirations’. Aspiration for a better world, a better future, a better self, the list of possible aspirations is infinite. A ‘Pundit Dream’ is foremost an act of great idealism, the ultimate belief that acting or performing or making something in the world will have profound consequences and benefits.
The Pundit Dream is also a ‘MacGuffin’ (a plot device, like a physical object, secret document, or ideal, that drives a story forward by motivating characters to act, but is ultimately irrelevant in itself to the plot's resolution.) in the 1959 episode of the television series ‘Perry Mason’ entitled ‘A Shattered Dream’, Perry defends a world renowned gemstone expert charged with murder who attempts to cleave a raw 1000 carat diamond and fails. This dream to cleave the diamond into two perfect halves, making it ten times more valuable, becomes an interesting metaphor for contemporary artistic production.
The 16 Artists in the exhibition- Alex Heilbron, Kristopher Raos, Catherine Wang, Jack Slavin, Vasa Mihich, Niko Chodor, Rosa Sarholz, Rita McBride, Matt Paweski, Nicole-Antonia Spagnola, Alex Lukas, Michael Bala, Kristin Posehn, Glen Rubsamen, Bedros Yeretzian, Chadwick Rantanen are all in the business of great idealism, profound consequences and infinite aspirations.
Tracing the Edge - Benton Museum of Art, Pomona College
Tracing the Edge
On View August 23, 2023 – January 7, 2024
The Hard-Edge style was one of the first widely recognized art movements to originate in our region, coming at a time when Los Angeles was considered a cultural backwater. Often contrasted to the loaded gestures of Abstract Expressionism, Hard-Edge came to represent a distinctly West Coast approach to modernist abstraction that emphasized a cool, detached, and formal contemplation of vision and aesthetics.
Los Angeles is no longer just the edge of the art world, but it continues to nurture painters finding new languages of abstraction. This exhibition brings together leading historical Hard-Edge painters with four contemporary artists based in Southern California whose works expand our notions of what abstraction can be and mean. Often drawing on visual traditions outside of European modernism, Jackie Amézquita, Linda Arreola, Aryana Minai, and Kristopher Raos use shape, texture, color, and material to engage questions of class, spirituality, memory, and politics. In contrast to Hard-Edge’s reputation as formal and removed, these contemporary works draw close to the world, jumbling and reorganizing the boundaries among tastes, places, times, and states of mind.
Accompanying the Benton’s survey of the work of Hard-Edge painter June Harwood, this exhibition contextualizes her work within a regional tradition of abstraction that has remained consistent through LA’s history.
Signals - University of Laverne
Signals
February 6-March 21, 2024
Signals is a group exhibition featuring paintings by Nick Aguayo, Greg Ito, Dion Johnson, Helen Lundeberg, Christine Nguyen, Annabel Osberg, and Kristopher Raos. Executed with rigor, grace, and a personal touch, the works included in this show may allude to signs, symbols, or dreams. Signals presents paintings of different shapes and sizes that range from figurative representation to color-focused abstraction, graphic precision to expressive gesture, up-beat tempo to calm meditation, and impressive scale to nuanced detail.
In Nick Aguayo’s painting, In the name of all the other participants, the interlocking shapes with colorful edges feel like a sonic puzzle – a visual geometry amplified by an arpeggiating energy. The parallelogram and triangle shaped canvases by Kristopher Raos have an auditory ingredient. Within Raos’s rich color fields, the onomatopoeic word “Boing” appears compositionally cropped and stylized like a comic book or advertising font. The hardedge abstraction of Helen Lundeberg and Dion Johnson is striking and crisp. Lundeberg’s color planes carefully align and create a dynamic exterior view and a mysterious interior space, while Johnson’s intricately layered canvas, which is influenced by Lundeberg’s work, alludes more to sensations and atmospheres. Also employing precision and clean edges, Greg Ito’s circular canvas, Time Flies, presents a fantastic journey with personal symbols. Drifting off into dreamland, Annabel Osberg and Christine Nguyen paint imaginary scenarios. Osberg’s imagery seems to honor spirits and conjure ghosts, and her narratives may reflect on the body’s relationship to a changing environment. The grand scale of Nguyen’s color field abstraction with silhouetted birds and flora simultaneously ascends up toward the ceiling and stretches onto the floor, welcoming viewers to take a closer look.
Signals emphasizes that art is participatory. Each piece transmits layers of meaning from its painted surface to the viewers’ optic receptors – these messages and sensations become part of a lively a visual conversation where gallery visitors are invited to look, interact, and discover.
Venus Over Manhattan
Small Paintings
June 28 - July 29, 2022
(New York, NY) – Venus Over Manhattan is pleased to present “Small Paintings,” an exhibition featuring the work of forty-eight artists. Comprising nearly eighty works, the presentation will be on view from June 28th through July 29th at the gallery’s Upper East Side Location.
Featured artists include: Etel Adnan, Sophie Barber, Seth Becker, Forrest Bess, Daniel Boccato, Joe Brainard, Stephen Bron, Roger Brown, Greg Burak, Jennifer Carvalho, Joe Coleman, Lois Dodd, Louis Eilshemius, Shanique Emelife, Dana Frankfort, Will Gabaldón, Ficre Ghebreyesus, Chambliss Giobbi, Victoria Gitman, Joanne Greenbaum, Mary Heilmann, Kelsey Isaacs, Michael Kagan, Alex Katz, Claudia Keep, Karen Kilimnik, Harriet Korman, Maryan, Louisa Matthíasdóttir, Bridget Mullen, Jan Müller, JP Munro, Janice Nowinski, Fairfield Porter, Kristopher Raos, Eleanor Ray, Peter Shear, Aaron Michael Skolnick, Altoon Sultan, Hannah Taurins, Lina Tharsing, Bob Thompson, Mose Tolliver, Albert York, Caroline Zurmely.
Installation view of “Small Paintings” at Venus Over Manhattan, New York, 2022