Artists have always been the heart and soul of New American Paintings, so, not surprisingly, this site is in many ways a tribute to the thousands of artists we have been privileged to work with over the years. More than three thousand artists have been published in New American Paintings since its inception, and you will find a page on this site for each one of them. For now the content of these pages is rudimentary, but moving forward, layers of more robust content will be added.

While artists provide the core content of New American Paintings, we have always relied heavily on art world professionals to help determine exactly what that content will be from issue to issue. Our jurors are such an important part of what we do that this site includes an index of the more than seventy-five curators who have lent their eyes and minds to our project over the years.

To date, we have published one hundred and six issues of New American Paintings. This site includes a comprehensive index of every issue. Included on each issue’s page you will find a complete list of the artists featured in that issue, the juror associated with that issue, and information about other content published in the issue. As with all aspects of this site, the issue pages are highly interactive and will lead you directly to the issue’s featured artists, juror, and more.

The list of people that deserve to be thanked for making this site a reality is extensive. Dozens of friends and colleagues contributed their insights, and in many cases helped to test the technology as it was developed. I want to send a huge shout out to our web developers, Sametz Blackstone, for the incredible job they did, and the patience they granted us. In particular, I want to thank Brandon Walsh for directing the project, Joerg Dressler for making the site look as “hot” as it does, and our beleaguered friend, Luke Ehler, who breathed life into the technology that runs the site, and who is, as I am writing this, across town doing final testing and working on a few of our numerous requests.

In New American Paintings’ offices, a lot of time has been spent on this project for the past year. I want to thank my incredibly dedicated employees, Alexa Kinne and Kayelani Ortiz, for all of their help and hard work. And lastly, I want to thank the multi-talented, hyper-creative, laser focused, Drew Katz for everything he has done to bring this site home. Drew has been intimately involved from the project’s inception, and his help and expertise have been simply invaluable.

Now please take a moment and dive into the site. As always, we truly value your feedback, so please feel free to reach out. And, if its not already obvious, this is now the home of the New American Paintings/BLOG, so please come back soon for frequently updated content!

Steven Zevitas, Editor & Publisher

Jason Middlebrook | Black Betty, 2013, Spray paint on cherry, 105 x 18 x 1 1/4 inches. Courtesy the artist and Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin. 

Middlebrook would probably say “the tree did most of the work.” He expressed that in a Modern Art Notes Podcast on his concurrent survey Jason Middlebrook: My Landscape at MASS MoCA, but it holds true to his painterly interventions on the seven planks in this exhibition. Consider how the optical waves on Black Betty refer back to the untouched cherrywood and, if you look at them from an angle, recede into the surface. It feels deliberate: Middlebrook’s carefully taped and applied black spray paint belongs there, like the cherry’s grain itself. He emphasizes his ethos in titling neighbor Respecting the Grain: warm-toned chevrons of varying widths ripple across the blond panel, yet they reserve wide gulfs for the creamy, yellow birch grain. The artist considers the 100+ years of growth clocked in this hardwood (old-growth birch can more than triple that estimate), adding his touches to the “work” (i.e. the tree) to make it his own.

Jason Middlebrook | Black Betty (detail photos). Courtesy the artist and Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin.

Jason Middlebrook | Respecting the Grain, 2013, Acrylic and spray paint on yellow birch, 101 x 17 x 1 inch. Courtesy the artist and Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin.

Jason Middlebrook | Day and Night, 2013, Acrylic and spray paint on ash, 126 x 23 x 1 1/4 inches. Courtesy the artist and Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin.

Natural abstraction in the form of a prominent burl — a stately timber sunspot — dominates Day and Night, pulsating through veneered and bare, wavy-edged triangles and Middlebrook’s network of colorful soda straws. The modestly scaled Black and White Number 5, the “oldest” plank in the show (in terms of the artist’s intervention) and the smallest at just over two meters in height, presents an intriguing dichotomy. Caramel whorls and gnarly protuberances activate the surface and side of this squat bigleaf maple panel. On it, Middlebrook painted a black-striped white cascade that resembles the grand, twisting trunk of the deciduous giant — or at least a typical “tree” shape — more closely than the rugged base. Reality is far more complicated and cool, and Middlebrook revels in this.

Jason Middlebrook | Day and Night (detail photos). Courtesy the artist and Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin.

Jason Middlebrook | Black and White Number 5, 2011, Acrylic on bigleaf maple, 84 x 28 x 2 inches. Courtesy the artist and Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin.

The complex, fluidic relationship between humans and nature is a recurring concern of Middlebrook, from his exhibitions of decorated landfill waste to his Public Art Network Year in Review 2012 award-winning subway mosaic Brooklyn Seeds. While current works like Respecting the Grain strike a more benevolent tone — the opportunity to inform one another altruistically — I found Ripe on the Vine particularly nuanced. Acid pinks and yellows punctuate the zigzagging bolt of acrylic and spray paint down this razor-straight plank, echoing the synthetic colors used to tag trees for logging. As the gradient flows to the right, however, these artificial tones segue into deep, leafy greens of the forest. It’s not as doomsday decadent as covering rubbish in fiberglass and tiles, nor is it as carefree as supersized weeds “bursting” up the subway walls. Rather, it walks a fine line between destruction and coexistence, suggesting Middlebrook appreciates both the beauty of nature and the consequences of cutting it all down.

Jason Middlebrook | Ripe on the Vine, 2013, Acrylic and spray paint on maple, 97 x 16 x 1 1/2 inches. Courtesy the artist and Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin.

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Jason Middlebrook was born in Michigan in 1966 and lives and works in upstate New York. He currently has a solo exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and is slated to participate in a group show at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in 2014. His work is in the collections of institutions including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (New York), the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. In 2010 Middlebrook received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and in 2012 his MTA Arts for Transit commission Brooklyn Seeds was named one of the best public artworks in the United States at the Americans for the Arts Conference. The Line That Divides Us continues through August 10. 

Brian Fee is an art punk based currently in Austin, TX, but he can usually be found in New York or deep in Tokyo, depending on the art season.

Pat Snow | Wake, 2013, Oil on panel, 18” x 24”. Image courtesy grayDUCK Gallery, Austin.

Upon meeting Snow at the three-artist exhibition True Story at grayDUCK last year, I was stone-cold smitten with his graphite portrait Record Shop Girl and the liquidic color bouquets blooming across watercolor Sleeping vs Waking. There was something uncanny about these figures —  Facebook “selfies” of Snow’s friends  — something nostalgic, like girls I’d met in university or at some party in New York. His usage of text (either unsteady print or carefully meandering cursive, culled from snippets of conversation or song lyrics) redoubled this deep familiarity. Like: I know them from somewhere, or, I want to know them. Wintersnow Snowinters signals Snow’s first painting show in some two decades, so several earlier watercolor works (like Sleeping vs Waking) reappear here as fully-formed oil on panel compositions. The 2013 Wake features Snow’s hometown friend Heather (now an Austin-based chef) with clouds of grey across her face, like sleep’s last remnants, instead of the tropical shadows from last year’s watercolor. The same script — “it wasn’t so much the sleeping as much as the waking up” — snakes across her partially concealed arm like a tattoo, but the subdued palette radiates hazy consciousness, flickers of violet in her hair, a single streak of watery red extended beneath her lips.

Pat Snow | Sleeping, 2013, Oil on panel, 18” x 24”. Image courtesy grayDUCK Gallery, Austin.

Pat Snow | Wintersnow Snowwinters installation. Image courtesy grayDUCK Gallery, Austin.

Snow explained that he works to keep his colors “pure”, using CMYK process colors in warm-up compositions, and then only three to four colors in his oils. Black becomes sharp outlines, like screen-printing but hand-brushed here, strengthened by a flatness forged by finishing each with Krylon Kamar varnish. To me, his color choices appear much bolder: like the rouge slash across Sleeping‘s cheek and the goldenrod collar of her jersey shirt, and the warm blue highlighting Bubblegum‘s hair, echoed in her piercing eyes. If the “selfie” captures one’s likeness in time, I proffer that Snow’s reductive palette and contrasty outlines activate those moments, and by working from watercolor to oil he makes their reality that much more present.

Pat Snow | Bubblegum, 2013, Oil on panel, 24” x 18”. Image courtesy grayDUCK Gallery, Austin.

Matthew John Winters | The God Head, 2013, Ink on paper, 35” x 35”. Image courtesy grayDUCK Gallery, Austin.

Winters’ contributions come in two broad flavors: ink on paper and paint on reclaimed wood. He emphasized that his images “have all undergone a change in state. These things go through a strange magic as they are cast aside or incorporated into an artwork.” Consider The God Head, a pink- and black-ink cloud of addiction and temptation clawing at one another, floating in the outlined vestige of a child wearing a Rubbermaid bin like a helmet — or a shield from some very grownup troubles. The original compositional photograph is not exactly forthcoming (unlike its kin Moosebeetle — a hulking, hyperbolized insect with antlers) but The God Head‘s imagery isn’t so hard to decipher. Winters’ ink drawings exude an unbelievable intensity, as he “draws” literally from his subconscious in constructing them, though the narrative within The God Head suggests some deeply considered self-reflection beyond its automatic roots.

Matthew John Winters | Transfer of Energy, 2013, Ink on paper, 21” x 21”. Image courtesy grayDUCK Gallery, Austin.

Matthew John Winters | Wintersnow Snowinters installation. Image courtesy grayDUCK Gallery, Austin.

The massive horizontal Pink Mountaintops derives from Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s Earth from Above, a favorite picture-book of Winters’ grandfather. Uneven striations of wood recycled from the Blanton Museum (Winters’ day-job) echo the craggy ridges, while the mountains themselves coat the composition like an outsized decal, hugging every tectonic peak. The use of gradient is intriguing: silvery speckles deliquesce into black shadow and rosy sunlight into whitish snow, like a Polaroid in Winters’ mind, sharpening from a youth’s overactive imagination to sobering reality.

Matthew John Winters | Pink Mountaintops, 2013, Acrylic and spray paint on reclaimed wood, 10′ x 5′. Image courtesy grayDUCK Gallery, Austin.

Two artist “selfies” — Snow depicted in ink by Winters, Winters in crayon crosshatchings by Snow — were used in exhibition promotional materials and anchor the show. Both images are very much them: Snow’s unruly hair and quizzical expression, Winters’ stoic-yet-Socratic gaze, like each bears a simple Photoshop filter manipulation. Each is a translation of the original, but in the artists’ hands they feel more authentic than a self-shot photograph. Snow gets this in translating his friends through watercolor to oil, depicting them more closely to how the world sees them, more than just a mirror of themselves. Winters turns that mirror back on himself, but by eschewing a traditional self-portrait for intuitive ink vignettes he creates a portal for us to see him a bit more clearly.

Pat Snow and Matthew John Winters | Wintersnow Snowinters, 2013, ink on paper and crayon on paper. Images courtesy grayDUCK Gallery, Austin.

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Pat Snow was awarded the Individual Artist Fellowship/Grant Award by the Alabama State Council on the Arts in 2010 and 2011 and has participated in many solo, two-artist, and group exhibitions in Birmingham, Alabama and Austin, Texas. Recent exhibitions include Interchange Alabama/Texas, an artist exchange program between Space One Eleven (Birmingham) and Project Row Houses (Houston), supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Andy Warhol Foundation. Snow lives and works in Austin.

Matthew John Winters has participated in numerous group exhibitions around his degree program at DePaul University (Chicago) and in Austin, Texas, including Ink Tank Collective’s Armageddon Outta Here at Co-Lab Project Space and Art on the Green at AMOA-Arthouse, both in 2012. He is currently featured in the youth-artist/mentor partnership exhibition Advanced Young Artists at AMOA-Arthouse, through September 1. Winters lives and works in Austin. Wintersnow Snowinters continues through July 21.

Brian Fee is an art punk based currently in Austin, TX, but he can usually be found back in New York or deep in Tokyo, depending on the art season.

Installation view, BMO Harris Bank Chicago Works: José Lerma, MCA Chicago, July 2 – December 3, 2013. Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago

This theme of memorializing the sponsors funding the show is one that runs through the entire exhibition – depicting subjects such as the Board of Trustees, and the bank founders funding the series of Chicago Works, Lerma creates a sense of false gratitude that is neither coy nor ironic, but matter-of fact and temperate, softened by a gentle humor. The less-than triumphant attitude provoked by the sculptures in the entrance – the cartoonish swollen piles of paper that look as half-full as they are half-empty, stage Lerma’s premise of excess as a path toward abstraction, which not only complicates, but skews a longstanding history of “social” painting. The accumulation of physical material is just one tool used to define Lerma’s formal quirk, whether in the mountainous obliteration of detail within the paper pieces, or the slightly faux-naïve, feverish, and busy drawing style within his paintings, the work favors an approximate symbol of the subject, over recognizable representation. The diverse elements in this exhibition are tied together quite nicely by an unfaithful likeness, demonstrating Lerma’s versatility when it comes to dealing with a weighted, though not necessarily current, trope within art history. As such, the social undertone of Lerma’s work questions its own relevance – after all, it has been a few centuries since these types of commissions were genuinely in vogue.

Installation view, BMO Harris Bank Chicago Works: José Lerma, MCA Chicago, July 2 – December 3, 2013. Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago

The main galleries have a purposefully overwhelming feminine cache, placing a large emphasis on over-the-top domestic interior elements. A carpet installation, which depicts illustrative portraits of the original founders of BMO Harris Bank before the merge, occupies much of the center rotunda – made up of patterns and large forms, the piece is best viewed from a floor above via the MCA’s wrapping staircase, dissolving into decorative lines and tessellations for the viewers walking upon it at ground level. Works are also hung along the walls, but require passage onto the carpet in order to view them; the floor piece literally changes how you approach the paintings, a subtle cushioned effect, like walking on a baroque Carl André. The paintings have a predominantly pastel palette, which looks as though it was lifted directly from an 18^th Century Derby figurine, but is treated less preciously than French porcelain. Ballpoint pen blues, washed out highlighter pinks, oranges, yellows, and violets, and sometimes flat-out Crayola hues, bring a vibrant and oppositional slant to the fluffy imagery. In Parterre, a flat plane of faces is scrolled in an all-over pattern across a large expanse of canvas. The ornamental treatment of the hairstyles and clothing in addition to the architectural scale suggests something more of a tapestry, or textile – though not quite as decorative. Placed atop two keyboards, the canvas’s weight is propped up against the wall, emitting a note that acts as a tragic and somewhat comedic soundtrack to the painting.

Installation view, BMO Harris Bank Chicago Works: José Lerma, MCA Chicago, July 2 – December 3, 2013. Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago

The adjacent room is covered in a retro-reflective curtain, done up in grand drapes, whose installation gives another enforcing nod to the theatrical ambiance built up by the paper busts and the audio of the keyboard painting. Lit by white-hot spotlights, the iridescent folds create a literal silver screen that viewers can interact with, each movement causing visual disruption or moiré in the gleaming fabric. The visual interference of the piece functions as a tactile hall of mirrors; overwhelmingly about surface, the viewer never reflected in its shine. The installation pushes back, it enchants our eyes as much as it repels them. Like staring into the sun on an overcast day, the experience is phenomenal, but in a way that is hard to look at for any length of time.

Installation view, BMO Harris Bank Chicago Works: José Lerma, MCA Chicago, July 2 – December 3, 2013. Photo: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago

Although spatial, the installation is without depth – and while the various pieces in this exhibition remain flat, the experience is anything but. The exhibition succeeds for this precise reason; while the work is about history, it is not indebted to it. In fact, if this exhibition were only about history, it would certainly gloss over quite a bit –instead, by capturing a moment where history falls flat, Lerma uses flatness as a metaphor to picture all the comedy, tragedy, and awkward pitfalls that come with out-rightly staging the social in a contemporary context.

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José Lerma received his MFA in Painting at the University Wisconsin–Madison and has held residencies at the CORE Residency Program; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, Maine. He has exhibited his work widely both nationally and internationally at Contemporary Art Museum Raleigh, North Carolina; Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain; Milwaukee Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; Museum of Fine Arts Houston; and Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece, among others. Lerma lives and works in Chicago and is a Assistant Professor in the Department of Drawing and Painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work will be presented in an upcoming exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in London.

Stephanie Cristello is an artist, curator, and writer who lives and works in Chicago, IL.

Ellsworth Kelly at Ninety, Matthew Marks Gallery. Image Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.

Ellsworth Kelly at Ninety, Matthew Marks Gallery. Image Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.

Working in his large studios in Spencertown, New York, Kelly primarily derives inspiration from shapes and forms in nature, a facet that was recently highlighted by the Met’s exhibition of his plant drawings. Attentive to the details of his surroundings, such as the curve of a green field on the horizon or the shifting shadows as they’re cast throughout the day, Kelly builds up his monochromatic paintings with thick layers of oil paint, creating a surface that is impenetrably opaque.

Ellsworth Kelly at Ninety, Matthew Marks Gallery. Image Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.

Richly colored, matte oil paintings are contrasted by white painted aluminum sculptures, which have highly reflective surfaces. Hung perpendicularly to the bright oil paintings, the sculptures mimic mirrors, creating a surface on which images of the oil paintings are inverted and gain a diaphanous quality, a stark divergence from their actual forms.

Ellsworth Kelly | Gold with Orange Reliefs, 2013, Oil and canvas and wood, three joined panels, 79 1/4 x 72 3/4 x 2 5/8 inches, Image Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

Ellsworth Kelly | Collage, 1962, Image Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

Shown on its own at the gallery’s 502 West 22nd Street location is the luminous Gold with Orange Reliefs, which is based on a collage Kelly made in 1962. In it, the artist employs a large square panel painted in metallic gold—his first use of the particular paint medium—and has attached two smaller, orange panels, so that the curved shapes dip just below the bottom edge of their base, like quotation marks, or two diving swimmers. The piece is an example of Kelly’s long-term engagement with abstract form, as well as his consistent desire to nudge his practice into new territory.

Ellsworth Kelly | Four Panels, 2012, Oil on canvas, four panels, 27 x 120 inches, Image Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

In Four Panels, Kelly conjures the minimalist painter Blinky Palermo, yet adds his own twist by attaching a fourth, white panel on one side of the typical A-B-A block pattern. Easy to miss at first glance, and virtually illegible in photographs, the understated addition is a subtle way in which the work maintains slight asymmetry. The white panel also creates an edge that is not painted, but is a “real edge”—an aspect that plays up the sculptural quality of the work. It is also the presence of the works’ “real edges” that account for the unframed presentation of all of Kelly’s paintings.

Ellsworth Kelly | Black Relief Over White I, 2012, Oil on canvas, two joined panels, 70 x 60 7/8 x 2 5/8 inches, Image Courtesy Matthew Marks Galleery

Although the works on view are unquestionably indicative of Kelly’s signature look and style, the show at Matthew Marks also gestures to the changes that have taken in place in his practice in recent years. Having achieved a sharp, bold aesthetic that is all his own, Kelly has recently used his talents to expand beyond his traditional choice of mediums, designing the façade for Matthew Marks gallery in LA, and even his first ever tattoo, for Whitney curator Carter Foster. These recent, atypical projects are equally inspiring; proof that an artist who has already made an indelible mark in history can continue to push his work in new directions.

Ellsworth Kelly | Yellow Relief Over Blue, 2012, Oil on canvas, two joined panels, 70 x 60 3/4 x 2 5/8 inches, Image Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery

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Ellsworth Kelly (b. 1932) lives and works in Spencertown, New York. After serving in the US Army during WWII, he attended art school in both Boston and Paris. Returning to the US in 1954, he began exhibiting his work in New York in 1956. Retrospectives of his work have been organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Guggenheim Museum, New York. In honor of his 90th birthday, eight museums and institutions have organized Kelly exhibitions, including the Museum of Modern Art and The Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.

Ellsworth Kelly at Ninety is on view at Matthew Marks Gallery through June 29^th.

Nadiah Fellah is a graduate student of Art History at The Graduate Center, CUNY in New York.

*Late Entry Fee Applies.

For more information on Ms. Bishop, click “read more” below.

Janet Bishop is curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). In this capacity, Bishop’s primary responsibilities include the acquisition, research, presentation, and interpretation of objects in the permanent collection of the Painting and Sculpture Department and the organization of special exhibitions.

Bishop was one of the lead curators for The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde — an award-winning and critically acclaimed historical exhibition that premiered at SFMOMA and traveled to the Grand Palais, Paris, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2011-12). Other exhibition projects of special note include 75 Years of Looking Forward: The Anniversary Show (2010-11), a major reinstallation of SFMOMA’s collection assembling some 400 works in all media; Robert Bechtle: A Retrospective (2005-6), the first comprehensive exhibition of the California realist’s paintings and drawings; and 010101: Art in Technological Times (2001), which brought together the work of 20 international contemporary artists on the occasion of the millennium. Bishop is currently at work on a Matisse/Diebenkorn exhibition, which she is co-organizing with the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the first David Park exhibition to examine the full scope of the artist’s output. She is also overseeing the museum’s off-site exhibition programming during its expansion construction period from the summer of 2013 through early 2016.

Bishop joined SFMOMA as a curatorial assistant in 1988, was promoted to Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture in 1992, and was named Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Associate Curator of Painting and Sculpture in 1997. She was promoted to her current position in 2000. Prior to joining SFMOMA, Bishop worked at the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University (1987-88) and at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University (1984-85). She received her BA in art history and psychology from Cornell University in 1985 and her MA in art history from Columbia University in 1988.

Work by Alex Chitty and Alice Tippit, from left: “Autonaut,” 2011, “Snap,” 2011, “Slow Death of a Namesake (Unit I),” 2013, and “Lake Aspect,” 2012. Courtesy of the artist and Roots & Culture.

In Chitty’s sculptures, what resemble decorative art objects are placed coldly on Bauhaus-styled glass and metal shelves, creating a quasi-familiar situation out of carefully fabricated bric-a-brac. Each sculpture is like a formula, the sum of its parts acting as the whole entity, such as in Slow Death of a Namesake, on view in the main gallery. Functioning as an architectural element, the casual placement of objects ­– ceramic jaguars, chains, and votive vase forms, among other less nameable things – produce the effect of a Hockney etching, where Chitty’s amassed materials similarly reference the emptiness of a collectible object, and are surprisingly almost as two-dimensional. Among the most interesting moments within the piece are Chitty’s latex forms, which carry the same weight of a drawing, as if the lines were lifted off the page and suspended in space.

Alex Chitty, “Slow Death of a Namesake (Unit I),” 2013, Perspex, 2 Haeger jaguars (cream and white), latex, aluminized prints, heat transfer on fabric, steel, birch plywood, Tesla room divider. Courtesy of the artist and Roots & Culture.

The non-descript shapes barely hold their form, and look all the more fragile within the starkness of their metal and ceramic surroundings. While apparently casual in their placement, the smaller pieces within the larger sculpture read as a visual essay; a critical comment on the domestic, and entirely digestible symbols of midcentury-cool they imitate. The status of these objects waver when met with the delicate touch of Chitty’s overwhelmingly handmade, and non-utilitarian latex objects. Often defined as “a person or thing that has the name of another,” Chitty’s “namesake” references the name you would give to the shadow or ghost of the thing itself. While the sculptures certainly have a familiar visual impression, it is hard to give the parts within them a just name – and though we come close, the work challenges our ability to give a name to an object, once its original use has run out.

Alice Tippit, “Snap,” 2011, Oil on canvas, 15 x 18”. Courtesy of the artist and Roots & Culture.

Hanging just beyond the sculpture is Tippit’s Snap – a small painting done in two hues of blue, which depicts an all-over linear pattern that pushes up against the edge of the painting. Despite the hesitant touch of the brush, the painting registers like a broken mirror, jagged and superstitious, never touching the edge of the canvas. A similarly domestic reference within the proximity of Chitty’s work, Tippit offers a different relationship to language. Coming from a more post-structuralist direction, Tippit’s paintings are entirely linguistic, translating images by using a simplified pictorial language that pulls from a varied lexicon of subjects. Her representation of things is indebted to signs, where the paintings stage their own myths – lifting recurring subjects from the history of painting, and inserting them into a more clinical context, Tippit undoes complicated subjects and puts them back together in a fresh and immediate manner.

Alice Tippit, “Haiku,” 2010. Oil on canvas, 17 x 20”. Courtesy of the artist and Roots & Culture.

The abundance Leda and the Swan paintings has always fascinated me; they represent a moment when the painting is no longer about the subject, but about that subject’s presence in history. It is the many swans in these paintings I think of when I see Tippit’s Haiku, a pared down silhouette of a swan with an apostrophe-like beak, sitting against a slightly asymmetrical red and green background. Like a reference card children use to learn letters, we can imagine the soft-spoken echo of a teacher repeating, “S is for Swan,” an elementary undertone that carries through all of Tippit’s work. On the opposite wall of the main gallery, Tippit stages a similar circumstance in Lake Aspect, this time using the silhouette of Ingre’s famous La Grande Odalisque.

Alice Tippit, “Lake Aspect,” 2012, Oil on canvas, 15 x 18”. Courtesy of the artist and Roots & Culture.

Painted in a soft aqua blue against a pale pink, the top corner carries a small yellow scalene triangle. Essentially done in a primary palette, the painting challenges the relationship between a reclining nude and simple geometry. Though the presence of the triangle formally suggests an effort to navigate through triangulation, a third element to the painting is purposefully missing. While the painting is flat, it still references a landscape – perhaps the absent third element – explaining how figure and shape introduce distance, even in the most flat and minimal situation. It is circumstances like these that make Ella Hatchet an incredibly engaging show, one that continues to unfold symbol upon symbol.

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Alex Chitty currently lives and works in Chicago.  She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a B.A. from Smith College, MA. She is a 2012 & 2011 recipient of the Illinois Arts Council Artist Project Grant, and has shown her work with Alderman Exhibitions; Bourouri Gallery, Berlin; Corbett vs. Dempsey; The Chicago Cultural Center; the Kyung In Museum of Fine Art in Seoul, Korea, and The Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art. 

Alice Tippit was born in Independence, KS and received her BFA and MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has had solo exhibitions at Peregrine Program in Chicago, Important Projects in Oakland, CA, and Jancar Jones Gallery in LA.

Stephanie Cristello is an artist, curator, and writer who lives and works in Chicago, IL.

The main gallery space is filled with ten large 44 x 34 paintings that are three-dimensional, visually enticing, and inviting.  At first glance, they do not appear to have a unified theme, as they vary fairly drastically in color and abstract subject. Ellen C. Caldwell, Los Angeles Contributor

Christine Frerichs | The Conversation – installation view. Photo by Lee Thompson, courtesy of gallery km.

Christine Frerichs | The Conversation (#2), 2012-2013, oil, acrylic, spray paint and Activated Carbon Paint (ACP) on canvas, 44 by 34 inches. Photo by Lee Thompson, courtesy of gallery km.

But some of the show’s connection lies in the details: figure eights emanate from the center of each painting, and they are positioned at just a height so that visitors’ belly buttons line up with the very center of the paintings (and of the figure eight), making visitors’ eye levels line up with the center of the top circle of the elliptical shapes underlying each painting.

Frerichs plays with something of a centripetal force here and emphasizes the physicality of her paintings in this way.  And they are strangely grounding because of this – though it is such a subtle aspect of the work, it is not something that one would necessarily pick up on consciously.

Christine Frerichs | The Conversation (#6), 2012-2013, oil, acrylic, spray paint and Activated Carbon Paint (ACP) on canvas, 44 by 34 inches. Photo by Lee Thompson, courtesy of gallery km.

Christine Frerichs | The Conversation (#7), 2012-2013, oil, acrylic, spray paint and Activated Carbon Paint (ACP) on canvas, 44 by 34 inches. Photo by Lee Thompson, courtesy of gallery km.

Frerichs also uses color in completely different and seemingly disjointed ways throughout her body of work.  Some paintings are composed of bright colors, geometric lines, and serpentine shapes that come out at the viewer almost like a hologram, while others are filled with more earthy colored pastels and neutrals that resemble allusions to naturalistic surfaces like dirt, sand, or even a far-off planet.  There are smoke and cloud-like shapes that seem to suggest explosions or fierce sprays of water amidst highly structured lines and diagonal grids.

Christine Frerichs | The Conversation (#5), 2012-2013, oil, acrylic, spray paint and Activated Carbon Paint (ACP) on canvas, 44 by 34 inches. Photo by Lee Thompson, courtesy of gallery km.

I left unsure of what I was seeing, but loving the feel, texture, and abstraction itself.  There is a playfulness in Frerichs works that cannot be denied, but at the same time, there is also a maturity that overrides it beautifully and complexly.

Christine Frerichs | The Conversation (9), 2012-2013, oil, acrylic, spray paint and Activated Carbon Paint (ACP) on canvas, 44 by 34 inches. Photo by Lee Thompson, courtesy of gallery km.

Frerichs uses a combination of oil, acrylic, spray paint, and activated carbon paint (ACP) that just teeters on the edge of almost feeling outdated in terms of a more traditional practice and process, but they are revolutionary and radical in their final outcomes and aesthetic.

Christine Frerichs | The Conversation (#3), 2012-2013, oil, acrylic, and Activated Carbon Paint (ACP) on canvas, 44 by 34 inches. Photo by Lee Thompson, courtesy of gallery km.

Overall, the show is a joy to experience and explore.  My favorite moments laid in the details, in places such as the tiny dots strewn throughout her works like a breadcrumb trail, the geometric arrows that puncture her paintings in works like The Conversation (#9), and in the X and O shapes found in both the figure eight and serpentine lines that interact between tiny targets in The Conversation (#5).  Equally moving and enticing were the firework-like explosions overlaying the patriotic stripes in The Conversation (#3) – and in such a work, lies Frerichs’ typically amazing moments of overlap and disjuncture.

Christine Frerichs | The Conversation (#8), 2012-2013, oil, acrylic, spray paint and Activated Carbon Paint (ACP) on canvas, 44 by 34 inches. Photo by Lee Thompson, courtesy of gallery km.

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Frerichs has exhibited at ACME, CB1 Gallery, Kaycee Olsen Gallery, and Young Art in Los Angeles, Duchess Presents in Chicago, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson, among others, and is newly represented by gallery km. Her work has been reviewed by ArtForum and The Los Angeles Times, and published in New American Paintings. She

received her M.F.A. from U.C. Riverside in 2009, and has taught at U.C. Riverside and U.C. Irvine, and is currently Senior Lecturer at Otis College of Art and Design and Adjunct Faculty at East Los Angeles College.

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Frerichs’ show runs at gallery km through July 27^th with an artist talk and walkthrough this Saturday, June 29^th.  Bettina Hubby’s solo show opens there September 7^th. 

Ellen C. Caldwell is an LA-based art historian, writer, and editor.

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