“Khola”, Mixed media, acrylic paint, fabric and collage on canvas
“Kanga Amricani”, Mixed media, acrylic paint, fabric and collage on canvas
The images above are from Fabric Secrets, Maurice Evans‘ solo exhibition of mixed media paintings, on view at Bridge Art Gallery in Wilmington until 5/31/25.
From the gallery-
Born in Smyrna, Tennessee, Maurice Evans discovered his artistic passion through music before transitioning to visual arts. After studying Fashion Illustration at the Art Institute of Atlanta, he pursued a career that blended bold colors, cultural narratives, and mixed media. In 1994, his independent career took off with a successful exhibition at the Black Arts Festival in Atlanta, leading to national and international recognition.
Evans’ work, often incorporating photography, painting, and sculpture, explores themes of music, culture, gender, and politics. His distinctive style has been showcased in numerous galleries, museums, and collections, including Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport and the Hammonds House Museum.
Residing in Atlanta, Evans continues to push artistic boundaries, living by the mantra, “Create art for art’s sake,” inspiring artists and audiences alike.
It’s also worth checking out his Instagram account where he posts videos of his process, as well as his most recent work.
Below are a selection of works from the artists and their statements about their work.
Moones Zeydabadi
Moones Zeydabadi
I make drawings and paintings depicting human and nonhuman figures in scenes of intimate encounter with each other and their environments. These narratives draw from deeply personal experiences which embody a more universal experience of being. I weave together fragments of recollection, imagined environments, and symbolic gestures to visually represent the complexity of identity and the way it shifts and fractures into new territories as one journeys through life.
My practice explores the liminal territory in which identity, memory and legacy seep through our collective subconsciousness. Through my interest in casting light on overlooked or forgotten stories, I infuse them with living qualities and complex non-linear narrative paths, I model a new, broader, and alternative space of belonging.
Foreground sculptures by Priya Dave
Detail from the interior of one sculpture by Priya Dave
Priya Dave
As an Indian, my art spectrum seeks to disrupt the cycle of disempowerment by integrating self-studied neuroscience research to explore the microbiology of the mind affected by culturally restrictive and arbitrary rules. The societal norms often resulted in mental health challenges, including depression and self-doubt, which left many struggling to trust their judgment or make decisions. Through my work, I strive to create immersive environments that map the brain’s physiological structure, fostering public engagement and raising awareness about mental health through a scientific and artistic lens.
My artistic practice encompasses various mediums, including painting, drawing, printmaking, immersive and video installations, and multi-sensorial experiences. Drawing from my Indian heritage, l often incorporate culturally and historically significant materials like kumkum, fabrics, and spices. These elements are deeply rooted in tradition and carry themes of memory, and identity. By transforming these materials into multisensory artworks, I reimagine their traditional meanings and bring them into contemporary conversations.
Through this fusion of culture and neuroscience, I create spaces that stimulate multiple senses, including sight, touch, sound, smell, and proprioception, encouraging deeper introspection. My work seeks to bridge the gap between personal experience and universal understanding, addressing the amalgamation of mental health, identity, and sensory perception. It is a reflection of my commitment to exploring how art can transcend cultural boundaries and inspire meaningful connections while fostering mental well- being and self-awareness.
Paintings by Abigail Dudley
Abigail Dudley
My paintings celebrate the singularity of perception and the way it entangles how one perceives the world. I am captivated by the slow build-up of forms and the subtle shifts in color that allow me to infuse a soft atmosphere of memory and temporal transitions into my paintings. My work is connected by my search for meaningful encounters with my surroundings through the act of painting, and a search to find surprising moments in life and painting.
My work focuses on the visual slippage between personal narrative and creating a space between harmony and contradictions of visual elements. Through this process, I tie together a space through intimate moments of perception. I aim to cultivate the idea of what it means to linger within a place and how that response can translate into a painting to act as a form of resistance to fast-looking in a culture that values a fast pace of life.
Work by Mikhail Shulga
Mikhail Shulga
My introspective nature is rooted in my identity as a Russian. Long winters and limited sunlight compel us to seek solace indoors, fostering a culture of deep spiritualism and reflection. Over generations, resilience has emerged from the hardships, shifting political regimes, and wars that define our history, further shaping this introspective tradition.
In my installations, I repurpose discarded electronics – objects imbued with nostalgia and unrealized promise. Once luxurious and cutting-edge, these items now lie abandoned on sidewalks. Many come from the ’90s and ’00s, my childhood years, when such technology symbolized hope for a better future. But that promise feels unfulfilled. While our lives have become more convenient, we are left grappling with existential questions: How does technology impact our sense of self and the meaning of human existence? Does the rapid advancement of technology amplify or diminish alienation, freedom, and authenticity? How do virtual spaces, social media, and digital communication shape our perceptions of reality, relationships, and identity? Perhaps the answers lie not in outside but in our own reflections. – “We don’t know what to do with other worlds. We don’t need other worlds. We need a mirror.” Tarkovsky, A. (Director). (1972), Solaris [Film].
Work by Emmanuel Aboagye
Emmanuel Aboagye
My work uses the language of painting to explore ideas of visibility and invisibility as it relates to issues of identity, memory and belonging in a post-colonial context. I explore the complexities of identity, be it class, race and nationality. I give agency to memory not as a tool to investigate the past but a medium for evaluation in the present. I investigate the nuances and specificity of the idea of belonging.
Having been trained as a painter, I employ modern sensibilities in engaging the materials I work with, utilizing them as a lens to examine notions of liberation. I work with materials like, acrylic paint, oil paint, brush, linen, canvas, sequence, wrappers, frost sheet, junk mail flyers, patterned plastic bags and electric iron. I consider the histories and attitude of the materials I work with. They are not merely tools but collaborators in an emancipatory process.
I lean on improvisation as a radical approach for self-liberation in my practice. This allows for spontaneity, fluidity, and the unexpected, reflecting my commitment to embracing uncertainty and possibility.
Paintings by Arend Neyhouse
Arend Neyhouse
My work weaves historical notions of art into the tapestry of our contemporary world. Specifically, while dealing with elements of myth and fable, I tell stories in the space of suburban America. As a consumer of fiction, and spending the majority of my life in suburbia, I explore the synthesis of these elements. My work exists at the crossroads of fable and familiar.
With my figurative paintings, I continue to explore realist arts position in the contemporary art world. I think that through the exploration of the mundane parts of our daily lives lies a time capsule for posterity – a captivating exploration of quietude transformed into an everlasting narrative.
My images exist in the in between. Moments before or after a great change. I am not trying to tell the whole story, but merely a single page, or even a single line; leaving whole worlds both before and after each image. A testament to the sense of sonder as the world churns around us.
Creating epic scenes through my technical approach and unwavering craftsmanship; humanity is laid bare. Through my art, I aspire to create not just paintings, but windows into the soul of our shared existence.
Head to the next page to see more of the artists from the show.
For Mia Fabrizio’s installation in the lobby of The Delaware Contemporary, Pull Up A Chair, she has created several sculptures that use domestic objects to explore a variety of social issues. It is part of the museum’s Winter/Spring three-part exhibition, Dinner Table.
From the museum-
Mia Fabrizio is an interdisciplinary artist creating mixed media portraits, freestanding sculptures and installations composed of building materials and domestic items. She carves away, mends, and cobbles together assemblages from a domestic landscape that is both nostalgic and full of pathos.
In these works, Fabrizio explores the power structures and cultural paradigms associated with, “having a seat at the table.” Fabrizio reveals how furniture conventions can grant power to the user. It is the “power to be seen, power to be heard, and power to contribute to the framing of a society” that Fabrizio aims to scrutinize. The chair sculptures become vessels for memories with details that reference labor, gender, and cultural constructs. Her multilayered constructions toggle between tearing apart and memorializing her personal experience. The assembly and material choices subvert the basic understood function of a “seat” and reveal illusions of functional space. She asserts that, “these seats are invitations in name only, token representations.”
Mama Liked the Roses links past to present by combining images and materials from Fabrizio family home with images collected from regions in Italy where her great grandparents had originated. The details within the piece reference labor, food, gender and religion.
And from the artist-
I am an interdisciplinary artist. Mixed media portraits, freestanding sculptures and installations are composed of building materials and domestic items. Multilayered concepts relating to identity and social constructs are presented through a variety of artistic mediums and processes. Consumed with hidden and exposed structure, my investigation of physical construction, cultural paradigms and their relationship, originates from the framework most familiar to me, the house in which I grew up. Contradictions within this space spark my desire to highlight the fluidity of perceived binaries, particularly those relating to feminine and masculine, public and private and modern and traditional.
Ascribing to the visual context of home as well as the ethos of homemade I paint, adhere, carve and chip away at plywood, drywall and paper. I vacillate between tearing apart and tenderly memorializing my personal experience, concurrently the work points outward to larger societal conversations around immigrant status, feminism, and queerness.
Take A Seat, at The Delaware Contemporary, presents three artists whose work focuses on aspects of domestic life. The sculptures in Adam Ledford‘s installation, and Debra Broz’s porcelain creations both explore items found around the house and encourage viewers to take a longer look beyond the initial familiarity. Sierra Montoya Barela‘s still life paintings, with their bright colors and unique compositions, balance out the exhibition.
From the museum-
The dinner table recalls memories of cuisine, traditions, faces. Many of these memories are not clearly outlined but are rather assembled together through the periphery of our experiences. At the edge are small details such as decor or furniture, all of which complement the feeling and evoke emotion that registers our memories of the moments. The settings themselves often define the sensibility of the dinner table. Working within and beyond these domestic settings, Sierra Montoya Barela, Debra Broz, and Adam Ledford each contribute their distinct techniques to a larger place setting, inviting visitors to reminisce on tables past and present.
Sierra Montoya Barela is a painter of modern-day still life, capturing the spaces we exist in, but specifically the life that exists alongside us. Barela’s use of perspective composes a portal of access, one that feels like a peephole into the domestic items that capture our impression of a space. Each painting offers a scene that imbues surrealistic comfort. Plants that grow as we move around them, food that waits to be consumed, isolated hands or feet that are suggestively attached to a body. Barela’s spatial acuity combined with her use of color and pattern is multidimensional and lively, highlighting the surroundings that outline our lives.
Also questioning elements of space, Adam Ledford melds multiple mediums together to create installations that are dimensionally varied. The mixture of sparse line work directly applied on the wall with hand-crafted, two-dimensional ceramic vessels create a composite scene of domestic familiarity. Evocative of furniture found in our homes, the drawings support the elegant pots that rest on their implied surfaces. The nature of the entirely non-functional dioramas are deceivingly simple; their whimsical nature feeding into our sensibilities of space and depth, while subverting those perceptions into new spaces of disbelief.
Debra Broz also works within the composite. Broz alters found porcelain sculptures, seamlessly combining various pieces together to craft new creatures altogether. These small figurines are reminiscent of lovingly coveted trinkets that decorate our shelves and tables. Broz leans into our memories, appropriating the figurines’ normal representation and twisting them into something fantastical. As an actual conservator of porcelain goods, Broz’s technical skill leaves little room for error; enabling her audiences to jump into the sublime and become collectors of her newly constructed tchotchke.
The Delaware Contemporary is currently showing several exhibitions that reflect on the theme of the dinner table. In one room Nicole Nikolich has created the installation Can I Please Eat In The Computer Room Tonight? which includes an old Macintosh desktop computer surrounded by her colorful textile pieces. The work evokes the nostalgia of a childhood spent eager to be on the computer, even in its then limited capabilities.
From the museum about the installation-
The dinner table is a place of routine and tradition, the daily ritual of which can consist of eating, sharing, and storytelling. However, the dining room is not always the location for eating a meal. Food can be served on the sofa in front of the TV or outside under the stars, and in Nicole Nikolich’s experience, these special occasions were spent in her computer room. Seeking solace as a young teen, there was an excitement in experiencing space and time alone. Nikolich reclaims this memory, reflecting on nostalgic moments through her textile practice.
Nikolich’s artistic interests varied until she taught herself how to crochet; a medium that combined her intrinsic interest in color and texture. Based in Philadelphia, she was jointly inspired by street art and the ever-increasing yarn bombing movement and so took her developing techniques to her surroundings. These early experimentations eventually led to larger projects and commissions; enabling opportunities to further explore the medium on an increased scale. Her bright colors, varied textures, and whimsical designs explode on different surfaces and in all types of environments.
Can I Please Eat In The Computer Room Tonight? is a site-specific installation in response to Nikolich’s sensorial memories, her retelling of these early moments of youth. Combining both two and three-dimensional textiles, Nikolich inserts her audience into a youthful memory that is both individually personal and collectively reflective. The space is transformed by Nikolich’s signature experimental style and bold color, constructing a portal into a textile explosion. In doing so, the installation offers audiences an opportunity to reimagine their adolescent abandon; those remembrances in which routine breaks and adventure begins.
And from Nikolich-
Can I Please Eat In The Computer Room Tonight? explores the positive and transformative view of tech from a preteens perspective growing up in the early aughts. This installation is a memorial to this fever dream of a time period where you could only access the internet in a specifically designated computer room, often decorated in brown hues and overstuffed with knickknacks and office supplies. This space, an escape to another part of your life, often felt like an oasis to explore who you were becoming for the first time without the microscope and confinements of adults and societal expectations. Swapping sandboxes for CD-ROM games and mixed tapes. Inside jokes with friends in chat rooms and staying up until way too late messaging your crush in your own secret language. Taking selfies on the front facing camera and looking at yourself in a slightly different way for the first time. Learning about yourself and the world all from the glow of a little square box in the middle of a little square room.
Artist and illustrator Joseph Christian Leyendecker created this painting in 1926 for the cover of The Saturday Evening Post. Leyendecker produced annual covers featuring timely takes on “Baby New Year” for several years.
This work was part of Delaware Art Museum’s 2024 exhibition Jazz Age Illustration, which focused on the art of popular illustration in the United States between 1919 and 1942.
Pictured are two paintings by artist and illustrator Howard Pyle, The Mermaid (1910) and The Flying Dutchman (1900), currently on view at Delaware Art Museum. Pyle played an important part in the history of the arts in Delaware, especially in Wilmington, where he was based. The Mermaid was his last painting. He passed away in Italy in 1911 and the painting was left unfinished on his easel. It was completed by his student Frank Schoonover.
From the museum about the artist-
Howard Pyle captivated American readers and aspiring illustrators with his passion for storytelling. Based in Wilmington, Delaware, Pyle illustrated and wrote for the nation’s most popular magazines. His art breathed life into fictional villains and historical heroes. Pyle taught a generation of students including Violet Oakley, Frank Schoonover, and N. C. Wyeth. Today, illustrators, filmmakers, and animators still celebrate his lasting imprint on the nations visual culture.
Launching his illustration practice in the 1870s, Pyle built a successful career that spanned thirty years. He excelled throughout rapid industry expansion and vast changes in printing technology. Pyle published thousands of images in books and magazines. Beginning in 1905, Pyle transferred his skills as a storyteller into mural painting. When he died, his students and friends came together to preserve his extraordinary legacy. They formed the Wilmington Society of the Fine Arts, which became the Delaware Art Museum.
Howard Pyle was born on this day in (3/5) in 1853.
This is the last weekend to see the interactive installation Pixel Promenade Remix by Radiance (Erin Barry-Dutro and Kyle Steely) at The Delaware Contemporary in Wilmington. The work, located in its own room, is activated by body movement and creates fun multicolored light shows for participants.
From the museum-
Baltimore-based artist duo Erin Barry-Dutro and Kyle Steely, known as Radiance, construct site-specific installations that merge technology with active sensory participation. Their individual practices inform the ultimate collaboration; Erin Barry-Dutro is a visual artist and Kyle Steely is a designer/maker working with coding programs. Together, they envision products and environments that are aesthetically dynamic through functionality. Largely, the resulting projects have responded to music, movement, and the senses, ultimately addressing our humanity and how we interact with our environment.
In response to the theme of “Design”, Radiance proposed an interior version of the Pixel Promenade, which was originally installed for the Baltimore Light City Festival in 2016. Based on the original concept, Pixel Promenade Remix invites visitors to move within the installation, acting as the catalyst for oscillating color and light. Participant body movement is captured and tracked to orchestrate a light show orchestrated and centered on the individual. This simple gesture enables a sensorial experience; a direct connection between our bodies and a reactionary force.
This revitalized installation offers not only an elegantly crafted encounter but additionally initiates a dialogue about the nature of technology-based art forms and their inevitable decay. When invited to re-create the installation, Radiance took the opportunity to reflect, update, and consider the space with new possibilities. In doing so, they sought to answer questions about design innovation; what does it mean to reuse and recycle these materials? How can artwork that relies on technology be adapted to more closely resonate with contemporary topics and ideas? Pixel Promenade Remix presents the conceptual argument that “the new” is not always necessary, rather the importance lies in its relevancy and ability to reflect its participants.
“The real phenomenon of loss is both the inventory of what no longer exists and the impossible measure of what survives.” —Canisia Lubrin
What does the fugitive offer to sites of ruins? Is it a hum, a murmur, a cry, a shadow, a haunting, a poem, a memory, a scene, a loved one, a vessel, a movement, a gathering?
Fugitivity routes and unroutes our understanding of topographic terrains created through the unfolding of displacement, relocation, and exile. In the wake of migratory catastrophes, ruins are the aftermath of loss and devastation, leaving behind vestigial remnants and residuals. Reaching for traces, illegibility, and livability, the fugitive attempts to depict and texture multiple lifeworlds within ruins marked in loss and devastation. Gesturing towards the specter, how might placing what happens within sites of ruins —the permeable, usable, corporeal, and inhabitable—at the heart of our critiques and interventions enliven our imaginative possibilities?
Ruins present a set of spatial, material, visual, and psychic dimensions of un/being and becoming, as well as modes of fugitive resistance and expression. Tending to the juxtaposition of being unplaced, we are what we lose focuses on the provoking void that ruins leave behind and expresses spatial, narrative, and material practices actively and painstakingly situated in the hold of the catastrophes as means of reworlding and unworlding towards livable possibilities.
Partaking in worlding decomposition, Zalika Azim, Suneil Sanzgiri, Azza El Siddique, and Chau Nguyen present visual, narrative, and sonic performances that desire and action towards the otherly present meaning and aliveness by uncomposing time and working with the permeability of the artistic mediums. By engaging with the barely perceptible imaginations, unplaced yearnings, and tactile and vulnerable terrains, the artists orient toward spectral terrains that suture, resist, and refuse the knowability of the fugitive. Viewers will reflect on the histories of ruins haunting our contemporary sites and their capacity to mutate to make complicated ways of knowing, feeling, and seeing the world.
More information on Suneil Sanzgiri’s video installation, pictured above, from his website–
How do we live through and narrate moments of revolution and revolt, and how do we understand these experiences across time and distance? Using imaging technologies to meditate on what it means to witness from afar, Suneil Sanzgiri explores the complexities of anti-colonialism, nationalism, and diasporic identity. His work is inspired by his family’s legacy of resistance in Goa, India, an area under Portuguese occupation for over 450 years until its independence in 1961. Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?), the artist’s newest two-channel video installation, combines archival footage, animation, interviews, and a script written by poet Sham-e-Ali Nayeem. The film tells the stories of the mutual struggle in India and Africa against Portuguese colonialism, highlighting the solidarity that developed between the two continents during the 1960s and 1970s.
Work by Carl Durkow (cloud chair), Trish Tillman Wood sculpture far left and sculpture far right pictured below) and Langdon Graves installation (blue walled area)
Installation by Langdon Graves, mixed media sculptures and framed drawing
Trish Tillman, “One Last Drink”, 2018, vegan leather, tweed, ultrasuede, chrome edging, wood, foam, thread, and glass
Trish Tillman, “One Last Drink”, 2018, vegan leather, tweed, ultrasuede, chrome edging, wood, foam, thread, and glass (detail)
Trish Tillman, “Candy Cigarettes”, 2024, hand-dyed leather, UV print on leather, thread, leather buttons, wood, foam, and metal hardware
Trish Tillman, “Giving Space”, 2023, hand dyed and UV printed leather, wood, foam, thread, polymer clay, and acrylic
Langdon Graves, Trish Tillman, and Carl Durkow all bring a distinctive vision to their sculptures for The Dream Expedition: A Design Exhibition, currently on view at The Delaware Contemporary. The intriguing works combine the familiar with the enigmatic to capture the viewers imagination.
From the museum-
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Surrealist movement. Introduced by poet and critic André Breton’sSurrealist Manifesto (1924), Surrealism reaches beyond reality to explore dreams, unconsciousness, and absurdities of the human condition. The movement greatly influenced the future landscape of design through the phenomenon of Surrealist Objects–exemplified by the work of artists like Méret Oppenheim or Man Ray. The Surrealist Object, and other surrealist sculpture, presented three-dimensional manifestations of unconscious symbolisms offering introspective and reflective opportunities.
Over the last century, the field of design and the concepts of surrealism have consistently informed one another; design objects were often the focal point of surrealist sculpture or assemblage, while designers incorporated surrealist processes into their design work. Today, contemporary artists and designers continue to draw inspiration from surrealist concepts to reflect a diverse range of emotions, ideas, and experiences. The Dream Expedition aims to celebrate the elements of surrealism that influence contemporary design and sculpture to further bridge the divide between “Fine Art” and “Design.”
Each of these three artists pushes preconceived notions of sculpture and design to their limits. Carl Durkow’s works are fully functional design objects, yet they venture into the surreal through their abstraction of forms and aesthetics. Langdon Graves’ sculptural works engage familiar design and organic objects in new, unexpected ways questioning our relationship to memory and the world around us. In her work, Trish Tillman incorporates materials that we typically associate with design–vegan leather, cushions, wood, or upholstery–creating sculptures that seem to morph and bend with dreamlike movement.
