As part of their programming for the nation’s 250th birthday, Delaware Art Museum is showing the work of local artists in their current exhibition, The People’s Gallery. It is a non-juried exhibition which allowed artists at all levels to contribute work.
It’s a fantastic opportunity to see what this community of artists has created and to purchase local art. Check it out before it closes on 9/6/26.
Paintings by E. Lizé
The members of this year’s Artist-in-Residence Cohort (ARC) at The Delaware Contemporary, Mo Berrouet, E.Lizé, and Celeste M. Rodriguez, each explored an element of the self for their culminating exhibition, Self, Realized.
This exhibition was curated by Amber M. Chacana, the first ARC curator-in-residence, and closes on 8/30/26.
Paintings by E. Lizé
E. Lizé’s series is titled Familial World.
E.Lizé is a musical artist and trained visual artist, who paints portraits and scenes dedicated to the Black experience. E.Lizé’s goal is to bridge the gap between predecessors and successors in order to remain a catalyst in preserving Black culture and Black history. E.Lizé is dedicated to archiving and preserving cultural and artistic history. She has a strong interest in tangible history and what it means to inherit it.
Inspired by the women who raised her, E.Lizé created these portraits as a way to honor their legacies and their lives (so far). In doing so, she created a personal archive, marked by her own perspective and care for her family.
Paintings by Mo Berrouet
Mo Berrouet‘s series of work is titled Emotional World.
From the museum:
Mo Berrouet is a visual artist based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with a BFA from West Chester University. Her work explores themes of mental and physical health, personal narrative, and the complexities of the human experience, expressed through a variety of mediums including painting, sculpture, ceramics, and photography.
Berrouet delves into the world of her emotions and how they exist within her body, and how her body exists in relation to her emotions. While her subject matter is personal, the emotions and feelings within them resonate with others. For Berrouet, our collective human experiences inspire her.
Work by Celeste M. Rodriguez
Celeste M. Rodriguez chose Cultural World for this body of work.
From the museum:
Celeste M. Rodriguez is a Puerto Rican-American artist born and raised in Camden, NJ. She received her B.A. in Painting from Rutgers University-Camden. Her work examines the complex relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States through visual storytelling, addressing themes of colonialism, cultural erasure, and resilience. Utilizing video, painting, drawing, sculpture, and collage. She confronts exploitation while honoring Puerto Rican strength. She views art as personal and political, and through her art, reimagines a future for Puerto Rico rooted in dignity and self-determination.
Philadelphia artist Jim Houser created this mural, Wide Open, in 2019 for Mural Arts Philadelphia.
From Mural Arts:
Wide Open by artist Jim Houser features a design that speaks directly to the artist’s view of Philadelphia. Located in the Northern Liberties neighborhood, the mural’s themes include the concept of brotherly love, family and friends, a love of skateboarding and music, and the complex interaction of danger and beauty. The struggle of loss, hope and pride in where one lives intertwine in this striking mural.
His mixed media paintings, seen below, were also recently on view at Philadelphia’s Paradigm Gallery.
Work by Jim Houser at Paradigm Gallery in May of this year
You can find his most recent work on Instagram.
Leonard A. Harmon, “Untitled”, c.1980s, Oil on masonite
Leonard D. Harmon, “Last Copper Moon”, 2025, Acrylic, spray paint, oxidized copper shavings, paper on wood panel
Leonard D. Harmon, “Last Copper Moon”, 2025 (detail)
Delaware Art Museum‘s Living Indigenous showcases and celebrates Indigenous communities and artists in multiple locations in the museum. The exhibition is part of the museum’s programming for the 250th anniversary of the United States.
Developed in partnership with the Nanticoke Indian Museum, one room dedicated to works created by Indigenous artists includes paintings by Leonard A. Harmon and his nephew, Leonard D. Harmon.
From the museum and artist about Last Copper Moon (pictured above):
Leonard D. Harmon notes the rich artistic legacy that precedes him. He explains, “I draw inspiration from my ancestors to infuse a modern twist into traditional arts.” This painting references the architectural forms his uncle, Leonard A. Harmon, was creating in the 1980s. A copper moon, or total lunar eclipse, is a sacred Indigenous occurrence, and the images Harmon includes refer to associated rituals.
The exhibition continues upstairs with two different series of portraits of members of Delaware’s Indigenous communities– Will Wilson‘s Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange (CIPX) and Andre’ L. Wright, Jr.’s Indigenous Faces of Wilmington. In 2022 the museum invited Wilson to continue his CIPX project in Delaware and facilitated a photoshoot of citizens of the Lenape Indian Tribe of Delaware (The Original People) and the Nanticoke Indian Tribe (The Tidewater People). That same year the museum also commissioned Andre’ L. Wright, Jr. to create a project showcasing diverse Wilmingtonians, two of which are pictured below.
Two portraits by Andre’ L. Wright, Jr. from his series “Indigenous Faces of Wilmington”
Living Indigenous is on view until 8/23/26 and the museum is free to visit every Thursday from 4-8pm.
Along several walls at the Barnes, Native American (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) artist Sky Hopinka‘s installation, Red Metal Dust, layers photographs and transparencies of a variety of landscapes with cut copper shapes to form dreamlike vistas.
About the work from the museum (in the artist’s words):
Red Metal Dust is a body of work that considers landscape as a place shaped as much by what remains as by what has been removed. Each panel layers photographic prints with transparencies of concurrent landscapes, allowing images to pass through and across one another rather than resolve into a single view.
Geometric silhouettes, cut into polished copper and placed over the image, follow the contours of the transparencies beneath them. These copper forms both interrupt and clarify the landscape, using the logic of the silhouette to define presence through reduction. The copper reflects light and the viewer’s image, bringing the body and present moment into the work.
The title draws from the Ho-Chunk way of describing copper, naming the material not as monument but as remainder-something carried, scattered, and endured. Here, copper becomes less a surface than a witness, resilient and reflective, shaped through contact rather than display. Across these works, landscape is approached as a layered field of return, where images accumulate, echo, and settle into one another over time.
For more information on the work, this interview with Hopinka from ARTNews is also worth checking out.
Below is another section located on a different wall.
Red Metal Dust is on view until January of 2027. The Barnes is also free for Philadelphia residents for the month of July.
At the Museum for Art in Wood in Philadelphia, BA Harrington‘s Suite Américaine and Viola Bordon‘s Muliebrity, both present works influenced by history and created from a feminist perspective. Harrington adds inventive additions to her expertly crafted furniture pieces, while Bordon’s intricate textile triptych (pictured below) examines the feminine associations in icons of freedom and liberty.
From the museum about Suite Américaine:
The daughter, granddaughter, and sister of carpenters, artist BA Harrington carries craft lineage into contemporary practice. Part of a growing, intersectional cohort of women-identifying woodworkers, Harrington learned her trade, like many before her, by reproducing furniture forms of the past. Suite Américaine holds a reverence for the history of American furniture making, but is inflected with a contemporary feminist imagination.
This body of work references late-seventeenth through early-nineteenth century dower chests, writing desks, and sewing tables, which were designed specifically for women but historically made by men. However, where these objects once stored and concealed the labor and craft skill of women, Harrington opens them. The objects expose, activate, and celebrate their rich interiors, with linens and quilts spilling out of their wooden casings. The use of French in the exhibition’s title, Suite Américaine, is both a nod to the eighteenth-century term for a furniture set and a phrasing that allows the artist to feminize the word “American.” Similarly, the work on display acts as a feminist intervention on historic furniture, using video activations and collaborations with fellow artists to deepen the discussions around these works.
In this exhibition, Harrington not only remakes the original forms with her own hands, asserting her technical skill, but also highlights the revolutionary potential of furniture to self-actualize the creative endeavors of women.
Suite Américaine is a part of Radical Americana, a series of exhibitions organized by a consortium of Philadelphia’s extensive collection of arts and cultural institutions that celebrate how today’s artists are continuing the city’s unique and rich legacy as a center for creativity and civic engagement. To learn more about the other participating artists and organizations, please click HERE.
To watch the Gallery Talk with BA Harrington and Viola Bordon, click HERE.
Viola Bordon, “Muliebrity”
About Viola Bordon’s Muliebrity:
Since the American Revolution, the Roman goddess Libertas has served as a personification of the nation’s ideals, including ever shifting definitions of freedom and enfranchisement. Exemplifying the contested meanings of Libertas, the 1886 dedication of the Statue of Liberty coincided with national discord over the boundaries of freedom, sparked by the end of Reconstruction in the South, legislative debates over immigration, and the growing movement for women’s suffrage.
Drawing from archival research at the American Historical Society, textile artist Viola Bordon examined the invention and evolving meanings of “Lady Liberty” as a fragmented icon of American identity. The resulting triptych, Muliebrity, takes its title from a term Bordon uses to articulate a distinctly feminine form of power-one aligned with endurance, fertility, and embodied knowledge, and inspired in part by poet Sujata Bhatt’s Muliebrity, which describes a woman whose daily labor is suffused with quiet, almost mystical authority.
Sewing found fabric swatches into her quilt through the process of appliqué, Bordon presents a kneeling Lady Liberty surrounded by wilderness. With its visual affinity to late Medieval and early Renaissance depictions of Mary Magdalene, the artist’s patchworked portrayal invites us to consider how this figure of womanhood is repeatedly mobilized to serve the symbolic needs of patriarchal institutions.
To celebrate the World Cup, the museum is also showing Keun Ho Peter Park‘s soccer ball sculpture for Flow State. It was made using two woods, cherry and maple, which are native to the Philadelphia region where several of the games are being played.
From the museum:
Soccer — known globally as futbol — has long inspired artistic expression. Its accessibility has made it one of the world’s most beloved sports, played by hundreds of millions across cultures, generations, and levels of competition. The FIFA World Cup, held every four years, is a global spectacle that draws billions of fans who rally behind their favorite players and nations. Yet at the center of this phenomenon is a single object: the ball itself.
In World Cup 2026: Flow State, Philadelphia-based artist Keun Ho Peter Park presents a sculptural portrait of the soccer ball. Inspired by the evolving forms of official World Cup match balls, Park explores how each design reflects the identity and aspirations of its host nation while conforming to FIFA’s exacting standards. A woodworker, furniture maker, and sculptor, Park celebrates this iconic object through a sculptural work that brings together his artistic languages of alternative coopering and pattern carving.
Flow State also traces the cultural histories embedded within World Cup tradition. As a youth in Seoul, Park witnessed the 2002 FIFA World Cup, co-hosted by South Korea and Japan, when the tournament — and its official Fevernova ball — served as a powerful symbol of diplomacy and cooperation. The 2026 World Cup similarly commemorates a moment of international partnership. Referencing the official match ball, Trionda, whose tripartite design represents the three host nations of Canada, Mexico, and the United States, Park reflects on soccer’s capacity to create connections across borders while sustaining local identities. The two woods selected for the work — cherry and maple — are native to the region surrounding Philadelphia, itself a host city for the 2026 World Cup.
All three of these exhibitions close on 7/26/26.
Shaun Kardinal “I II”, Woven paper ephemera and artist’s tape
Sculptures by Hyland Mather from the “Modus Volito” series
Framed images of work by Hyland Mather and Shaun Kardinal (sculptures by Hyland Mather on the left)
Sculptures by Hyland Mather
Discarded objects are transformed into new creations in works by Hyland Mather and Shaun Kardinal, currently on view in the two person exhibition, Form / Field, at Paradigm Gallery.
From the gallery:
This exhibition presents work from two distinct practices that converge through a shared sensitivity to line, structure, and process. Mather and Kardinal each explore how form emerges through accumulation, repetition, and material response, approaches that move between precision and drift, construction and discovery.
For his third major presentation with Paradigm Gallery, Mather presents works from several ongoing series, including Linea Pictura paintings, suspended “gravity works” (Onus Suspenda), and sculptural and assemblage-based works such as Modus Volito and Novus Inventa. Spanning painting, sculpture, and installation, the work explores line, structure, and found materials through processes of gathering, repetition, and thoughtful intervention. Across these works, line operates as both drawing and structure, with string extending into space, holding weight, or tracing paths across painted surfaces, allowing form to emerge through tension, balance, and material response.
In his debut Paradigm collection, Kardinal presents his woven paper quilts created from cut and punctured ephemera, along with a series of embroidered book pages and painted postcards, creating new forms from the smallest gestures. Kardinal’s work builds from repeating parts, embroidered marks, and modular systems that gather into larger compositions. These works often embrace landscape at a distance, horizons, city grids, or atmospheric depth, while remaining grounded in pattern and accumulation. Form, in this context, is built incrementally from repeated elements. In both practices, thread-like fiber elements and linear systems act as connective tissue, binding parts into larger wholes, or tracing form across space and surface. The “field” operates here as both a physical and conceptual space: a landscape, a surface of construction, and an invisible network of forces. Across both practices, it is within this field that form takes shape, held in a state of partnership between control and chance, repetition and variation, presence and possibility.
This exhibition closes 6/28/26.
John Baldessari, “One and Three Persons (with Two Contexts-One Chaotic)”, 1994-2012, 14-color screenprint
California artist John Baldessari was born today, June 17, in 1931. The print above was part of The Cleveland Museum of Art‘s 2024 exhibition, New Narratives: Contemporary Works on Paper.
From the museum about this work:
John Baldessari often incorporated appropriated (or “found”) imagery into his artwork, such as the photographs of architecture and rubble appearing in this print. He juxtaposed these elements with outlined figures in a typically obtuse manner to suggest a narrative or simply a feeling with strange or even ominous undertones. The artist’s interest in the formal qualities of art, such as dimensionality, highlighted by his use of the irregularly shaped sheet of paper, white cut-outs, and silhouettes, adds to the sense of suggestion and uncertainty in the print.
Mona Gazala, “Place and Power”, Broken concrete slab, paint, 2024
Closing this weekend, MOUTHFUL, a group exhibition at Vox Populi in Philadelphia, features a unique mix of works exploring aspects of language.
From the gallery about the exhibition:
MOUTHFUL brings together artists working with, around, through, against, beneath, within, alongside language. Featuring over 15 artists engaging a diverse set of techniques and media, the exhibition situates key archival pieces beside new and contemporary works: flags, impossible shots, concrete slabs, worksheets, disco on repeat, and many holes.
MOUTHFUL unearths echoes, rhymes, and dissonances across the past 50 years of cultural production. How and why do artists continue to turn to language as material? How and why do writers continue to turn towards visual practices to investigate language? What sound does meaning make? What shapes do our mouths take? Curated by Vox Populi’s director, Blanche Brown, MOUTHFUL picks up these familiar questions and shakes them out: see what falls though May 1- June 14th 2026
Featuring: Robert Carey, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, China Rain Chung, Logan Cryer, Catia Colagioia, Jordan Deal, Lucia Garzón, Mona Gazala, Rachel Hsu, Tan Lin, M Slater, Lea Devon Sorrentino, Cecilia Vicuña, Eva Wu, Connie Yu, Janet Zweig
Janet Zweig, “Mind Over Matter”, 1993, Computer, printer, paper, rock, rope, pulleys, basket
From the label for Janet Zweig‘s Mind Over Matter, pictured above:
The computer was fed three sentences:
I think therefore I am – Descartes
I what I am – Popeye
I think I can – The Little Engine That Could
It randomly generates sentences from the parts. Text slowly lifts rock.
Rachel Hsu, “Fetch the Moon from the Seabed（海底撈月)”, Inkjet prints on kozo, two from series
Pictured are two prints from Rachel Hsu‘s Fetch the Moon from the Seabed（海底撈月), a series that was on two walls of the gallery. Click on the image to enlarge.
Written on the information card beside the work:
Fetch the Moon from the Seabed（海底撈月), a long-form poem, investigates yearning and migration through language and translation. Taking the form of a Chinese language-learning workbook, the poem reveals the emotional and physical exertion that speaking a second language and cultural assimilation requires.
Logan Cryer, “How I Understand It All”, 2021-2026, Retired family basketball backboard
The words on the tape read: “If I turn around and speak by showing the back of my head, I am honestly telling you how I understand it all”.
Donald Lipski, “Who’s Afraid of Red, White and Blue #37”, 1990, White wool gabardine, made in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum
Rose B. Simpson, “Tonantzin”, 2022, Linen, cotton, clay, and thread, made in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum
(L to R) Rev. Howard Finster, “George Washington Meets Martha Custis, 1984, Pigment on cotton t-shirt; James Luna, “High Tech War Shirt”, 1997-98, Smoked hide, nylon setting, silk suiting, horse hair, metal, shell buttons, bead work with watches and necklace (shell, thermometer, and plastic toys); Hock E Aye VI Edgar Heap Of Birds, “Who Owns History”, 1992, Pigment on cotton t-shirt (all works made in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum)
S.A. Bachman, “Are You Telling Yourself A Little White Lie?”, 1988, Edition of 5, Halftone photographic silkscreen pigment on nylon, made in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum
Pictured are just a few of the many excellent artworks currently on view in Some American Dreams at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. Exploring the concept of America and the American dream, all the works were created by an impressive list of artists who were Artists in Residence at the museum over the past four decades.
From the museum and curator Hilde Nelson:
In her 1986 essay “Waking Up in the Middle of Some American Dreams,” poet June Jordan calls for a multiplicity of American dreams rather than a singular paradigm. For Jordan, those in pursuit of these dreams include:
the white people the black people the female people the lonely people the terrorized people the elderly people the young people the visionary people the unemployed people the regular ordinary omnipresent people who crave grace and variety and surprise and safety and one new day after another.
On the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, this presentation of works from The Fabric Workshop and Museum’s collection explores the complexity of American-ness through lenses of history, memory, and mythology. Made by past Artists in Residence in collaboration with the FWM Studio, the projects reimagine symbols of nationhood and belonging, critique ongoing legacies of inequity, and offer expanded visions of kinship and community.
The works on view represent four decades of making at FWM. They meditate on themes including indigeneity and race, alternative origin stories, landscape and the environment, the construction of historical narrative, memory and resistance, and images of cultural affiliation. Sections of the exhibition invite additional voices, drawing their titles from a chorus of American poets, songwriters, essayists, abolitionists, and historians.
The artists featured in Some American Dreams break down borders and categorical distinctions to propose a polyphony of American dreams shaped by hybridity, friction, and affinity. They ask: what if America is not one project, but many? And how might these Americas be affirmed, resisted or remade, in Jordan’s words, to envision “one new day after another?”
This exhibition closes 6/14/26.