Jun 252026
 

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.

Jun 172026
 

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.

Jun 112026
 

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”.

 

Jun 102026
 

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.

May 272026
 

Works by Zoe Elwood

MFA candidates Tim Carr, Ryan Dittmar, Zoe Elwood, Rebecca Giles, Arizol Mendoza, Alyssa Rose Pirolli, and Nasir Young are currently showing their work at The Delaware Contemporary for the 2026 University of  Delaware Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition. The show will be on view until 5/31/26.

The sculptures pictured above are part of  Zoe Elwood‘s installation.

Information from the museum about the artist:

Zoe Elwood (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist from central Utah, currently based in Newark, DE, as they pursue an MFA in sculpture at the University of Delaware (UD). A self-proclaimed “sculpture convert,” the thesis exhibition for their BFA in painting & drawing (Utah Valley University, 2023) featured numerous assemblages of found objects, and one painting. The language of their practice continues to involve all things patinated, favoring the strange familiarity of those that remind of the home. Through such materials Elwood interrogates heteronormative notions of domesticity and discusses queer identity formation within intimate, intolerant spaces. Elwood is a current DELPHI Fellow at UD’s Center for Material Culture Studies and has been the recipient of several other honors, including the Dianne Komminsk Scholarship.

Below are more works from the exhibition and some information provided by the artists and the museum.

Paintings by Nasir Young

Nasir Young (B.1995, Philadelphia,Pa) received his BFA from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Art in 2021; and is currently a MFA candidate at the University of Delaware(2026). Young is currently represented by Gross McCleaf Gallery in Philadelphia and had his first two solo shows at the gallery. He has had a multitude of group shows along the east coast. Awards he has received range from was The Raymond D. & Estelle Rubens Travel Scholarship; two illuminate arts grants; an Elizabeth Greenshields grant; and was the second-place winner of the Philadelphia Sketch Club 158th exhibition of small oils. Young was an artist in residence at Davinci Art Alliance Resident; Delaware Contemporary and upland Vermont. Nasir’s primary source of imagery is the everyday scenes of urban inner city life influenced by the shared visual language between places.

Photo Collage work by Ryan Dittmar

Ryan Dittmar is a photographer currently collaging images onto metal forms. His work focuses on memory and what happens to it when it is lost. Dittmar first started with photography in his undergraduate studies at SUNY Oneonta. He examines the ties that photographs have to memory, examining what happens over time when memory fades but the image remains.

Through the process of photography and collage, I collect memories with the camera and re-work the memories with my exacto knife. Steel sheets become the settings for these new scenes to exist. They represent a place in my mind, an open area in which memories are allowed to be reconstructed on. At its most simplest ingredients it is steel, and photopaper. Together these forms create the liminal space that is what I call the void. The place in between presence and memory.

Paintings by Rebecca Giles

Rebecca Giles is a painter who earned her BFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Her paintings focus on photosynthesis and plant cellular structures. She is especially interested in artificial photosynthetic systems. Giles is inspired by microscopic plant life. She has a light microscope in her art studio, and she paints pictures of what she sees through her microscope. She uses her microscope as an art tool to investigate light and color. Giles wants viewers to experience a feeling of overwhelming awe at the incredible vastness of the miniature worlds found within nature. She calls this feeling of awe the microscopic sublime.

Sculptures by Tim Carr

Tim Carr earned his BFA with a concentration in ceramics from Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University in 2024. He is currently pursuing his MFA at the University of Delaware. Much of his practice centers on utilitarian ware, which he expands to engage with personal and conceptual themes, using clay as a metaphor for culture, folklore, and narrative storytelling. Throughout a decade of working with ceramics, his artistic journey began in the communal studios of the Chester County Art Association, where he first developed foundational skills in the medium. His early years at Alfred University deepened his fascination with functional tableware and refined his approach to utilitarian ceramics, with a particular focus on mastering wheel throwing.

Paintings by Alyssa Pirolli

Alyssa Pirolli is a visual artist from New Jersey and is currently an MFA Candidate at the University of Delaware. She attended private art lessons with artist Rebecca Tait at the Studio of Glenn Gables in Laurel Springs, NJ before continuing her training in Philadelphia. Pirolli received her BA from Chestnut Hill College and a Certificate from the Advanced Fine Art Program at Studio Incamminati. Her work is focused on exploring ‘the self’ and the human condition, primarily through portraiture. Community, especially the one she has come to know while pursuing her studies in Delaware, has become a driving force in her current body of work.

Sculpture by Arizol Mendoza

Arizol Mendoza (she/her/hers) is a Mexican-American sculptural ceramic artist born in New Jersey, USA. She obtained her B.A. in Art in 2018 from Rutgers University with a Minor in Psychology and is a current MFA candidate at the University of Delaware (2026). Mendoza began her ceramics career in 2015 while studying at Raritan Valley Community College (Branchburg, NJ). Originally concentrating in Graphic Design, she discovered that the plasticity and physicality of clay— combined with her existing interest in abstract forms opened a door to exploring ceramics as a medium for translating her visions into tactile, three-dimensional forms. Her earlier works explored personal narratives and storytelling through organic forms.

May 202026
 

“The Shape of What Remains”, 2026, Casein, Painted Paper, and Shopping Bag Paper

“Cocooned Reflection”, 2025, Casein, Collage, Blackout Poem,and Acrylic Mediums

“We Learn to Be Guarded”, 2026, Casein, Collaged Drawings, Found Objects and Acrylic Medium

“We Learn to Be Guarded” (detail)

For An American Son, Oscar Eduardo de Paz‘s solo exhibition at Chris White Gallery in Wilmington, he has created a series of works that capture moments from his life growing up as an American born to immigrant parents. The addition of collaged poems and objects adds textures to the paintings that draw the viewer in, while his focus on hands emphasizes the commonalities in his experiences.

From the gallery-

An American Son presents a powerful new body of work by Oscar Eduardo de Paz, tracing his journey from childhood poverty to fatherhood, community, and artistic emergence.

Through his Poetic Symbolic Representation (PSR) approach, de Paz layers figures, objects, archival fragments, and lived memory to reveal how American systems, poverty, policing, immigration, education, and care, shape a life. These paintings move between personal testimony and collective history, offering an intimate and compelling account of American experience through one son’s eyes.

The gallery is hosting a closing reception this Friday evening, 5/22/26, from 5-8pm.

May 062026
 

Detail from the center work in the image above

In Stone Formations, Kira Krell‘s exhibition at the Mezzanine Gallery in Wilmington, her large multilayered paintings and smaller delicate sculptures find a cohesive balance, much like the natural formations that inspired them.

From Mezzanine Gallery and Delaware Division of the Arts-

Stone Formations is a solo exhibition by Kira Krell that guides viewers from volcanic deserts to beautiful coastlines. Through diverse geological imagery, and weathered forms, the work traces place and time, evoking memory, endurance, and the lasting presence of landscapes once called home.

Krell’s process begins by layering sand, plaster and earth pigments to create relief-like texture paintings. Adding, subtracting, and distressing these elements is necessary to achieve surfaces that appear weathered and time-worn, in pursuit of capturing geological structures: Stone Formations. Intricate details are revealed through dry brushing and mark making techniques, using acrylic and pencils. Fascinated by natural forms and their portrayal of permanence and strength, the artist offers an impression of steadiness and belonging. This acts as a counterpoint to our fast-paced, ever-changing world. Krell invites viewers to take a moment to pause, breathe and reflect on our beautiful world.

The exhibition will be on view until 5/29/26.

Apr 102026
 

Lindsey Cherek Waller, “Making Plans”, 2025, acrylic on stretched canvas (It was also used for the cover of the upcoming book “Girls Our Age” by Phoebe Thompson)

Perry Picasshoe, “Splitting Heaven”, 2025, oil on unstretched canvas (part of a performance piece)

Perry Picasshoe, “Splitting Heaven”, 2025 (detail)

Creative Influence(r), currently on view at The Delaware Contemporary, features work by Lindsey Cherek Waller and Perry Picasshoe, two artists who use social media platforms to increase their visibility and success.

From the museum about the exhibition-

For centuries, art museums have wielded their power to define a predictable, prescribed path for aspiring artists. An artist striving to build a career from their work traditionally starts with a formal arts education, then builds a portfolio, hoping to secure gallery representation, which will garner the attention of collectors, galleries, and museums. But since the 2010s, that has shifted. Increasingly, young and emerging artists are utilizing social media platforms to subvert the traditional routes to becoming a working artist; a path that, for many, has numerous real and perceived barriers to entry. Using social media platforms, like TikTok and Instagram, artists have found ways to circumvent the traditional hierarchy of the art world, building their own audiences and collector bases by sharing their work online for millions to discover and appreciate. By utilizing these platforms, artists have also found a way to reinvigorate art for younger generations and those who feel excluded from institutional structures, making contemporary art more accessible for all.

Lindsey Cherek Waller and Perry Picasshoe built their artistic career on social media platforms where their art is activism. Their public artwork has protested ICE abductions, it has protected queer virtual and physical queer spaces, and has raised funds to support causes important to them. These artists are only two of many who are redefining “success in the art world”, their success comes directly from their fearlessness and advocacy for their work and communities.

Creative Influence(r) is on view until 4/26/26.

Feb 132026
 

Currently on view at Philadelphia International Airport, It’s A Wrap 2, brightens a section of the airport with art work and installations by several local artists.

Included in this post are works by Nicole Nicolich (pictured above), Tim Eads of Tuft the World, Olivia Chiaravalli, and on the ceiling tiles- work by Miriam Singer and Eurhi Jones.

From the airport about the exhibition–

This exhibition features work by Philadelphia area artists who were invited to create unique architectural interventions within the Airport terminal. Using yarn, fabric, felt, found objects, tape, paint, wheat paste, and wood, the artists applied their work to the ceiling tiles, columns, rockers, walls, walkway, and windows. They have visually transformed this location into an immersive and experiential art-filled passageway.

The artists responded to the existing architectural elements to create an unexpected visual experience and an engaging space for people to pass through. It is a form of urban interventionism where art activates the built environment with the intention to see a public space in a new and creative way.

Work by Tim Eads of Tuft the World

Olivia Chiaravalli, “Brick by Brick”

Miriam Singer, “Dreamliner”

Eurhi Jones, “Tinicum”

Feb 062026
 

Giorgio de Chirico, “Portrait of Guillaume Apollinaire”,1914, Oil and charcoal on canvas

René Magritte, “The Secret Double”, 1927, Oil on Canvas

Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art presents a large collection of works, in a variety of mediums, from the artistic movement. The show takes you through Surrealism’s history and is filled with many inventive and imaginative pieces- including several from lesser-known artists.

From the museum about the exhibition-

Surrealism burst onto the scene in Paris in 1924. French writer André Breton announced the aims of this revolutionary literary and artistic movement in his Manifesto of Surrealism. It started with a question: How, ideally, should we live? Breton observed that, at about twenty years of age, we make the error of trading our childlike imaginations for adult good sense and logic. Yet it’s the imagination that allows access to the innate state of freedom that we all possess. And maintaining freedom, Breton proposed, should always be the highest human aspiration.

Surrealism’s ambitions were broad and bold: its adherents wanted nothing less than a revolution in consciousness. To that end, they explored a method of experimental poetry called automatic writing, comparable to spoken free association, done spontaneously and, as far as possible, without conscious intent. Sigmund Freud’s theories about the role of the unconscious and the interpretation of dreams were an important inspiration. The Surrealists looked to access the unconscious mind to break free from the constraining rationality of the modern world.

Visual artists were part of the Surrealist movement from the start. They took up surprising and often challenging subject matter, imagery, and techniques across many mediums: painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, photography, book illustration and design, and film. In Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100, we explore how, from the movement’s 1920s beginnings through the 1950s, these trailblazing artists made good on Surrealism’s revolution in consciousness.

The exhibition is split into six categories- Waking Dream which features Surrealism’s beginnings in the 1920s, Natural History, focused on the influence of nature, Desire, Premonition of War, Exiles, and Magic Art, which focuses on the new type of esotericism that emerged within Surrealism in the aftermath of World War II.

Lee Miller’s photographs of natural rock formations

Salvador Dalí, “Aphrodisiac Telephone” 1938, Plastic, metal

From the museum about Aphrodisiac Telephone, one of the artworks in the Desire section–

Salvador Dalí likened the Surrealist object, which uses found items, as a symbolic creation with improbable juxtapositions, comparable to poetry and sexual perversion. He applied this idea in Aphrodisiac Telephone. Its basis is the substitution of a lobster— a real lobster in the sculpture’s first iteration for display in 1938, a factitious lobster in white plastic for the editioned version —for a similarly shaped telephone handset. The title alludes to the lobster’s reputation as an aphrodisiac when eaten.

Max Ernst, “The Fireside Angel (The Triumph of Surrealism)”, 1937, Oil on canvas

From the museum about the Max Ernst painting above, from the Premonition of War section-

Ernst painted The Fireside Angel (The Triumph of Surrealism) to protest the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War as well as the defeat of the Republican side. But this depiction of a rampaging bird-headed beast also served as an allegorical reflection on the nature of evil. Ernst exhibited this painting as The Triumph of Surrealism — a despairingly ironic title given the situation in Europe — at the 1938 International Surrealist Exhibition in Paris.

During World War II many European artists escaped to New York City and Mexico. The Exiles section features works by these artists, as well as Mexican (like Roberto Montenegro pictured below) and American artists whose work could also be seen as part of the Surrealist movement.

Roberto Montenegro, “The Double”, 1938, Oil on panel

The last section of the exhibition Magic Art, focuses on the increase in post-war interest in supernatural themes. There was also a room devoted to the work of artist friends Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, who had moved to Mexico during the war.

Leonora Carrington, “And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur”, 1953, Oil on canvas

Remedios Varo, “Creation of the Birds”, 1957, Oil on Masonite

This exhibition is on view until 2/16/25.