Delaware Art Shows- Lucia Riffel at The Delaware Contemporary

 Animation, Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Delaware, Installation Art, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film, Wilmington
Jun 052026
 

Lucia Riffel‘s current installation, a red sun has water in its eye, at The Delaware Contemporary, explores elements of magical thinking, our relationship to nature, and the desire to leave some mark of ourselves in the world. In the darkened room, looped 3D animations play above small handmade sculptures, and on the floor a video is surrounded by a circle of hand prints in dirt, reminiscent of those left behind on cave walls.

About the exhibition from Riffel’s website:

I started seeing raccoons in July. They would tap on my windows at night and tap inside my walls in the morning. Watching me, sleeping in the room next to me, warmed from the waters I showered in through the thin barrier of the tub. I don’t know what they wanted or what they were trying to tell me, but they wanted to tell me something so badly. I loved them, I feared them, they consumed my thoughts for months. I am both terrified and comforted by how thin the membrane between my life and theirs is. After all, we are both just creatures trying to live.

I am interested in the marks we leave on the world and the marks the world leaves on us. Our existence feels so small, layered between an authoritative takeover and ever-growing climate devastation. But I contradict myself, because I find small things to be some of the most magical. We anthropomorphize, we think the raccoons are trying to tell us something (and maybe they are!), we see ourselves in everything, we find meaning in everything. We leave our little marks anywhere we can to signal to the others that we are here, beneath it all. Despite the horrors, we do persist. I often think about someday someone or something seeing our small, mundane, markings of life and knowing “we were here, we were here.”

I made these tiny bits of ephemera to serve as relics of time spent processing, in communion with bits of nature as it exists now, and moments tucked away at the dawn of whatever comes next.

And from The Delaware Contemporary’s website:

“My work leads one to the place between their mind and screen, space and time, thought and feeling, and into the everyday sublime. I create time loops and capsules – distilling the fleeting and immaterial through installations, animations, and horticulture. Themes of pattern and repetition coalesce both in-screen and in real life, allowing one to look through the mirror of the screen and enter a meditative headspace beyond as well as within. Processing cyclical existence, digital ephemerality, and environmental anxiety, my practice utilizes experiential stimuli to awaken interiority – leaving one in a suspended metaphysical twilight zone.​”

This exhibition is on view until 8/30/26.

 

Delaware Art Shows- University of Delaware Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition at The Delaware Contemporary in Wilmington

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Ceramic Art, Collage, Conceptual Art, Delaware, Fiber Arts, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Sculptors / Sculpture, Wilmington
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.

Delaware Art Shows- Oscar Eduardo de Paz at Chris White Gallery in Wilmington

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Delaware, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Wilmington
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.

Delaware Art Shows- Kira Krell at the Mezzanine Gallery in Wilmington

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Delaware, Fiber Arts, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture, Wilmington
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.

Delaware Art Shows- “Constellations of Belonging” at The Delaware Contemporary

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Ceramic Art, Collage, Delaware, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture, Wilmington
Apr 102026
 

Debra Cartwright, “Marked Infertile, 1873”, 2025, watercolor and oil on canvas

Tiana McMillan, “Venus Skirt”, 2018, ceramic

Tiana McMillan, “Self portrait”, 2017, underglazed ceramic (with work by Debra Cartwright in the background)

Debra Cartwright, “Whispers of care”, 2025, watercolor, pencil, ink, and collage on paper

Debra Cartwright‘s paintings and Tiana McMillan‘s sculptures work well together in Constellations of Belonging, currently on view at The Delaware Contemporary.

From the museum’s website-

Constellations of Belonging unfolds within a moment shaped by surveillance, bodily regulation, and persistent demands that Black women be legible, visible and consumable. The body is monitored, narrated, disciplined, and asked to explain its own presence.

This exhibition considers how artists tend to their inner world under these conditions. Interiority is approached as a political and ethical practice—a site of care, imagination, and endurance beyond public demand. The exhibition takes its structure from constellations: provisional patterns drawn across distance. Belonging, here, is composed across difference, pressure,and time.

Within the gallery, this idea appears through light and weight. Darker works, anchored at a concentrated point within the gallery, function as repositories—holding what has become too heavy, too charged, or too historically burdened to remain invisible. In doing so, they allow other forms within the space to move with greater restraint and quiet, unencumbered by what has already been borne.

This distribution frames fragmentation as strategy. The body, like a constellation, is extended across multiple sites as a means of protection and care. What is held in one place reshapes what becomes possible in another.

Constellations of Belonging invites viewers to consider belonging as a continual practice –made and remade in relation, sustained through imagination, and carried collectively rather than alone.

This exhibition closes 4/26/26.

Delaware Art Shows- “Creative Influence(r)” at The Delaware Contemporary

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Delaware, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film, Wilmington
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.

Delaware Art Shows- “This Place Meant” at The Delaware Contemporary

 Architecture, Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Conceptual Art, Delaware, Drawing, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Sculptors / Sculpture, Wilmington
Apr 092026
 

Thea Abu El-Haj, “Architecture of Exile”, 2023, oil on board

Rayan Elnayal, “The courtyard lit up-Al Hoash Nawar”, 2023, digital print

Shira Walinsky’s installation

For This Place Meant at The Delaware Contemporary, artists Thea Abu El-Haj, Rayan Elnayal, and Shira Walinsky each present work that reflects aspects of what home means to them.

From the museum about the exhibition-

This Place Meant explores how three artists think about and imagine home when they are far from it. Each artist explores their lived or past relationship with the place they call home and where they are now. Thea Abu El-Haj remembers the home she once knew, Rayan Elnayal imagines a home she hopes to know, and Shira Walinsky shares the home she knows with new neighbors. If you were forced to leave your home, whether to be closer to family, to find a better life, to escape natural disasters or political trouble, how would you share memories from where you once lived? What parts of that place would you describe: the colors, the smells, the sounds?

We hope you tell them what that place meant to you.

Below are some additional works and the artist bios from The Delaware Contemporary’s website.

Paintings by Thea Abu El-Haj

As a Palestinian American artist, Thea’s work excavates personal and collective narratives of loss, exile, and resistance, even as it celebrates the beauty and joy around us. She is drawn to the imprint of human history on the natural landscape. Growing up in the Middle East, the colors, quality of light, and traces of millennia of human presence continue to resonate through her work, even as the landscapes of the Northeastern U.S. where she has lived her adult life influence what she paints. Buildings and stone walls in the process of decay; light coming through dark and dark through light; the quality of color at different times of day are all sources for her work.

Digital prints by Rayan Elnayal

Rayan Elnayal is a Sudanese artist, designer, and educator based in London, with a background in architecture. In 2020, she transitioned from traditional practice to an alternative one that fosters a more equitable and creative approach to design but also nurtures her artistic pursuits. She is also the co-founder and director of Space Black, a collective of Black professionals in the built environment, dedicated to imagining alternative spatial futures for marginalised communities.

Her pieces invite viewers to step into these imagined spaces and explore them. Her work challenges us to reflect on our personal attitudes toward futurism and futuristic aesthetics, while reminding us that our envisioned future built environments can honour our heritages, communities, and shared joy.

Shira Walinsky is an interdisciplinary artist and teacher. Her work centers on people and places in the City of Philadelphia. She has worked in Philadelphia for 20 years on murals, paintings, photography, films and other public participatory work. The map can be a portrait of places and the face a map of our experiences. She is interested in how the vibrant and the sensory can amplify the stories of people and place. This manifests in bus wraps, films, photography, painting and murals. In 2012 she co-founded Southeast by Southeast with Mural Arts Philadelphia. Southeast by Southeast is a community space co-created with social workers and artists and community leaders for and with refugee and immigrant communities. Shira strives to create innovative projects which elevate the resilience of immigrant and refugee stories.

This exhibition, part of the museum’s Winter/Spring exhibitions, closes on 4/26/26.

Delaware Art Shows- “Imprinted: Illustrating Race” at Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Delaware, Drawing, Painting / Painters, Printmaking, Wilmington
Feb 262026
 

Kadir Nelson, “Harlem On My Mind”, 2016, Oil on canvas, Cover for The New Yorker, February 22, 2016

There’s only a few days left to see the excellent and informative exhibition Imprinted: Illustrating Race at Delaware Art Museum.

From the museum about the exhibition–

The Norman Rockwell Museum assembled Imprinted: Illustrating Race with co-curator Robyn Phillips-Pendleton, a professor at the University of Delaware. The exhibition honors Rockwell’s powerful images supporting the Civil Rights Movement, displaying his work within a sweeping historical survey of American illustration that features illustrators including Romare Bearden, Emory Douglas, Howard Pyle, and Loveis Wise.

Illustration has been at the forefront of defining events in the United States, from the American Civil War and Reconstruction Era to the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, moving forward to today. Imprinted examines widely circulated imagery, conceived and published over the course of more than three centuries, which has reflected and shaped perceptions of race across time.

Featuring over 200 artworks commissioned by publishers and advertisers, the exhibition traces harmful and prolific stereotypical representations of race that were historically sanctioned and prominently featured in newspapers, magazines, and books, on trade cards, posters, and advertisements, and on packaging and products. Imprinted also celebrates the concerted efforts of 20th and 21st century artists and editors to shift the cultural narrative through the publication—in print and across digital platforms—of positive, inclusive imagery emphasizing full agency and equity for all.

Norman Rockwell, “Murder in Mississippi”, 1965, Oil on canvas (Unpublished, intended as the final illustration for “Southern Justice” by Charles Morgan, Jr, in Look, June 29, 1965)

From the museum about the Rockwell work above-

In 1963, Rockwell turned his attention to the documentation of America’s most pressing social concerns and the subject of human rights by making works for Look magazine.

In the beginning of 1965, Rockwell began work on a piece about the murders of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman-three young civil rights workers who were in Mississippi to expand voter registration.

He wanted the painting to express his outrage. In a letter to Look art director Allen Hurlburt, Rockwell wrote: “I tried in a big way…to make an angry picture. If I just had a bit of Ben Shahn in me it would have helped.”

Shahn’s portraits of the three activists are also on view next Rockwell’s.

Below is Jacob Lawrence‘s painting, The Brown Angel.

Jacob Lawrence, “The Brown Angel”, 1959, Tempera on gesso panel

From the museum-

In the 1940s and 1950s, Lawrence painted a series of compelling works inspired by nightlife and its social atmosphere. In The Brown Angel, the painting’s sharp, edgy forms convey a sense of unease, perhaps pointing to the mounting racial tensions of the time.

Several of Ahmed Samuel Milai’s series of comic-style historical portraits are also on view.

Ahmed Samuel Milai, “Marie Laveau, III”, 1966, Ink, benday, and conte crayon on board    For “Facts About the Negro” by J. A. Rogers, in The Pittsburgh Courier, April 2, 1966

From the museum-

Milai was an editorial and comic strip cartoonist for the Pittsburgh Courier, an influential African American weekly newspaper published from 1907 to 1966. For 30 years, he illustrated “Your History,” a cartoon feature that became known in the 1960s as “Facts About the Negro.”

Designed to celebrate and inspire pride in the accomplishments of people of color across the fields of the arts, literature, education, and science, the series brought Black history to light at a time when such information was not widely acknowledged or shared.

You can find a few more of his illustrations here.

Thanks to the support of The Gilliam Foundation, for Black History Month the museum is offering free admission (including the exhibition), every Saturday in February. The exhibition closes 3/1/26.

Delaware Art Shows- “Biennial Art+AI” Exhibitions at The Delaware Contemporary

 Animation, Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Ceramic Art, Conceptual Art, Delaware, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Printmaking, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film, Wilmington
Dec 182025
 

Work by Mel Rosen (sculpture) and Stass Shpanin (mural, video, and paintings)

Detail from Stass Shpanin’s “Dance of Birth” animated video

Ceramic sculptures by Mel Rosen

Paintings by Stass Shpanin

The Delaware Contemporary is currently showing three exhibitions as part of its 2025 Biennial  Art + AI programming. This post covers two of them, the third is here.

Construct | Disrupt: Artificial Intelligence as Tool and Material features work by artists Mel Rosen, Stass Shpanin, Sol Kim, and Mark Burchick.

From the museum about the exhibition-

In an age when reality itself feels unstable—filtered through algorithms, fragmented by digital archives, and refracted through competing narratives—artists are increasingly turning to the tools of fiction and speculation not to obscure the truth, but to question how we construct it. Construct | Disrupt brings together the work of Mel Rosen, Sol Kim, Stass Shpanin, and Mark Burchick, four artists who use artificial intelligence, language, and archival material to explore the porous boundaries between perception, memory, and belief.

Across diverse practices—from ceramics, drawing, and painting to video, installation, and text—these artists engage with AI not as a replacement for the hand, but as a provocateur, a co-conspirator, and a mirror to the human imagination. Rather than seeking resolution or certainty, their works open up space for doubt, complexity, and contradiction.

Together, the artists in Construct | Disrupt invite us to consider how we construct meaning in a world where the archive is no longer fixed and where the image can be endlessly generated. The work of these artists does not offer answers, but rather asks: What do we trust? What do we remember? And how do we decide what is worth believing?

About the two artists pictured above, from the museum-

Stass Shpanin engages history as a space of imaginative reconstruction. Working with visual fragments from American folk traditions and immigrant archives, he uses AI to distort and reconfigure the past, generating speculative images that blend glitch, myth, and memory. His paintings and drawings present broken, layered timelines where visual language is both preserved and interrupted. Rather than restoring a singular truth, Shpanin’s work embraces the possibility of many coexisting histories—ones shaped as much by fantasy as by fact, as much by the digital as the ancestral.

Mel Rosen’s practice draws from archaeology, natural history, and personal memory to create objects and images that feel both ancient and otherworldly. Her use of AI image generation allows her to iterate quickly, mutating prompts based on her own drawings and a mental library of organic and cultural references—from Pompeian frescoes and fossils to barnacles and talismans. The resulting images feed back into her ceramics and drawings, where mythic forms and geometric distortions coexist in a suspended cosmology. Rosen’s work suggests that artifacts—whether material or digital—are always evolving, reshaped by time, environment, and interpretation.

Still from the video “Person Enough” by Sol Kim

Sol Kim (video still above) approaches language as a material form, using words to subtly disrupt social and technological systems. Her works often begin with a textual prompt—an instruction, label, or survey—that gives rise to absurd, humorous, or quietly unsettling performances. In The Cookiest Cookie, cookies are judged and destroyed by AI based on their perceived “cookie-ness,” while in Person Enough?, performers attempt to become more legibly “human” to computer vision systems. Through these gestures, Kim reveals the tensions between human nuance and machine classification, exposing the strange logic that governs our interactions with technology—and with one another.

Mark Burchick Installation

Images from Mark Burchick’s “Felt Presence”

Mark Burchick’s Felt Presence explores the intersection of faith, media, and artificial intelligence through the lens of Catholic mysticism. Drawing on archival photographs from the 1917 “Miracle of the Sun” in Fatima, Portugal, Burchick trains AI models to generate photorealistic images of miracles that were never captured on film. Presented alongside historical documentation and witness testimony, these fabricated scenes invite viewers to question the boundaries between belief, evidence, and visual truth—highlighting the unseen technological, institutional, and spiritual forces that shape our perception of reality.

In NOO Icons, Burchick expands this inquiry through an immersive video installation framed like a reliquary. A five-minute rear-projected loop, trained on over 100 images of stained glass Rose Windows, morphs into abstract color fields via AI animation. At its center is a 3D-printed altar piece generated using DreamFusion, a text-to-3D tool prompted to create a “solar monstrance.” The resulting object—gold-finished, internally lit, and housing Lithium batteries—evokes both the Communion host and a technological relic. As Kate Crawford notes in Atlas of AI, Lithium is a sacred yet finite resource driving modern AI. By encasing it in plastic and low-res form, Burchick critiques the planned obsolescence and ecological cost of our AI-powered age, reframing divine presence through the lens of material decay.

In another of the museum’s galleries is- Reimagine | Reveal: Challenging the Algorithmic Gaze featuring work by Danielle Glovin, Stephanie Dinkins, and Leah Modigliani.

About the show from the museum-

The works covering this exhibition theme approach AI not as a neutral instrument, but as a complex cultural system—one that reflects, amplifies, and at times distorts the values of its makers. Through the intersecting strategies of critique, reimagination, and bias exposure, Danielle Glovin, Stephanie Dinkins, and Leah Modigliani probe the systems—algorithmic, archival, social—that dictate what is preserved, who is recognized, and how knowledge circulates.

Together, these artists ask urgent questions: Who trains the algorithm? Whose histories are encoded, and whose are left out? What does it mean to build an intelligence—and who is it built for? In doing so, they model a critical engagement with AI, one that challenges default narratives, centers marginalized perspectives, and opens up space for new possibilities. Their practices call us to reconsider what it means to know, to remember, and to be recognized in a world increasingly shaped by invisible systems of intelligence.

Stephanie Dinkins’ interactive sculpture “Not The Only One (N’TOO)“

Stephanie Dinkins’ “Conversations with Bina48” (back wall) and Leah Modigliani’s AI generated letters for “Cultural Capital”

From Danielle Glovin’s series “Future Generations”

About the artists’ work pictured above-

Stephanie Dinkins’ Not The Only One (N’TOO) and Conversations with Bina48 extend this inquiry into the realm of relational AI, specifically that of minority groups in the tech sector. In N’TOO, an interactive sculpture gives voice to the oral histories of three generations of Black women, creating an AI entity intentionally designed, trained, and aligned with their values and lived experiences. It is a poignant reversal: instead of AI extracting meaning from biased data sets, Dinkins encodes her AI, reorienting the goals of intelligence design toward inclusivity and equal representation.

In Conversations with Bina48, Dinkins engages in an evolving dialogue with one of the world’s most advanced humanoid robots- probing the limits of kinship, consciousness, and identity. The recorded exchanges navigate tensions between human and machine, emotion and algorithm, intimacy and abstraction—underscoring the urgency of developing AI systems coded to reflect the full richness and diversity of human stories, cultures, and embodied experiences.

Leah Modigliani’s Cultural Capital offers a satirical yet incisive intervention into the circuits of artistic legitimacy. Through a fictional archive of AI-generated letters of recommendation and rejection—authored in the mimicked voices of historical critics and curators—Modigliani reveals how the rhetoric of value and genius in the art world is both constructed and recursively reinforced. The project uses generative tools to lay bare the biases embedded in cultural gatekeeping, drawing attention to the ways AI might amplify inherited hierarchies under the guise of neutrality.

Danielle Glovin’s Future Generations presents AI-generated reinterpretations of inherited family photographs, exposing the mechanics of machine vision and the flattening effects of automated classification. By transposing Midjourney text outputs onto her photographs, Glovin literalizes the collision between personal history and digital taxonomy. The result is a visual language at once familiar and estranged—where nostalgia meets simulation, and memory is rewritten through the aesthetics of machine learning.

These exhibitions will close on 12/28/25.

Delaware Art Shows- “Reclaim/ Reframe: Challenging the Algorithmic Gaze” at The Delaware Contemporary in Wilmington

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Conceptual Art, Delaware, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Printmaking, Sculptors / Sculpture, Video and Film, Wilmington
Dec 182025
 

Portraits by Carrie Ann Baade

Reclaim | Reframe: Datasets and Cultural Visibility, is one of three exhibitions that make up The Delaware Contemporary’s 2025 Biennial- Art + AI. The timely show features work by Carrie Ann Baade, Tyanna Buie, Blažo Kovačević, and Tara Youngborg.

From the museum–

Through AI and computational technologies, artists Carrie Ann Baade, Tyanna Buie, Blažo Kovačević, and Tara Youngborg construct layered narratives that reclaim overlooked and marginalized histories. In doing so, these artists unsettle dominant cultural and media frameworks that have long erased, distorted, or commodified lived experience. Exploring themes of identity, ancestry, and displacement, they use generative tools as critical instruments to question, expose, and reconfigure the archival and institutional biases embedded in history, culture, and the environment. From ancestral reclamation and speculative futures to immersive storytelling and data-driven environmental translations, their work advances a reimagining of social justice through the lens of artificial intelligence.

Together, these artists offer a complex portrait of making in the age of AI, revealing how tools shaped by those in power can both perpetuate bias and enable resistance. Their work asks: Who shapes the cultural record? When an AI model “remembers,” whose truth is it repeating? How can we reclaim agency within these systems (built on our collective labor)?

The images at the beginning of this post are from Carrie Anne Baade’s series, Birthplace. Her mixed media portraits of her ancestors, created with the help of AI, present a fascinating look at the stories of several women from early in American history.

From Baade’s statement about the work-

Birthplace is a visual exploration of personal ancestry, delving into the lives of women from colonial Louisiana between 1690 and 1750. Through oil painting, collage, and Al-generated imagery, I reconstruct the presence of these women-figures shaped by French colonial rule, Indigenous displacement, and Romani migration-whose stories have been largely absent from recorded history. Employing a methodology that blends archival research with imaginative storytelling, I create portraits that serve as visual hypotheses-acts of artistic and ancestral repair. The compositions incorporate antique lace, colonial maps, domestic fabrics, and found objects, mirroring the intertwined textures of lineage, migration, and identity. Al-generated image blending aids in synthesizing historically plausible references, speculating on the appearance and presence of women who were never visually recorded.

This project is not about one family, but a shared American inheritance. It reveals the complexity of identity in a land shaped by colonization, migration, and erasure. In rematriating these women to history, Birthplace offers viewers a visual counter-history-one rooted in survival, interconnection, and the enduring power of maternal lineage.

Pictured below are works from the other artists in the exhibition along with information provided by the museum.

Tara Youngborg examines how institutional data and machine learning shape our understanding of land and environment. Using field research, environmental archives, and US Geological Survey datasets, her datastream translates waterflow data and topographic maps into immersive video installations that highlight the limitations of digital representation. By transforming statistics into layered, shifting media, Youngborg portrays landscapes as dynamic terrains of knowledge. Glitches and ruptures in the work expose gaps between digital abstraction and lived experience, prompting questions about algorithmic authority and what is lost when place is reduced to data.

Tara Youngborg’s installation

Tara Youngborg’s installation (detail)

In AR (Argumentative Reality) and Truck for Three Illegal Passengers, Blažo Kovačević uses augmented reality, 3D modeling, and game engine software to confront invasive state surveillance and the dehumanization of migrants. Using digitally enhanced X-ray images from European Border Patrol inspections, he reconstructs a 2015 tragedy in Serbia where 54 undocumented passengers died in a van crash. His works shift between detached aerial views and intimate interior scans, altering typical media frames into ethical engagement. Kovačević warns how AI-driven technologies can perpetuate oppression through automated surveillance, data collection, and erasure, urging reflection on the politics of visibility and mediated violence.

A still from Blažo Kovačević’s video

Tyanna Buie reconstructs erased family histories and reimagines Black identity through speculative Afro-Futurist frameworks. Using ChatGPT and DeepFake technology, she remixes images, sound, and text to create narratives where absence becomes presence. In The Guardians of Nyala, Buie overlays her own likeness onto eighteenth-century Dutch dignitary portraits, then collaborates with AI to imagine a family history untouched by colonization. Rooted in personal narrative and Black popular culture, her counter-archive elevates erased lives and transforms AI from a tool of replication into one of radical self-authorship.

Two of the portraits from Tyanna Buie’s “The Guardians of Nyala”

This exhibition closes 12/28/25.

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