Contributed by Sharon Butler / On October 12, Two Coats of Paint welcomes Alice Pixley Young. She hails from Cincinnati, Ohio, where the Rust Belt and ancient fossil beds meet nuclear contamination sites. She creates installations that tease out ideas about the complex archaeology of the industrial landscape, uncovering stories of displacement, exploitation, and environmental degradation that have come to characterize twenty-first-century America.
Young’s visual vocabulary draws from both manmade and natural environments, generating a hybrid language that articulates our fractured relationship with the land. She uses recurring motifs – bell jars, transmission towers, mirrors, and fire – that migrate fluidly between drawings, monoprints, and sculptural works. These elements recall the dystopian landscapes of Cormac McCarthy‘s The Road, which are littered with remnants of failed civilization.
2025, Gouache, Sumi Ink, salt collage on Monoprint on Rives BFK, 30 x 22.5 inches
92 x 50 inches
The materiality of Young’s work is itself a form of environmental testimony. She employs hand-cut tar paper for large-scale installations, crafts miniature transmission and water towers, and uses salt and gouache to make crystallized surfaces that evoke both geological processes and industrial decay. These choices, she observes, align her practice with traditions of Land Art while drawing on the Hudson River School’s romanticized vision of the American landscape. Young’s version, of course, is more complicated and nuanced given the scars decades of industrial exploitation has left.
Central to Young’s conceptual framework is her positioning of the fossil age and nuclear age as opening and closing credits of our current era. This bracketing – from ancient marine life embedded in stone to radioactive isotopes that will outlast human civilization – establishes a chronological scale that people, save for scientists, are not accustomed to contemplating. Using video projections and mirrors, Young fashions what she calls “thresholds” or “portals” in which she imagines personal memory could intersect with geological time. Her documentation of “compromised landscapes” is part of an artistic movement that finds beauty in spaces marked by trauma. Serving as both elegy and warning, her work honors what has been lost while insisting on our responsibility for what remains.
About the artist: Alice Pixley Young grew up in Washington, DC. She received a BFA in Painting/Printmaking from Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida, participated in the New York Studio Program, and got an MFA from the University of Maryland, College Park as well as an MA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, including at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (2020), Akron Art Museum (2022), Sarasota Art Museum (2022), 21c Museums (2014–24), The Print Studio London (2019), and UICA (2012 and 2016).
In 2015, Young participated in the contemporary light exhibition, “InLight” Richmond, at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and was awarded Best in Show. She has had solo shows the Taft Museum of Art (2019), the University of Kentucky’s Bolivar Gallery (2024), and the University of Rochester’s Hartnett Gallery (2024). She is a grant recipient from the Puffin Foundation, the Surdna Foundation, Ohio Arts Council, and Summerfair AIA, and has attended numerous residencies, including those the Kala Art Institute, Stove Works, the Vermont Studio Center, Jentel, Ragdale, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and Hambidge.
Alice Pixley Young, Two Coats of Paint Artist Residency, 22-19 41st Avenue, 6th Floor, Studio #10, Long Island City, NY. Oct 12-17, 2025. Please join us for an Open Studio on Wednesday, Oct 15, 5-7 pm. For more information, or to arrange a studio visit, please contact: STAFF@twocoatsofpaint.com. Please put ALICE PI XLEY YOUNG in the subject line. Follow Alice on Instagram @alicepixley
Studio listening
Spotify playlist — “I’m allover the map but this more dreamy, indie, post-rock and orchestral vibe is what carries me through a lot of my working days. I also listen to a lot of podcasts, but sometimes it’s too many other voices in your head and you just need to go back to your music muse.”
On view
“The SuperNatural 2.0” (curated by Alice Gray Sites), 21c Museum, , Louisville, KY; Jan 2025 – Feb 2026
Upcoming shows
Alice Pixley Young, “Still Life” (solo exhibition), A.I.R.Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, ; Feb 14 – Mar 15, 2026
Alice Pixley Young, “Half Life” (solo exhibition), Akron Art Museum, Akron, OH, July 2026 – January 2027
About the Author: Sharon Butler is a painter and the publisher of Two Coats of Paint. The Two Coats of Paint Artists Residency Program is currently accepting Letters of Interest for 2026. Find out more here.
