Contributed by Sharon Butler / A couple of weeks ago, I got a letter from Joy Amina Garnett, a friend, painter, and one of the earliest art bloggers. She stopped painting and left NYC in 2020, moved to LA, started writing a memoir about her family of intellectual Egyptian ancestors – now finished and forthcoming as The Bee Kingdom (Gaudy Boy, 2026)– and hasn’t looked back. She invited me to publish some images of my recent paintings in the Evergreen Review, where she has been the art editor for several years. Evergreen is a storied literary magazine founded in 1957 by Barney Rosset, Fred Jordan, and a few other like-minded collaborators. They wanted to challenge the comfortable assumptions of postwar American culture, and, for the next 16 years, published writers such as Samuel Beckett, Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs, Jean Genet, Allen Ginsberg, LeRoi Jones, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Frank O’Hara, Jean-Paul Sartre, Susan Sontag, and Malcolm X. Eventually, they took a break from publishing. In 2017, after many years of inactivity, publisher John Oakes and editor-in-chief Dale Peck relaunched the Evergreen Review, resuming its original mission to publish challenging and unexpected writing, now with art. And, it turns out that the current Evergreen office is just a few blocks from my LIC studio. Kismet.
Joy has paired my paintings with poems by Erin Redfern, a poet deeply invested in the sonnet form. A few years back, I too was interested in the 14-line sonnet, but as a basis for paintings. I often gave MFA students the enigmatic assignment to make a sonnet in visual form. As Redfern wrote in a North American Review essay, “The sonnet may make a … democratic claim because built into this form is the poem’s directive to interrupt itself. If we are open as we write, if we are listening, the new voice we hear is ours and not ours; it arrives seemingly across the ether, from the place insight, inspiration, art come from.” As she suggests, the beauty of the sonnet lies in its redirection of thought halfway through. The pairing of our work seemed another lovely coincidence. Redfern calls her verses Fourteen Line Poems: Fourteen-line poem in search of lost grandmothers, Fourteen-line note to self as we enter a darkling time, Fourteen-line poem telling the therapist’s story. Thanks, Joy, for putting our work together on the page.
Have a look (subscribe, perhaps?) at the Evergreen Review.
“Abstract by Definition: An Index”
This month, my painting Green Wall 3 remains on view at Art Cake in “Abstract by Definition: An Index,” the historic American Abstract Artists’ 90th anniversary exhibition, curated by Saul Ostrow who has juxtaposed contrasting works in order to “orchestrate an internal dialogue that reflects on the nature of abstract art across several realms – philosophical, historical, etymological, and symbolic.”
Please join me for a panel discussion at the gallery on Saturday, May 9, 4–5:30, with Saul and fellow abstract painter Tom McGlynn about the different ways we define, organize, and explore the abstract in art. The beautiful exhibition catalogue should be available by then, too.
Art Cake 214 40th Street, Brooklyn, NY
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Writing:
I penned a couple short reviews for Two Coats of Paint in the past few months:
Eric Wolf: Into the fog
“Wolf understands that water, despite its singular simplicity and familiarity, is full of incongruities. It lacks structure yet possesses awesome strength, and while it seems transparent, it remains a mystery. These qualities map onto fundamental human ones – will, self-preservation, and love, for instance. He is not the first artist, of course, to make these discoveries. But he articulates them extraordinarily well…”
Doomscrolling 3-D + IRL: The 2026 Whitney Biennial
“Walking through the show and reading the sobering narratives was like spending a couple of hours on the couch doomscrolling. You know it will make you feel like shit, but you can’t look away. This year’s Whitney Biennial works by making the world’s inadequacies painfully visible.”
Save the date:
May 5–10: The Two Coats of Paint Residency Program welcomes the return of Gyan Shrosbree from Fairfield, Iowa. Gyan, who also had residencies in 2016 and 2017, makes clothing that she combines with twentieth-century modernist painting in an idiosyncratic and inventive practice that includes collaborative activities like sewing with her mother and staging exhibitions in the form of fashion shows. A Two Coats Open Studio for Gyan will be on Wednesday, May 6, 5-7pm. Studio mate Chris Joy (Gorky’s Granddaughter) and I will have work on view, too.
Note: New images were recently posted to the website at www.sharonlbutler.com.
This piece was originally published in Sharon Butler Notebooks on Substack. Subscribe here.
About the author: Sharon Butler is a painter and the publisher of Two Coats of Paint.
