Contributed by Sharon Butler / Most artists participating in the prestigious Sam & Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts 2025 Artists in Residence Program in New Berlin, New York, make art the old fashioned way. During the residency, each is afforded ample studio space, the free run of the generous Golden supply closet, and expert technical help. This year’s result is the uniformly striking “Made in Paint 13” at the SG & AG Gallery, comprising the work of 18 artists. It is distinguished by the integration of material and process with labor intensity and personal and cultural history. Each artist has a penchant for craftsmanship and savors the slow process of making work by hand.
Cultural variation, accommodation, and agitation preoccupy many of the artists. Genevieve Cohn‘s eclectically “fortified” paintings, at first glance charming faux-naif confections, incorporate references to the Women’s Land Army of the First and Second World Wars, separatist women’s communities, and motifs from fairy tales and literary fiction. In the tradition of South American geometric abstraction, Rodrigo Galecio of Santiago, Chile, has divided the canvas into a 4 x 4-square grid and filled it with colorful abstract scenes from New Berlin, obliquely summoning unity by rendering his experiences into a lively whole. Scherezade García-Vazquez shares the sentiment. In the center of Notes on The AmericasII/Apuntes de Las Ameericas II, she incorporates a brown face created by mixing all the paint colors together in an inclusive vision of humanity.
Nature too comes into play. In Raindrop (Pickerelweed v. Wetland Nightshade) Florida-based Jacoub Reyes uses images of an invasive plant (wetlands nightshade) and a native plant (pickerelweed), both abundant in Florida, to stimulate conversation about invasion, subjugation, race, and class. His beautiful woodcut print, lightly obscured by a delicately patterned white tulle curtain, and bedazzled with hanging pearl-like beads, is a tour de force, offering rich allusions to the artist’s multicultural heritage without being confined to any specific narrative. Steeped in East Asian cultural history and migrant literature and tinged with modernist social critiques, San Francisco-based Kunlin He’s work spans research, design, drawing, and painting. His Ginseng Hunter is part of a series that maps habitats of wild ginsing. The American type, considered endangered, is often uprooted, harvested, and exported to Asia, where it can sell for hundreds of dollars per pound.
Perhaps inevitably, colonization is a persistent theme. In her series “Composición sustraída,” Natalia Sánchez uses Golden’s wide array of acrylic, polymers, and aggregate materials to make abstract paintings recalling vernacular tile designs and architectural surfaces in Puerto Rico. Jeanne F. Jalandoni, who grew up in New York City, creates layered collages comprising family archives, personal memory, and Filipino American history. In Hold Your Horns, a human figure with a water buffalo head captures the emotional complexity of identity. Jalandoni’s novel use of materials – gel medium tinted pale blue and pulled off over the feet – will amuse anyone who has spent time with the Material Specialists team at Golden. Vickie Pierre‘s small-scale collage series “Poupées” features simplified figurative forms, patterning, and metallic glitter that recall tribal adornments and body armor. For An Echo Blooms and Army of Me, her Haitian heritage may have prompted her exploration of decoratively camouflaged protection.
Others draw on and update classical styles. Nicole Duennebier adapts a 16th-century Dutch painting style to the depiction of a dark and swampy landscape in Swamp Structure with Overgrowth. Although she says she doesn’t see the paintings as allegorical, her murky vision seems an irrepressibly apt metaphor for the current US administration. Suzanne Unrein also riffs on old Dutch paintings, but her rendition is brasher and more colorful. Whereas the floral arrangements in Dutch paintings are elegant and refined, Unrein’s Illusions casts the flower as a show-stopping ball of emotion. Chicago-based Kyrin Hobson plumbs the city’s tradition of iconoclastic figurative painting, framing enigmatic legacies of survival to inspire rising to contemporary challenges. In Pain Transfer, a young pregnant woman lies unstably on a horse’s back while an older woman, kneeling on rocks, pierces her ear.
Some of the artists traffic in emotional and lyrical Inventiveness. Kristy Hughes’ goal for her colorful sculptural forms is to evoke hope and joy. Her process includes transforming recycled trash into pulp that she uses to coat objects. In Sky Portal, she combines construction cardboard, epoxy resin, handmade paper pulp, found plastic PVC pipe, notes, and poems into a whimsical minimalist form. Jackie Kazarian‘s abstractions involve enterprising gel medium experimentation. In Pilot Light, for instance, she fosters destabilization through overlapping pours and painted passages over linen. Without any fixed imagery, viewers are left to find their own meaning: the absence of narrative truth is the point. Rachel Ostrow, who came to a Two Coats of Paint Open Studio last year, left some faux-stain glass gels on the windows, and urged me to go to Golden, has two smaller works on view: Stayin’ Alive 1 and Stayin’ Alive 2. In each, she used a thin base layer of iridescent color to create a shimmer suggesting bird feathers or a pastel oil slick. The effect is beautiful, but the delicacy of tiny pin holes, perhaps used to hold masking shapes down, grab me just as much.
For certain artists, technique merges seamlessly with content. Tony Shore, who teaches at MICA, paints black velvet images of stalwarts of the working-class Baltimore communities where he grew up. La Bahia is a nocturne depicting a young man leaning on a wall outside a bar, smoking a cigarette. Sincerity and dignity, as well as superb painting technique, elevate the piece from kitsch to arch but authentic expression. New Yorker Barbara Friedman pours and drips and then conjures imagery within the paint. In Everybunny, she orchestrates an absurd and unnerving transition as a giant rabbit form segues to a realistically painted head. Emily Somoskey’s paintings depict the landscape as a shifting, unknowable space. In Bridging, pools of pale blue water seem to rise above diagonal bridge-like forms. Embedded collage elements add pattern and texture that challenge our understanding of surface and image.
Wang Chen, who teaches Digital Art and Design at Penn State, is the only artist in the show who uses digital technology as part of the final presentation. Touching Red, an engrossing three-channel video installation with sound, embodies drawing, performance, sculpture, costume, and audio design. The 15 minute, 43 second piece loops on a large-screen TV that has been divided into three smaller sections, simulating a triptych. The narrative focus of the piece is survival – how a life is compelled to take on new shapes as order breaks down and reassembles.
Owing to the turmoil and censorship experienced in undemocratic societies – which increasingly include the United States – contemporary painting can generate wide-ranging discussion about gender, race, and justice alongside process and materiality. In her 2017 book Fray: Art and Textile Politics,Julia Bryan-Wilson examined the rise of “craftivism,” in which handmaking is seen as a political and social practice.“Made in Paint 13” vividly suggests that painting is also a form of resistance.
“Made in Paint 13,” Sam and Adele Golden Gallery, Sam & Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts, Inc., 237 Bell Road, New Berlin, NY. Through August 28, 2026. Artists: Wang Chen, Genevieve Cohn, Nicole Duennebier, Barbara Friedman, Rodrigo Galecio, Scherezade García-Vasquez, Kunlin He, Kyrin Hobson, Kristy Hughes, Jeanne F. Jalandoni, Jackie Kazarian, Rachel Ostrow, Vickie Pierre, Jacoub Reyes, Natalia Sánchez, Tony Shore, Emily Somoskey, and Suzanne Unrein.
About the author: Sharon Butler is a painter and the publisher of Two Coats of Paint. She recently returned from a brief invitational residency at the Golden Foundation.
