Editor
Molly Warnock is an art critic and art historian based in Baltimore. The author of Simon Hantaï and the Reserves of Painting (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020) and Penser la Peinture: Simon Hantaï (Gallimard, 2012), she has written widely on modern and contemporary art for, among other journals, Artforum, Art in America, Les Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne, Tate Papers, nonsite.org, and Journal of Contemporary Painting, as well as for numerous European and U.S. exhibition catalogues. In 2010, she curated a double exhibition of Simon Hantaï’s work for the Galerie Jean Fournier, Paris, and Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, and wrote the accompanying catalogue. She is a 2020-21 Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
Contributors
Julie Ault (b. Boston, 1957) is an artist who frequently adopts curatorial and editorial modes as an artistic practice. Her work takes the form of exhibition-making, art criticism and theory, and historical chronicles. Ault explores how art shapes and is shaped by a given moment’s political, socioeconomic, and cultural circumstances. She was a cofounder of the New York-based artists’ collaborative Group Material (active between 1979 and 1996). In her more recent work, Ault focuses on researching and mobilizing materials and information to animate histories of activism in art. Her latest projects include Paper Mirror: Nancy Spero at the Museo Tamayo and MoMA PS1, 2018–19, and In Part: Writings by Julie Ault, 2017, with Dancing Foxes Press and Galerie Buchholz, New York. In 2018, Ault was named a MacArthur Fellow.
Sarah Crowner was born in 1974 in Philadelphia; she lives and works in Brooklyn. Her diverse practice ranges from paintings and ceramics to sculpture and theatre curtains. Her bold and colorful paintings and tile works incorporate forms found in architecture, nature, and in the history of twentieth-century art and design. She creates her stitched paintings by using an industrial sewing machine to join irregular panels of alternately painted and raw canvas, simultaneously revealing the painting’s composition and construction. Crowner’s work has been featured in both group and solo exhibitions in galleries and museums worldwide and was the subject of an important survey at MASS MoCA in 2016-17. Her artwork belongs to many public and private collections, including those of The MoMA, New York and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. She is represented by Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York and Simon Lee Gallery, London and Hong Kong.
Odili Donald Odita (b. Enugu, Nigeria, 1966; lives and works in Philadelphia) is an abstract painter whose work explores color both in the figurative historical context and in the sociopolitical sense.
He is best known for his large-scale canvases with kaleidoscopic patterns and vibrant hues, which he uses to reflect the human condition. For Odita, color is at once a distinct phenomenon and a vehicle for mirroring the complexity of the world. He has presented solo exhibitions at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond (2020-21); Laumeier Sculpture Park, Outdoor Galleries, Northern Grove, St. Louis (2020); the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2019-21); the Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham (2015–17); Savannah College of Art and Design (2012–13); and the New Orleans Museum of Art (2011), among other institutions.
Odita is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
Eileen Quinlan (b. Boston, 1972) is interested in the false transparency of the photographic image, suggesting that it is not a window, but a mirror. She uses medium- and large-format analog cameras to create abstract photographs. Quinlan’s experimental process unfolds through a limited set of materials and brute repetition, probing and demystifying the circumstances of each image’s creation, insisting on the constructed nature of all photographs. As such, the constructions themselves run the photographic gamut from the quasi-pictorial to the semiabstract, from evidentiary document to expressive collage. Quinlan had her first solo museum exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in 2009. Her first survey show Wait For It at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, was held in 2019. She is represented by Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York and Campoli Presti, London and Paris.
David Reed (b. San Diego, 1946) lives in New York City. His paintings develop from an obsession with how we see and a deep interest in European and American paintings, ranging from the Italian Renaissance and the European Baroque to abstract expressionism, pop art, and minimalism. To make his paintings, he combines techniques and concepts used in older traditions of figure painting with new expressive and philosophical questions made possible by abstraction. In order to test our perceptions, Reed’s paintings combine disparate elements: for example, hand-painted brush and knife marks appear alongside images of such marks painted using computer generated, laser-cut stencils based on digitally processed scans. His most recent solo exhibitions include shows at Gagosian Gallery, NY (2020 and 2017); Neues Museum Nürnberg, Germany (2019); Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (2018); Pérez Art Museum, Miami, Florida (2016); Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, Germany (2015).
Pieter Schoolwerth (b. 1970, St. Louis) is a painter, filmmaker, and musician who lives and works in New York. Schoolwerth’s painting captures invisible flows of abstraction that structure contemporary experience and turns them into motifs for an elaborate new kind of figurative painting. Schoolwerth has exhibited internationally since 1994, including group exhibitions at The MoMA, NY; MNAM, Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Schoolwerth’s monograph Model as Painting was published by Sequence Press in 2019. Curated by Kathleen Rahn, his first survey exhibition took place at the Kunstverein Hannover in 2020. From 2003 to 2013, Schoolwerth ran Wierd Records and the Wierd Party on the LES of NYC, releasing music by forty-six bands and producing over five hundred live music, DJ, and performance art events. He is represented by the galleries Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler and Capitain Petzel in Berlin and Petzel Gallery.
James Siena (born in 1957) is an artist who lives and works in New York City and the Berkshires. His artwork is driven by self-imposed predetermined sets of rules, or “visual algorithms,” which find their end result in intensely concentrated, vibrantly colored, freehand geometric patterns. Siena works across a diverse range of media, including lithography, etching, woodcut, engraving, drawing, and painting. His work is held in numerous prestigious public and private collections across the U.S., including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Ithaca; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The MoMA, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum, and the Yale University Art Gallery, among others. He is represented by Pace Gallery, New York.