Updates.
"Juicy" Exhibition
CURRENT EXHIBITION
Queer Ecologies
February 8 - 28, 2025
Reception Saturday, February 8, 2 - 7 p.m.
Gallery Hours:
February 15 & 22 from 12 - 3 p.m.
This Exhibition is part of a gallery swap between Purple Window Gallery, Chicago & Beco Gallery, Kansas City
Queer Ecologies brings together ten Queer artists across the Midwest region thinking with ecological systems. (artists sourced from our open call). The exhibition is co-curated by Lily Erb and SK Reed of Beco Gallery (now, The Waiting Room) in Kansas City.
This group exhibition features work by Lily Erb, Eve Gordon, Naomi Hamlin-Navias, Kate Humphrey, Linye Jiang, Justin Korver, David Nasca, SK Reed, Exer Thurston, and Kellen Wright. The artists work in a range of materials from bioplastic, photography, fiber, zines, and ceramic. Together, the exhibition encourages a broader range of what Queerness looks like in middle America and how the artists work with other nonhuman ecologies to provide a greater context to our often human-centric world.
UPCOMING EXHIBITION
Juicy
March 8-28, 2025
Reception Saturday, March 8, 1-4 p.m.
Gallery Hours: TBD
Juror: David Linnewah of Studio Break Gallery and Podcast @studio_break
An international juried painting exhibition that seeks to celebrate the formal qualities of the painted medium. Subject matter may be figurative, non-objective, and everything in between. 100% of submission fees were redistributed to the ACLU, and artists that were awarded 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place.
Blue Mountain Gallery 2025 Winter Juried Exhibition
Blue Mountain Gallery is pleased to present the work of 36 artists selected by Glenn Goldberg for this year's winter juried exhibition. The artists, drawn from three hundred applicants from across the country, work in a wide range of media, including oil, acrylic, pastel, gouache, photography and mixed media. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue and will remain on view through January 25, 2025.
“In the House: Artists of the Harrison Center” at Newfields
Welcome to In the House: Artists of the Harrison Center, where we invite you to step inside our world and feel the pulse of creativity that runs through our halls. More than just a studio hub for over 40 artists, the Harrison Center is a home—a place where ideas are born, exchanged, and nurtured.
This exhibition at Newfields showcases the work of 33 Harrison Center artists, each bringing their own unique style and medium to the table. From bold abstracts and intricate ceramics to delicate photography and experimental printmaking, this collection highlights the diversity of voices that fill our house with life and art.
For nearly 25 years, the Harrison Center has been a space where artists not only create but grow together, side by side. Inside our house, we have created a space where artists can work collaboratively. The conversations are rich, and the exchange of ideas, tools, and techniques is constant. The camaraderie encourages artists to grow in their craft. At the Harrison Center, artists share the kind of mentorship and collaboration often reserved for academic settings but with the freedom to experiment and take risks. This exhibition reflects that spirit—the creative energy that flows through every studio, hallway, and gallery, making the Harrison Center not just a place where art is made but where artists thrive.
Harrison Center Studio Artist
Morgan is an Indianapolis-based writer and painter. Morgan’s studio practice is centered around the experience of connection. Her creative practice is a space for her to seek connection to herself and to the natural world. She primarily makes abstract landscapes using thick, densely layered oil paint. Her work speaks more to the process of making than to a particular end result. She often scrapes and layers paint over long periods of time, using making as a way to meditate on nature and its ever-changing state. Her work often explores themes of time, transformation, decomposing and regenerative energies, and the power of nature.
Bowery Gallery 33rd Annual Juried Competition
Every year The Bowery Gallery Annual Juried Competition is open to all applicants working in two-dimensional media. Past jurors have included prominent artists such as William Bailey, Rackstraw Downes, Paul Resika and Joan Snyder, and eminent critics like Jed Perl, David Cohen, and Stephen Westfall. Over the years exhibitions at Bowery have been reviewed in The New Republic, The New York Times, The New York Sun, Art in America and other publications.
Enrico Riley is a Professor of Studio Art at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize in Visual Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Prize in Painting. Riley has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the American Academy in Rome, the University of New Hampshire and Jenkins Johnson Projects.
He has participated in group exhibitions at “State of the Art 2020” at Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, “Black Bodies on the Cross” at The Hood Museum, Lori Bookstein Fine Art in NYC, and The Painting Center in NYC. His work is in institutions including the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Hood Museum, and The Nasher Sculpture Center. Enrico Riley has an MFA in painting from Yale University and a BA in Visual Studies from Dartmouth College. Riley lives and works in Vermont and New Hampshire.
“Passage” at the Harrison Center
The Gallery Annex features Morgan Binkerd’s oil paintings, primarily landscapes made en plein air. Binkerd’s art-making practices explore the overlap of written and visual mediums. Many of the titles in Passage explore the sense of place in Binkerd’s work– from the seasons she painted through, to how it feels to navigate one’s self in the world, and meditations of spirituality discovered in the landscape.
Binkerd’s painting practice is centered around the experience of connection. It is a space for her to seek connection to herself, to the natural world, and to others. The landscape moves beyond representation of the physical world and becomes a place for searching, for the external world to become the lens through which our internal worlds are understood.
The title of the show, Passage, speaks to the transience of what it means to be in a place, specifically, how it feels to work from the landscape en plein air. Binkerd’s paintings are more concerned with process than a particular end result; they are either made in quick bursts of energy or over long periods of time. When Binkerd returns to a painting, she observes the ways the landscape has changed and seeks to embrace and include the changes by continuing the work by scraping or layering paint. In her personal and spiritual life, this becomes a means to meditate on the natural world and the passage of time. Once a painting is finished, it has become its own world, not necessarily a vessel to transport the viewer to a certain moment or specific place, but a world of its own that exists outside of linear time.
The show can be viewed anytime during the month of October during Gallery Hours: Monday – Friday from 9 a.m. - 5 p.m. The works can additionally be viewed and purchased on our online gallery.
“Figuring it Out With Stanley Lewis” by Morgan Binkerd
On a Monday night, we gather in Mount Gretna’s Hall of Philosophy to hear Stanley Lewis talk about his work. Instead of showing his own paintings Stanley puts up a slide of Egyptian relief sculptures and commands that everyone in the audience draws from it. “We are all going to figure this out together!” This is the resounding theme of Stanley’s presence: There is something essential that we are all figuring out and the only way we can attempt this, is by joining each other in its demand.
There are 20 of us studying at Mount Gretna School of Art over seven weeks of nonstop painting, drawing, attending lectures, and receiving critiques. We are a varied group with a wide range of ages, and backgrounds, and have come from all over the country to dedicate our summer to working and learning alongside each other. Despite our differences, we are all united in one thing: a love for art and a commitment to making it a rich practice in our lives. Stanley Lewis encourages us to understand our lineage as painters, “Who are you? Who am I? Who was my teacher– you’ve got to figure out where you are. You have to go back and figure out where you are and work your way up from the start.”
On our first morning, Stanley confesses, “I think of myself as really, a kind of disaster. I’m leading you down a horrible path.” Stanley’s self-deprecating humor always gets a reaction out of the group. He claims his true influence is negativity, that he’s scared to go out into the landscape, and that the drawings he makes alongside us are horrible. “I thought today we’ll have a terrible day together. We’ll all make horrible paintings. We are all going to suffer, but we’ll have fun with it. We know where the coffee and donuts are.”
Stanley doesn’t get caught up in the barrier between student and teacher. He doesn’t impart wisdom or advice in the way you’d expect a teacher to. There are no formalities, no right or wrong answers. He extends advice to us as someone who is farther on the path. He puts the struggle in our hands and tells us how hard it is and will be. Fear and doubt permeate his language, but always, he tells us to keep pushing through and encourages us to figure it out.
“I paint in desperation and if you really suffer and do terribly for long enough you learn that you can handle it. It’s not impossible to be a true failure for a long, long time.” It is exciting to be in his presence. He has a contagious energy that seeps into our urgency for being out in the landscape. He sees painting as the ultimate challenge, a puzzle that can never be solved. We can only continue to fail toward it and see what the practice has to teach us.