Author: Carol Knowles

Many of the paintings in “Vacate Now!” Bobby Spillman’s exhibition at L Ross Gallery, roil with energy. Fires flash, lightning bolts, and toy airplanes blast across the surface of his canvases.

Against the Wind, one of the show’s strongest works, is a rush of emotion and energy. The day after several tornadoes roared across the Mid-South and his father had a heart attack, Spillman loaded a brush with white, yellow, and pink oils. In one spontaneous, continuous gesture he swirled the paint diagonally across 72-by-66 inches of canvas and created a multi-hued whirlwind.

In the complex feat of design Vacate Now, Spillman simulates psychic space. Light-blue bubbles percolate through layers of earth-toned speech balloons. Green volts of electricity and orange and fuchsia accent the artist’s daydreams and internal dialogues.

Spillman can handle subtly modulated hues and shapes as well as blocks of color and blasts of energy. In a particularly beautiful passage in Daily Ritual, a blue-gray sky faintly mirrors billowing smoke and orange, red, and white-hot flames.

Daily Ritual by Bobby Spillman

“Bobby Spillman: Vacate Now!” at L Ross Gallery through September 30th

“Maysey Craddock: Unsaid,” at the David Lusk Gallery is, in large part, Craddock’s response to the devastation she witnessed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Buildings and bridges stripped to their girders and broken and leafless trees are Craddock’s subjects. Her canvases are torn and wrinkled paper bags.

White Passage is one of the smallest, most crumpled works in the show and also one of the most beautiful. Its lacy bridgework, its maroon-umber atmosphere, and its surface (a paper sack torn apart and stitched back together with silk thread) speak of fragility, putrefaction, and the

White Passage by Maysey Craddock

patchwork repair of the Gulf Coast cities. For the installation The Memory of Your Words Never Leaves Me, the artist ripped the keys and typebars out of an antique typewriter, painted them dark red, and hung them from the ceiling.

Many of Craddock’s artworks in previous shows were nostalgic and delicate. In this exhibition, the artist gets to the heart and guts of things; she lets her ideas go wherever memory and raw emotion take her. With edgy, urgent work in “Unsaid,” Craddock says more than she ever has before.

“Maysey Craddock: Unsaid” at David Lusk Gallery through September 30th

For her exhibition, “A Glimpse of Motion” at Perry Nicole, Anne Davey looked down into the pale aquas of chlorinated swimming pools and the purple-umber shadows of lakes and recorded bodies moving in water. Her most accomplished works suggest multiple layers. In Glide, a small oil on canvas, sunlight dapples the surface of a lake. Just beneath, rippling water refracts brightly colored swimwear into an Art Nouveau mosaic of yellows and blues. Deeper still, bare limbs gliding through shadows in the lake kaleidoscope into peaches and umbers.

The body is reduced to undulating light and shadow backdropped by white gessoed paper in three charcoals, Underwater I, II, and III. These particularly subtle and assured works evoke dreamscape and mindscape and remind us that the world and everything in it are shifting fields of energy.

“Anne Davey: A Glimpse of Motion” at Perry Nicole Fine Art through October 1st

In “Amy Pleasant: You Are Here,” at Clough-Hanson, Pleasant builds worlds out of thousands of tiny ink blots, smudges, and miniscule figures. Her figures cluster like bacteria in Petri dishes. They spiral like stars in a galaxy, engage in mundane activities, and play out scenes from thousands of lives lived simultaneously.

In a haunting mosaic of overlapping shadows (detail from an untitled ink work on paper), a boy sits on the grass looking back at his house, a teenager stares into the sky, and a man pauses at a street corner. In another untitled paperwork, two tiny figures push and strain and enjoy a sexual encounter. To their left, a little boy sleeps with his teddy bear.

Mouse ears, bird wings, and a flurry of cat fur tell a story of death as well as life in a detail from Drip, a large ink work drawn directly onto the gallery walls. In another section of Drip, three tiny figures dive into the white wall. The several inches of space surrounding them look vast, but the tiny specks unhesitatingly embrace the cosmos. What courage and chutzpah. What an apt metaphor for life on earth.

“Amy Pleasant: You Are Here” at Clough-Hanson Gallery through October 11th

rknowles@memphis.edu

In “Le Déluge,” the darkly beautiful exhibition at the Buckman Performing Arts Center, Christine Conley captures the frivolous play of the privileged, the plight of the poor, and a planet careening toward a 21st-century version of the biblical flood.

In the exhibition centerpiece, Après Moi, le Déluge (4-by-8-feet, graphite on styrene), Conley sweeps across time and space with bravura draftsmanship and telling historical detail. On the right-hand side of the drawing, water floods New Orleans’ downtown skyscrapers and pours into residential neighborhoods. Pairs of animals attempting to stay afloat bring to mind Noah and his ark. But in Conley’s apocalyptic vision, instead of finding refuge, the animals spill over the gilded frame.

To the left of the flood waters, Conley transforms Fragonard’s painting The Swing into a drawing as full of lush foliage and elaborate petticoats as the original 18th-century masterwork. The gnarled tree that towers above the nobleman pushing his mistress on a swing twists into tornadic energy that blows through the top of the drawing. And the canopy under which two peasants rest on the opposite side of the flood waters (a detail Conley skillfully appropriates from one of Francois Boucher’s 18th-century pastoral paintings) billows into whirlwinds that burst through the right side of the gilded frame. Unawares, rich and poor alike are about to be swept away.

She Spoke Softly by David Gillspie

Other works in “Le Déluge” include 70 howling, grimacing faces hanging from the ceiling (Free Agents, ceramic bisque). And in one in a series of five small drawings (Little Boy/The Sleep of Reason), a face peers out of a mushroom cloud created by an atomic explosion. In another, assorted hobgoblins leer at us from Conley’s re-creation of Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.

A somewhat enigmatic but important part of Conley’s vision hangs on the wall next to the exit. Three retinal-shaped cones, the color and translucency of amber, pierce a black box titled Enlightenment. Like the rest of “Le Déluge,” Enlightenment asks us to look into the dark places in ourselves and our world to realize that our planet careens toward environmental catastrophe and to understand that this time there may be no Noah, no ark, no safe haven.

“Le Déluge” at the Buckman Performing Arts Center through September 15th

Twenty-two artists in Memphis College of Art’s exhibition “Horn Island 22” also explore the raw power of nature. David Gillespie sums up his eight-day sojourn on an uninhabited island with a mixed-media work that is both Eden and a primal scream. In She Spoke Softly, a blue-green heart floats in the center of an acrylic seascape. On top of this painting’s frame sits a beautifully sculpted human torso and head. By Gillespie opening the mouth, throat, and chest of his ceramic work — like Francis Bacon’s screaming, eviscerated portraits — we see humanity inside and out. Unlike Bacon, Gillespie pays homage to life’s beauty as well as its pain.

The Muses Confer by Lisa Tribo

Some of the works reflect Hurricane Katrina’s battering of Horn Island. For example, in Trice Patterson’s spare, close-up drawing Three Sea Oats, the oats look like tall, lean sentinels standing guard on an island that lost many of its trees to Katrina.

Lisa Tribo’s nine women in bright-white gowns on a deserted shore has the look of dreamscape, a post-apocalyptic meeting of survivors at the edge of the earth or a council of goddesses in The Muses Confer (conte on canvas). Tribo’s goddesses do more than muse. They expel the fears that can paralyze; they cleanse themselves with the raw power of nature. One goddess sits with eyes closed, face held up to the sun. Another’s hair is blown back by straight-line winds. With legs apart and arms extended, she thrusts out a staff made of driftwood and performs what looks like an exorcism over another muse who sits on the ground, head buried in her arms.

Other notable artworks include the primordial landscapes Solomon Behnke creates by rubbing coffee, rust, pastel, and paint onto the surface of 150-pound paper. In Landscape/Time, three robed and hooded figures, barely distinguishable from the desert floor and dunes that surround them, walk single-file toward a setting sun. A second sun, burning in the middle of the sky, and points of light, shining above the shrouds, suggest ancient rituals regarding time and matter.

There are few idyllic seascapes in “Horn Island 22.” Many of the works are powerful explorations of nature. Erin Morrison dissolves the boundaries between artist and island. Her surreal self-portrait, Emerge, hints of algae-rich waters and blood-red skies and sea birds. A large eyeball at the center of the painting takes it all in as Morrison’s light-green leg steps out of the primordial pool and plants itself on umber ground at the bottom of the picture plane.

“Horn Island 22” at Memphis College of Art through September 15th

Three summer shows trace the dramatic mid-career changes of two established Memphis artists. Pinkney Herbert’s paintings are on display at the Art Musuem at the University of Memphis and the David Lusk Gallery, and Chuck Johnson’s watercolors are showing at Joysmith Gallery.

Pikney Herbert’s Firefall

Herbert paints like an abstract expressionist on steroids, turning nuanced color fields into seas of conflagration. His 6’5″ frame allows him to gesture across entire canvases, covering their surfaces with firestorms, tidal waves, and whirlwinds. In the group exhibition at AMUM, “Three Paths to Abstraction,” Herbert slows things down a bit. His best paintings allow us to experience a wide range of energies as well as the forces that obliterate.

The iridescent red-oranges of Firefall fount up and move like rivers of magma across the canvas. The shape at the center of the painting also brings to mind a huge tropical flower whose long blades reach up for sun and then fall back to the mars-black earth that backdrops and nurtures them.

Herbert works wet-in-wet. Umber brushed and scratched into the red-orange paint at the bottom of the vaguely floral, vaguely figurative central shape looks pubic. On the left side of the canvas, the artist pulls and re-pulls his brushes and fingers through orange and umber pigments, evolving them into the grain of fine inlaid wood.

Firefall‘s combination of sweeping gestures and rich detail and its shapes, lines, and colors that evoke a wide range of primal energies — from incinerating rivers to tropical flowers in rich black earth to human sexuality — make this a particularly powerful work.

Five primordial landscapes at David Lusk Gallery in “Recent Paintings and Drawings” stand in even sharper contrast to Herbert’s earlier work. The largest of these paintings, the 6-by-8-foot Wing, evokes a surprising amount of power with the most minimal and monochromatic of materials.

With the sure hand of a calligrapher, Herbert paints a softly curving line across Wing. Above this contour of earth or ocean, he works the oils like rich earth and soft clay, folding the pigments back onto themselves. What looks like a wing billowed by air currents or soft sheaths of rain flow diagonally down and to the right, leaving the rest of the canvas wide-open and white. The quiet, Zen-like authority and graceful gestures of Wing feel as powerful as the energies of earlier paintings that swept us off the picture plane.

Chuck Johnson’s Brake Service

From the incinerating rivers and tropical earth of Firefall to the clay-like impastos, gentle rain, and the wide-open sky of Wing, Herbert is a master of all of the elements, producing some of the sparest, most stunning works of his career.

“Three Paths to Abstraction” at AMUM, through September 9th and “Recent Paintings and Drawings” at David Lusk Gallery, through July 29th

As recently as last year, Chuck Johnson was exhibiting complex, multiple-layered collages. In his first show of watercolors, “Different Strokes” at the Joysmith Gallery, he proves himself adept at scumbled scenes of urban decay.

It takes courage to suddenly switch the materials one uses and the genre in which one works. This new fit appears to be a good one as Johnson transforms scene after scene of the vernacular into evocative works of art.

In Hotel Merida, Johnson’s treatment of color and light turns a dining room floor into a sea of purple. We can almost see the moisture rise from the freshly mopped alizarin-crimson tiles. A light in the hallway draws our eyes down the dark umber corridors, and forest-green shadows on the walls hint of mold and mildew in this fine old hotel in Mexico City.

An up-close watercolor brings us face-to-face with an old Victorian facade in Boarding House. The image’s soft light and soft shadows invite reverie, and the house’s eroded eaves, front-porch swing, torn window screens, and crumbling foundation (the building lists to the right) give up some of their stories — young women in secretarial pools in Memphis in the 1940s and retirees in this early version of assisted-living.

Brake Service turns urban decay into abstraction. The still-vivid red letters of a sign advertising “E S RVICE” is repeated in the chrome of an automobile that frames the bottom of the watercolor. In the dusty sunset, the car-repair shop’s wooden facade becomes a field of orange-ochre. Johnson’s keen sense of color and the complex geometries of urban architecture — here in the deep-set doors and windows and the shadows they cast — transform a scene of nostalgia (have you tried finding a good repair shop lately?) into a striking abstraction.

“Different Strokes” at Joysmith Gallery, through July 23th

The largest work of art in “Small Considerations,” Jean Flint’s installation at the Jones Hall Gallery at the U of M, is a tattered rag rug titled Scampering Woman. Stitched into its fabric is the figure of a woman with multiple arms and legs, naked except for the curlers in her hair and bending over like a runner at the start of a race. This woman is on a mission. Throughout the rest of the show, with Flint as her alter ego, she slows down and takes a good look at her revved-up body and mind that, each morning, start the day running.

Using twisted scraps of cloth, Flint simulates the body inside and out. In Mental Notes, for example, pieces of bound fabric are fastened with clothes pins to lines of string. They dangle inside an outline of a woman’s head. Dozens more spill out and pile up like scattered thoughts or viscera on the floor in front of her. Coils of fabric become convolutions of a human brain shaped into a skull in Disconnected. This work’s irregular edges, its loose strings, and its title suggest a brain and mind that, like the rag rug, are a little worn out.

To explore body, mind, and feelings, Flint knots and twists strips of fabric and lays them out on ungessoed, unstretched canvas for Scampering Woman II, a wall hanging. Both cloth and canvas are stained with umbers and burnt siennas. Silkscreened to the right of this raw, darkly beautiful metaphor for psychological and/or physical funk are two smaller versions of the multiple-limbed sprinter on the rag rug. These are some of the last images you see as you exit the exhibit. Mission accomplished — Flint seems to say — the woman is up and running again.

“Small Considerations” at Jones Hall Gallery through July 1st

While Jean Flint serves as shaman taking us on a journey into body and mind, photographer Ian Lemmonds proves himself a magus of light in the exhibition “Things I Found at Thrift Stores” at the L Ross Gallery.

Many of the prints blend the surreal, the mystical, the spiritual, and the everyday. One print features a large plastic goldfish lying on a hardwood floor. The cord that tethers this creature to the earth creates a small heart-shaped wound in the middle of glowing white light that blurs the bottom of the fish’s body. Two tiny plastic figures stand in front of the otherworldly icon. One of the figures, a father, looks down at his son who points excitedly toward the glowing fish.

Toys found at thrift stores combined with Lemmonds’ evocative use of light suggest that there is magic all around and inside us if only we would notice. A long-exposure photograph transforms a plump baby elephant with a 20-watt bulb inside its body into a round, radiant sun god floating above a small figure of a man walking in the shadows. Dressed in a 1950s-style suit and hat, the man calmly goes about his business, unaware of the transformation occuring just above his head. Another work brings to life a rabbit that has been reduced to a plastic repository of coins with the word “bank” emblazoned across its forehead. Lemmonds photographs the bunny from the cheeks up and shines a bright light behind its huge brown eyes that appear to look at us with wonder.

A bull in front of a mantle and blazing fireplace is one of the most unsettling images in the show. Like Lemmonds, this is a creature mesmerized by the light. But unlike the artist, who is able to envision countless scenarios, the bull, transfixed but uncomprehending, becomes a disconcerting image of courage and confusion, strength and helplessness.

Lemmonds turns toy horses and natural light into tableaux of possibility and joy. In one image, we glimpse a white pony galloping on a window sill between brightly lit windows. If we had looked an instant later, we sense that we would have missed the pony, that it would have vanished into pure white light.

“Things I Found at Thrift Stores” at L Ross Gallery through July 4th

From quirky to transcendent to sassy, May exhibitions provide a wide range of art. Dwayne Butcher’s eye-popping minimalism simulates the flight patterns of Superman, and Mel Spillman and Ty Ennis chart the tangled worlds of celebrity.

In “Supermandamnfool,” the current installation at Material gallery, minimalism meets brilliant colors meets Butcher’s love for Superman movies. With six red and blue panels on the left wall, 30 red slats to our right, and 10 equally brilliant blue boxes mounted on the wall in the back, Butcher announces that on June 30th, Superman Returns premieres.

Look close. There are hints of humanity in the artist’s sleek, precise, brilliantly colored homage to the Man of Steel. Red latex dripped across the panels to our left resembles sound waves or EKG readings of the human heart. The red dripped along the bottom of the blue boxes at the back of the gallery looks like sap oozing from the wall.

The title of the show, “Supermandamnfool,” nicely sums up Butcher’s quirky, surprisingly evocative art and the human condition. In spite of our heroic attempts at precision and control, things get squashed. They ooze and flow unpredictably. And like Superman, Butcher is on a mission. With brilliantly colored, glass-smooth surfaces, he slides our point of view around the gallery and asks us to soar as fast and as high as we can.

Through May 27th

In “Cross Axis: west (memphis) east,” the group exhibition at Marshall Arts, Mel Spillman’s female figures dissolve into worlds of celebrity. While the garter belts, eye mascara, and stiletto heels of the legendary dominatrix Marti Domination (Queen of the Box Office) remain intact, her body disappears in the glare of the floodlights of Matthew Barney’s extravaganza Cremaster. In az Hollywood portrait of glamour, the face of Carole Lombard is obscured by a thick mask of makeup. And we can just make out the soul behind the mask in Spillman’s sparest, most accomplished work, Pier Angeli. Untouched white paper suggests Angeli’s flawless complexion and pools of India ink are the limpid, sad eyes of this actress who committed suicide in 1971.

Ty Ennis’ small, mixed media drawings are sardonic commentaries on celebrity in all its theatrical, self-absorbed glory. Rather than being honored for his public service to others, for example, Ennis’ Man of the Year is a famous musician “being serviced” by three adoring fans. With titles as sardonic as his images, Ennis also depicts the sexual charge of celebrity in a portrait of a buxom porn actress in Jenna Jameson and her cache of sluts tempt me. I guess I am human.

But Ennis’ irony borders on pathos in Many of Us Will Live Forever. In this drawing, a man wearing a dingy T-shirt looks out at us from shadowed, sunken eyes. This is the quirky, raw face of a man who lives close to the edge and believes he is invincible no matter how many drugs he takes or how much sleep he loses. This is the face of the friend who never made 40, the one still etched in our minds.

Through May 22nd

Ted Faiers’ 15 paintings currently on display at Power House, in the retrospective “Pattern Recognition,” pack a lot in. Bursting with color, irony, and insight, these works chronicle the turmoil in America during the 1960s and ’70s and reveal the worst and best in humanity.

The exhibition’s smallest painting, the 1954 Portrait of a Man, is reminiscent of the “Indian Space Painting” approach championed by Faiers’ teacher and mentor Will Barnet at the Art Students League in New York City. Barnet challenged his students to develop a new American painting based on Native American motifs. Faiers took his mentor’s advice to develop a distinctive style, but instead of continuing to paint tightly patterned, earth-toned abstractions, his art became increasingly figurative, colorful, and charged with satire as sharp as his hard-edged, bold designs.

Three large works created in 1968 — The Candidate, Holy Terror, and Homage to the Anonymous — are counterpoints of the chicanery and courage of the ’60s. The wide-open mouth of The Candidate roars out sound bites that whip like lassos around his head. This candidate has so completely wrapped his rhetoric in patriotism his tongue has become blue and emblazoned with stars, and his whole body, including his nose hairs, are the colors of the flag.

Holy Terror contains more unsettling visions of humankind. In quick succession, the demeanor of a television evangelist shape-shifts from greedy to self-righteous to pious to smug.

In a poignant tribute to courage, Homage to the Anonymous, the red stripes of the American flag are heavy beams carried on the shoulders of a series of black men with featureless, impenetrable faces. Row after row of anonymous men bearing a heavy load creates a sense of their endless toil and determination to go on. The work also brings to mind the African Americans who challenged a system that claimed it gave them freedom but relegated many of its citizens to lives filled with menial or onerous labor.

The Delegate’s Wife, from 1956, is a very different portrait of humanity — one of power and privilege. What looks like a pontiff’s hat or an exaggerated crown tops a blue body with rounded breasts, stomach, and thighs that is slumped comfortably in a throne-like chair. The woman’s right hand and its perfectly manicured long red fingernails curve languidly on the arm of her throne. The jagged yellows and the larger passages of pastels (light greens, pinks, and blues) gently arcing around her body suggest moments of high-key energy in a life filled with leisure.

By the end of the 1960s, flat surfaces could no longer contain the energy generated by rapidly changing racial/political/social attitudes, and Faiers began stretching canvases over low-relief wooden carvings. A good example of this is Masquerade (1971). In what could be a 3-D poster for the sexual revolution, a Mardi Gras reveler wears a headdress that spreads out like the wings of a monarch butterfly. Flowing bands of pinks, violets, and blues radiate from the woman’s shoulders. She nurses a bourbon over ice, and fine black leather sharply defines her breasts, which point directly at the viewer. Her face is painted rust and beige to match the coloration of a monarch, but her eyes are uncovered, wide, unblinking. This butterfly, emboldened by Carnival and changing sexual mores, emerges from her cocoon sprouting wings and a wide-open libido.

Pattern recognition: Faiers was good at that. He filled his paintings not only with bold designs but with archetypes and the broad stripes of history. Like the figure in Masquerade, Faiers looked right at us and didn’t blink. How refreshing. How we could use his humor and insight right now.

During the month of April, the works of five widely read, widely traveled artists take us to faraway places and states of mind.

“New Work” by Gregory Burns at the Jay Etkin Gallery shorthands 40 years of travel in Asia. Swaths of color and calligraphic gestures bring to mind light filtering through chartreuse and magenta seas in Alila Lotus. Purple drips and emerald-greens wash down a hillside of rice paddies in Indonesia in Terraces II.

Burns’ Journey to Japan is one of the exhibition’s most evocative paintings. Two burgundy-black temple posts are set against a blazing red sunset inflected with pinks and corals. A swatch of light-yellow acrylic streams between and almost connects the two posts that bend toward one another. This is Japan’s philosophies — Buddhism and Shintoism — as well as its architecture and terrain. Here is a world where magenta mountain peaks rise suddenly from the bottom of the picture plane and door posts and skies look as radiantly alive as the holy men inside the temples.

Through April 28th

In his exploration of addiction, “Sometimes the Medicine Kills You” at the Material gallery, Ian Lemmonds is a master of allusion and illusion. For one work, he embeds 36 teaspoons in a wall. Each spoon casts a double shadow that looks like a pair of cutting shears. Thin lines of red thread run down the centers of the spoons’ handles, fall over their edges, and thread through long sewing needles. Like addiction, this ominous yet graceful work, capable of puncturing a vein or suturing a wound with stainless-steel precision, is mesmerizing.

In another surprisingly beautiful piece, Lemmonds takes 36 more spoons, turns them around, and embeds their handles in the wall. An egg rests in the bowl of each spoon. Arranged in rows of six at six-inch intervals, spoons and eggs cast multiple shadows that look like paddles swatting across the surface of the installation in slow motion. This work has the look, feel, and voice of addiction — “Here, take this (and this and this and this),” it seems to say. “Don’t stop. Don’t think. Swallow it whole.”

Through April 29th

Mother and son artists Sheri Fleck Rieth and Herb Rieth have put together the exhibition “Turn 2,” at On the Street Gallery. Sheri Rieth’s most successful works are large, garishly colored relief prints that darkly hint at the plight of others. A single creature — a barely discernible pink dog — stands in a lurid coral atmosphere next to a large crimson-red “X.” A rectangle, as purple-black as a bruise, fills the bottom third of the composition. Its size, shape, and surface resemble the freezers used to store the bodies of victims of Katrina. This end-of-the-line, the-buck-stops-here X is Rieth’s “in memoriam” to the environmental devastation and needless loss of life that occurred during the flooding of New Orleans.

Herb Rieth creates mixed-media paintings that are as socially aware, sardonic, and honest as his mother’s art. His alter-ego, “spaceman,” wears what looks like tin canisters and cowboy boots. Rather than “going where no one has dared to go before,” he is locked inside tin cans that protect him from the pollution in his own backyard.

Spaceman engages in a series of futile behaviors — projecting happy faces onto polluted clouds dripping with gunk (The Gift), playing banjo music for plants dying in denuded earth (Banjo), and continuing to shovel into the earth for fossil fuel (Aloha).

In Trojan, the bungling of this sad-sack begins to read like Greek tragedy. Still unable to change his behavior, spaceman drags a huge dinosaur on a circus wagon across a landscape covered with Iraqi desert camouflage and another pattern that can cloud one’s vision: fabric preprinted with American patriotic icons.

Through April 21st

Carol Buchman’s mixed-media paintings in her exhibit “Midrash: Stories Reclaimed” at Perry Nicole Fine Art also tell stories and search for meaning. In a particularly wry and expressive self-portrait, Bible Belt Bagel Babe, the artist stands between Ionic columns and under the pediment of a church designed to look like a Greek temple, one among many churches in the painting. Buchman wears a New York City T-shirt. Her right hand holds a bagel, her left holds a replica of the Statue of Liberty, and the statue, in turn, holds a copy of The Joys of Yiddish. A long black strap (the buckle reads “BIBLE BELT”) coils like a snake around Buchman, the churches, and the Statue of Liberty. A golden hand atop one of the church spires points to a sky layered with luminous blue and purple handmade paper. With humor and wisdom from many sources, this Bible Belt bagel babe weaves together an understanding of life and beyond.

Through April 28th