Andrew Edlin Gallery

Andrew Edlin is proud to announce the first NYC gallery exhibition for the late East St. Louis artist Abraham Lincoln Walker (1921-1993). Although Walker participated in a handful of regional group exhibitions during his lifetime, he had little desire to show his art publicly, preferring to work in near-complete solitude in the basement of his East St. Louis home.

Carroll Cloar: The Flowers We Gathered January 9 – February 15, 2025 Andrew Edlin Gallery is pleased to present The Flowers We Gathered, a solo exhibition by Southern artist Carroll Cloar (1913–1993). The presentation features fourteen paintings and drawings mostly from the 1960s and 1970s and is the artist’s first New York solo show in nearly thirty-five years. Carroll Cloar was born in Earle, Arkansas, where a boy who always wanted to read, draw, and paint was an anomaly. He studied writing and the visual arts at Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes College) and trained at the Memphis Academy of Arts. He moved to Manhattan in 1936 to pursue a career as a cartoonist. (he hoped to get a New Yorker cover). His dreams of a successful comic strip featuring a clever, well-spoken rustic from the Arkansas Delta besting and bemusing jaded New Yorkers never came to fruition, but he found his way to the Art Students League. Decades after he left New York, its rich teachings and artistic influences are beautifully reflected in The Flowers We Gathered (1978). In it Cloar tempers joyous childhood memories with the weight of Southern masculinity and balances shimmering pointillist surfaces with sharply delineated figures. The Art Students League, with its open approach, gave him a chance to experiment and to learn from a variety of artists. Cloar recalled that his teacher Ernest Fiene (1894-1965) “…would look at my work, shake his head, sigh, and say ‘Color, color, color.’ He had no hope for me.” But Cloar persevered, and many of his paintings—including Charlie Mae Looking for Little Eddie (1969)—echo Fiene’s acidic palette and tonal experimentations. The League also introduced Cloar to lithography, an unforgiving medium that pushed him toward the sparing but evocative images of family and country life that became crucial to his later works. In his Day Remembered (Study), Cloar distilled figures from family photographs into essential compositional elements, often detached from their backgrounds. Cloar’s lithographs—all in black and white—liberated him from grappling with color and gave his style a new clarity. His series of lithographs, printed by Will Barnet (1911–2012), was featured in Life magazine. One of them hung in the American Art building at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York—where Cloar worked as an attendant. In 1940, he received a MacDowell Fellowship which took him to the American West, Mexico, and South America, where was immersed in revolutions, both literal and artistic, and a rediscovery of color. The decade also brought the Second World War, in which Cloar served, more travel in Europe, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. During his time in New York, Cloar perfected the craft of painting. Throughout his career, he meticulously planned and executed his works, creating sketches of figural elements and compositions before combining them into finely finished graphite drawings. Highly detailed, like the lovely maze of leaves and blossoms in Twilight Flowerscape (1962), these works on vellum could then be pressure transferred to prepared Masonite panels for painting. Cloar’s exposure to the city’s museums and galleries plays out in Little Known Blind Bug of the Inner Ear, a cheeky homage to the mystical, trapped-in-amber canvases of Morris Graves (1910 – 2001); Mama, Papa is Blessed wittily lampoons the brooding surrealism of Yves Tanguy (1900-1955). Most amazingly, his Pale Hose, Pale Writer irreverently references Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980), Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847-1914), the Book of Revelation, and Cloar’s fascination with baseball. Cloar’s often humorous take on these artists underscores his ability not only to effectively emulate their works but to riff upon them and their associated movements. His own paintings and drawings share a kinship with the creations he gently mocked. His flowery fields, backwoods roads, or evocations of family members and familiar ghosts have surrealist and magical realist roots and share in a wider web of Freudian dreams, Gothic fantasies, or Biblical visions. Drawing widely from modernist impulses, Cloar translated sacred myths and folk memories into uniquely powerful, poignant images. His drawing of Brother Hinsley Wrestling with the Angel (1960) evokes the Old Testament tribulations of Jacob; Paul Peterson’s Conversion (1965) transmutes Saul on the road to Damascus into a fallen Southern hunter; and Joe Goodbody’s Ordeal (1962) makes one man’s descent into insanity into an image of mythic, universal pathos. In 1951, seeking recognition and commercial success, Cloar paid a visit to Edith Halpert (1900-1970), the pioneering founder of the Downtown Gallery. Impressed by his works, which she felt were modern and yet had an old-fashioned quality that dovetailed with her taste for American nineteenth- century painting, she signed him. Cloar may have seen the work of Ben Shahn (1898-1969) during his time with Downtown. Many of Cloar’s paintings echo Shahn’s spare approach and edgy color; In Sunday Morning (1969), with its detached, distant view of Black men and women, Cloar’s debt to Shahn’s powerful explorations of social inequity is evident. By the 1950s, Cloar had settled permanently in Memphis. Close to family and his source material, he always acknowledged his debt to Manhattan, noting, “A seasoning in New York gives the artist perspective, depth, and a long view of the place of his origin.” It was that distance—and the vibrancy and experimentation of the mid-century New York art scene—that empowered Cloar to fully flower as an artist. — Stanton Thomas, Ph.D. Carroll Cloar is represented in the collections of museums such as the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many institutions. The gallery thanks David Lusk and Stanton Thomas for their insights into Cloar’s art and life.

Esther Pearl Watson: Generating Auras October 25 – December 20, 2024 Andrew Edlin Gallery is pleased to present Generating Auras, our second solo exhibition for Esther Pearl Watson. The gallery held two previous exhibitions featuring the artist, Guardian of Eden (solo, 2022) and April 14, 1561 (group, 2018-19). The paintings featured in this exhibition were inspired by the artist’s stay in Italy this past summer, caring for her father in his hometown of Ferno. "This past year, my father who is eight-seven, was in a motorbike accident in Italy. He spent three months in the hospital, and I found myself traveling back and forth as a long-distance caregiver.There is a painting in the show, Generates Auras, that features a large stoic donkey. Donkeys are often used as guardians of herds, bonding with them and protecting them from predators. I have to be a guardian for my dad." Watson grew up in a string of small Texan towns watching her father, Gene—an Italian immigrant who was adopted by an American family when he was seven—attempt to build a functional flying saucer. The amateur engineer, who might also be deemed an outsider artist, hoped to sell his homegrown spacecraft to NASA and use the earnings to alleviate financial hardship. Watson’s new paintings evoke a sweet optimism for the land and this country, evoking scenes by twentieth century folk artists like Grandma Moses, Mattie Lou O’Kelley, and Ralph Fasanella. Children play freely on lawns and in parking lots while in the background landscapes teem with fast food outlets and gas stations. Watson takes care to include even the most humdrum features—a Cheetos bag, a loose sock, snares of wire. These are richly embellished compositions with comet-streaked, celestial skies, and the artist’s glittering flying saucers hovering overhead. "Lately, I’ve thought a lot about comets. The auras they create are spectacular. There is a comet called the 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which is surrounded by its own nebulous aura or coma—an envelope of gas and dust. In his own way, my father is like this comet, generating his own aura, shaped by the changes in his body and mind. Just as a comet emits invisible light, he radiates a presence and energy that is deeply felt but not always seen, creating his own aura through this transformation."

Dan Miller works ambidextrously with intense, frenetic concentration, obsessively layering words or phrases until their legibility is obliterated. In the period leading up to Venice (2017), Miller began to create on a larger, and in some cases, monumental scale. This exhibition features a slew of recent large-scale acrylic and ink works on paper, highlighted by an imposing horizontal piece from 2022 measuring over thirteen feet in length. A painted navy blue and black background is punctuated by slashing yellow lines and scrawled, readable words like “fan” and “socket.” As is overwhelmingly the case with Miller’s work, most of his imagery is indecipherable, however, in several mid-sized compositions, he repeatedly renders the identifiable outline of a light bulb.

Andrew Edlin Gallery is pleased to present its second solo exhibition for Della Wells (b. 1951). True to her folk-art influences, Wells improvises with materials that are readily at hand. Her kinetic tableaux reveal a world that has been flattened, yet still possesses a vibrant, rumpled surface. She transforms reality into fable, melding together images, each one of which is a distinct token of her heritage. Collectively they serve as threads that embroider life in Mambo Land.

CO₂ Blues, scheduled since mid-2023, is the first exhibition of the enigmatic art of Melvin Way (1954-2024) since his passing, and the third solo show of his work with the gallery. It serves as a retrospective for a visionary who was one of the most admired self-taught artists in the contemporary art arena. Way's mostly small-scale drawings are strange and alluring concoctions of science and art that seem intent on revealing the secrets of the universe.

Andrew Edlin Gallery is excited to present a solo exhibition of works by Anthony Dominguez (1960-2014), an artist who chose to live unhoused in New York City for more than twenty years. It will be the late artist’s first exhibition at the gallery.

Are You Free on Saturday from 4-7 PM? is an installation of hundreds of handmade pronouncements collected by poet Dr. Kenneth Goldsmith from the streets and subways of New York City over the past four decades.

Unaccompanied Conversations explores the work of three artists: the now acclaimed Outsider James Castle, Pearl Blauvelt, and John Byam, all of whom were untrained and from modest circumstances, yet developed unique approaches to their art using unconventional materials. And they all devoted their lives to their art in the face of little or no market support. Besides their exceptional talent, these artists all shared traits of neurodiversity. They did not process information the way most people do, or hold “normal” conversations, even the banal—like commenting on the weather. But viewing the works of Castle, Blauvelt, and Byam can be like overhearing the conversations, often deep, sometimes funny, frequently intense, but always unusual, that have played out in the artists’ minds.

Andrew Edlin Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition for Vahakn Arslanian, his fifth with the gallery. The show features recent works made by the artist during the pandemic, including paintings of birds, planes and a customized motorcycle. Nonverbal and partially deaf since birth—he can hear the roar of airplane engines and the high-pitched chirping of birds—Arslanian was diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorder at age four, yet nothing has stood in the way of his unstoppable drive to create. He has been a productive, exhibiting artist working on his own for the past thirty years.