Ryan Lee Gallery

Ayahuasca is a part of Preston’s art practice, entwined with his exploration of his own family and ancestral heritage connecting to native peoples of the United States, Africa and Brazil.

Dig It assembles a series of works by artist, inventor and filmmaker Gabriel Lester that pay tribute to American jazz legend Thelonious Monk and his longtime friendship with jazz patron Pannonica “Nica” de Koenigswarter.

RYAN LEE is pleased to present Hung Liu: Pulse, an exhibition of the groundbreaking artist Hung Liu. With a focus on 1989 through 1996, the presentation honors Liu’s reactions to the Tiananmen Square massacre, which reverberate throughout her work in the decade to follow. Liu’s complex responses to the government’s bloody crackdown, which happened thirty-five years ago, suggests the extent to which China became nearly impossible to see from abroad. The works on view shed light on the contortions by which Liu attempted to capture the trauma through her works. RYAN LEE is proud to exhibit this impactful body of art as Liu’s first solo show at the gallery, and its inaugural showing of her work since announcing representation of her estate in February. Much of the work included in this exhibition has not been seen in three decades. Hung Liu was born in Changchun, China in 1948, growing up during the Maoist regime. In 1968, she was sent for proletarian “reeducation.” While in the countryside, for four years, she worked in rice and wheat fields seven days a week. To preserve her mind and spirit, she drew and sketched while also learning to use a borrowed camera to photograph neighbors and fellow villagers. In 1979, she was able to enroll in Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Art, and majored in mural painting. Her training in the prevailing Socialist Realist style, against which she later reacted, informed her practice for years to come. 1984 was a landmark year for Liu. After years of applying for a Chinese passport, she arrived in the United States at age 36 to begin graduate studies at the department of visual arts of the University of California, San Diego. There, she studied under Allan Kaprow, the American originator of the art movement Happenings. In the U.S., she was invigorated by her exposure to artists, critics, theorists and such peers as feminist art historian Moira Roth and fellow student Carrie Mae Weems. Despite the optimism of this period, it was only a few years into her time in the U.S. that Liu watched from abroad as a ferocious attack on unarmed students—and on the hope for democracy at large—took place in Beijing. The horror and pain of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre resoundingly impacted her work, instigating the groundbreaking installation Trauma (1989). Trauma serves as the inspiration behind the exhibition at RYAN LEE, which will be one of the first twenty-first century revisitings of the work since its original exhibition. Also central to the RYAN LEE’s exhibition, the paintings Pulse and Souvenir (1990) suggest the difficulty of looking from afar back at the turmoil in one’s homeland, unable to find a clear picture of the trauma. In Pulse, a small image of a tank evokes the mass press’s blurry mediation of memory and the past with the current violence and uncertainty. Little seen are Liu’s paintings of acupuncture charts and medical diagrams in which the human body is presented as a network of meridians and points-of-contact that, when blocked or injured, lead to illness. The illness, in this case, was in the Chinese body politic. The large and bloody painting Red Bladder (1995) is an example of the human body as a kind of strategic map. The print Chinese Bonsai (1992) depicts a woman with mutilated bound feet. She is a reference to Liu’s landmark Goddess of Love, Goddess of Liberty (1989), in the collection of the Dallas Museum of Art), which she considered as a metaphor for the “true condition of liberty” of China. It was a mere few years after the events at Tiananmen Square that Liu became a U.S. citizen. She was now able to return to China for the first time since emigrating. On this 1991 trip, she visited the Beijing film archive and discovered a trove of archival photography of young women, concubines, prostitutes and performers. She embraced these tangible ephemera, repurposing the photographs through large-scale paintings and mixed-media presentations of their subjects. In her Prostitute series, Liu integrates her artistic training in murals with the rules-bending conceptual art styles she was exposed to in California, resulting in a continued emphasis on multimedia. Conceiving of each artwork as an object, she worked with shaped canvases, and incorporated elements of San Francisco Chinatown tchotchkes. These elements along with her ennobling treatment of the subjects lent many of the Prostitute works an overall shrine-like quality. In Fan (1992), for example, Liu recreates a photograph’s young female subject in a memorial of sorts, building a lacquered wood shelf around a monumental painting of the portrait, decorated with Chinatown-sourced figurines. Liu’s Prostitute series gives its subjects a second life. She liberates them from a repression she knew all too well. This process contributes to her own reconciliation of love and nostalgia for China, without neglecting her criticism of its politics. Throughout the 1990s, Liu continued to build on broader thematic preoccupations of a complicated longing and mourning for China. The meaning embodied in Liu’s Prostitute paintings is enforced by her artistic method. As a painter, Liu challenged the documentary authority of historical photographs by subjecting them to the more reflective process of painting. Much of the meaning of Liu’s conceptual paintings come from the way the washes and drips dissolve the documentary images, suggesting the passage of memory into history, while working to uncover the cultural and personal narratives fixed – but often concealed—in the photographic instant. The installations and paintings in Hung Liu: Pulse altogether express a collective loss, one in which personal liberties and individual rights are the casualty. And yet, Liu’s work carries a poignant mix of sorrow and affection. Despite the criticisms they hold, these paintings are a metaphor of a China she loved and for which she grieved. Further contextualizing this complexity, RYAN LEE is proud to also present new scholarship around Hung Liu and her work, in an accompanying exhibition catalogue with essays by Jeff Kelley and Christina Yang.

Ina Gerken A swirl of dust, a shift of sound March 14 – April 27, 2024 Opening Reception: Thursday, March 14, 6:00-8:00pm RYAN LEE is pleased to announce A swirl of dust, a shift of sound, an exhibition of new abstract gestural paintings by German artist Ina Gerken (b. 1987). Her process is one that yields to artistic instincts, often expressed through a method of heavily layered brush strokes, splatters, and streaks. This sense of movement embodies Gerken’s tendency toward an itinerant nature, wherein moving her studio from place to place can at times become a part of her practice. The five evocative paintings in A swirl of dust were produced in New York City in 2023, to which she traveled after being awarded the prestigious Pollock-Krasner grant. Large-scale and full of activity, her paintings collectively represent an homage to the city’s vibrant, unique sensory elements. This is Gerken’s first major solo presentation in New York. Gerken’s paintings are a dialogue between her subconscious and her mediums. She begins with a deliberately undefined end goal, allowing primordial approaches of observation and discovery to take the lead. “I try to absorb everything like a sponge or a container, and let it come to life in the works,” she says. The past five years have taken her from Berlin to London to Los Angeles to Maine to New York, where each scene is a blank canvas to explore. “I discover my own themes that may have been lying dormant inside me,” she says, citing the power of each new environment to function like a mirror, reflecting ideas and feelings back to her, to in turn respond to through painting. In each vivid piece for A swirl of dust, Gerken manipulates the sounds and sensations of New York City through expressive shades of blues, greens, and violets, splaying them across the canvas with intense brush strokes, raw stipples, and impasto details. These works allude to concrete shapes but ultimately exist as abstractions, suggesting moods and temperaments, the timbre of a city street, or the momentary tumult of an inner landscape. Despite their reliance on energetic versus tangible subject matter, Gerken acknowledges the influence of specific characteristics of her locations. Inspired by the sounds of NYC as well as the “dust” of energy the city emits, she employs the visual motif of very small dots. By applying and then scaling the shape, Gerken offers an impression that mimics the transience of the city itself, rendering indecipherable whether the small and large forms are all dissolving apart, or are just coming together. The surreal effects of Gerken’s approach are intensified by the scale of this series of artworks, which allows her to literally immerse herself in the meditative process of creating. Painting on the floor, she is enabled to actually “be in the painting” and, conversely, is granted the dual vantage point of then stepping out and away from it to survey the experience and impact afresh. Evading ideas or ideals of the end result, she loses herself in the physical and psychological act of painting, lettering herself “drift, circle around something unknown, and discover how the invisible becomes visible.” Though in a sense spatially methodical, her process is fully reliant on intuition, and culminates in an un-anticipatable moment of recognition. “The picture emerges,” Gerken says, “and it exists out of itself.” The gestural energy of each painting invites viewers into the same physicalized, almost hypnotic sense of participation, finding their own recognitions or senses of meaning within it. Built on layers of exploration, action, and reaction, the artworks exist as testaments to the fluidity between reality and imagination, between rationale and intuition, between person and place. Ina Gerken (b. 1987, Speyer, Germany) is a painter whose process-based practice is rooted in intuition and spontaneity. Relinquishing control, Gerken allows her paintings to unfold autonomously and follow their own logic. To keep her process alive and exciting, she embraces the rapidly drying medium of acrylic paint, modifying content quickly and at will. Her work has been exhibited at museums and galleries around the world, including Logomo, Turku, Finland (2023); Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, TX (2023); Stiftelsen Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium, Vestfossen, Norway (2022); Deictorhallen Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany (2020); Museum Wiesbaden, Wiesbaden, Germany (2020); and Bonn Museum of Modern Art, Bonn, Germany (2019), among others. Gerken studied art at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and is currently based in Düsseldorf, Germany. About RYAN LEE Celebrating emerging and established artists and estates, RYAN LEE takes a multi-generational approach to its programming, presenting innovative and scholarly exhibitions across all spectrums of art practices, including painting, photography, video, sculpture, and performance. The gallery takes chances on a wide variety of boundary-pushing artists; their work consistently transcends political, cultural, material, or technical boundaries. In addition, RYAN LEE has, throughout its history, demonstrated its long-standing interest and dedication to feminist, Black and Asian American, as well as queer narratives in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Founded in 2013 by Mary Ryan and Jeffrey Lee, the gallery is led by partners of different generations and backgrounds with over six decades of combined experiences informing its unique approach.

RYAN LEE is pleased to announce in this moisture between us where the guinep peels lay, an exhibition of sculptures by American modernist Richmond Barthé (1901-1989) alongside images by multimedia artist Christopher Udemezue (b. 1986). The two bodies of work, created by artists of vastly different generations, explore figural representation through myth and movement, engage respective ties to Jamaica, and invoke evolutions of the queer Black perspective. Through their distinct mediums, both artists capture the eternal beauty and mysticism of the human body. Barthé, who was most prolific during the early-to-mid twentieth century, depicted the dynamism, energy, and movement of his subjects, often sculpting from memory. His figures, such as African Boy Dancing (1937) and Black Narcissus (1929) are characterized by their graceful, elongated forms, spiritual emotion, and delicate sense of motion. In dialogue with these sculptures, Udemezue’s photographs offer a striking and intimate meditation on the body from a contemporary perspective. “The scenes and stories depicted traverse historical and geographic borders,” Udemezue says, at the same time “addressing questions of African queerness, Caribbean spirituality and oral storytelling.” The artists’ bodies of work, when paired, highlight intergenerational possibilities for the queer Black perspective through expression and visual storytelling; while also calling upon their deep, yet differently rooted, ties to Jamaica. Udemezue’s photographs are directly inspired by trips to his ancestral homeland of Bickersteth, Jamaica, each staged portrait responding to the folklore and oral stories of his imagined queer ancestors. “a tenderness when I was low and a touch on the side of my waist on days like today. a voice? something brought us to this space” embodies these perspectives. Lighted in the hot colors of passion, Udemezue’s portrait captures affection and longing, depicting queer bodies entwined among the lush throes of island foliage. A hand emerges into frame, suggesting a tension between possibilities of being “beckoned away”, and consenting approval for the embrace. Together, Udemezue’s photographs are a rebuttal of and reclamation from Western myopia, its artistic and literary canon, and its historical misappropriations of Jamaican culture, spirituality, and identity. Barthé’s relationship to Jamaica, in contrast to Udemezue’s, was less linear. “I’ve always identified myself with a certain shade of blue-green,” Barthé relayed to fellow artist Camille Billops in a 1975 interview. “When I saw the water there [in Jamaica] it was like coming back home. I stayed for over twenty years because of the color of the water.” Despite not being genealogically connected to the island, its coasts, colors, and way of life had a profound impact on his work. Moved by its character, Barthé’s time there imbued into his sculptures the vitality and spirituality he observed around him. Simultaneously, although he never explicitly revealed his sexuality to the public, his sculptures over the years returned to themes of homoeroticism, engaging subject matters of the male body in particular. Aligned with their thematic conversions, both artists’ work also shares a preoccupation with figural representation, and a clear fascination with the body’s forms, movements and expressions. “This show, for me, acts as a conversation through time,” Udemezue says, “connecting present day pain and triumphs to those who came before me.” Through this lens, Barthé’s figures may be interpreted as predecessors to the younger artist’s work, and engaged with along the same representational spectrum of experiences. Barthé and Udemezue are united by the enduring timeliness of these subject matters. With in this moisture between us where the guinep peels lay, the invitation is to both contemplate and contextualize the evolution – but also the tenacity – of queer Black perspectives across era, geography, and medium. The gallery is working with the estate of Samella Lewis, who was instrumental in continuing Richmond Barthé’s legacy and creating later lifetime casts. Richmond Barthé (b. 1901, Bay St. Louis, MS – d. 1989, Pasadena, CA) was an American artist known for his sculptures of Black performers, athletes, dancers, and historical figures. While attending the Art Institute of Chicago, Barthé took up sculpture at the suggestion of one of his professors. Barthé began sculpting figures that expressed his sitters’ emotions through their gestures and movements. Shortly after graduating in 1928, the artist relocated to New York City, where he became a vital participant of the Harlem Renaissance. Over the next two decades, Barthé exhibited widely and gained considerable acclaim as one of the first modern artists to depict African Americans in his work. In the 1940s, Barthé became the first African American artist to be represented—together with painter Jacob Lawrence—in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s and Whitney Museum of American Art’s collections. By the late-1940s, Barthé moved to Jamaica and lived there for two decades. In 2015, Barthé’s work was featured in America Is Hard to See, the inaugural exhibition at the new Whitney Museum of American Art. Recently, his work has been featured in exhibitions at the Telfair Museums, GA (2023); Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort, Netherlands (2020); and Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, CT (2019), among others. His work can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; and Smithsonian American Art Museum, DC, among others. Christopher Udemezue (b. 1986, Long Island, NY) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice is rooted in his Jamaican heritage, healing, personal mythologies, and the desire for connection. Udemezue’s concentration has recently expanded to recounting and visualizing the effects of his mother’s immigration from Jamaica. He is the founder of RAGGA NYC, a collective platform that connects a growing network of queer Caribbean artists and allies through online storytelling and events. In 2017, Udemezue completed a residency at the New Museum that culminated in an exhibition on the platform, titled RAGGA NYC: All the threatened and delicious things joining one another. In 2018, his work was featured in the New Museum’s 40 year anniversary show, Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon. In 2019, Udemezue participated in The Shed’s inaugural Open Call grant and group show. He has also been included in exhibitions at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, MO; Künstlerhaus, Vienna, Austria; Mercer Union, Toronto, Canada; MoMA PS1, NY; New Museum, NY; and Queens Museum of Art, NY, among others. Udemezue received his BFA from Parsons School of Design in 2008. He lives and works in New York, NY. About RYAN LEE Celebrating emerging and established artists and estates, RYAN LEE takes a multi-generational approach to its programming, presenting innovative and scholarly exhibitions across all spectrums of art practices, including painting, photography, video, sculpture, and performance. The gallery takes chances on a wide variety of boundary-pushing artists; their work consistently transcends political, cultural, material, or technical boundaries. In addition, RYAN LEE has, throughout its history, demonstrated its long-standing interest and dedication to feminist, Black and Asian American, as well as queer narratives in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Founded in 2013 by Mary Ryan and Jeffrey Lee, the gallery is led by partners of different generations and backgrounds with over six decades of combined experiences informing its unique approach.

RYAN LEE is pleased to announce ALL MOST, an exhibition of new paintings by leading Norwegian artist Anne-Karin Furunes. Meditating on the natural world, its sublime beauty, and the current environmental threats imperiling it, Furunes’ series addresses the catastrophic consequences of global warming and the ephemera of nature through monumental depictions of calving icebergs and various transient states of precipitation. This is Furunes’s fourth exhibition at the gallery. The emphasis of the show is on works that capture the moment when chunks of ice ablate, melt, or break from larger bergs; the exhibition also includes portrayals of clouds pregnant with rain, alongside other powerful interferences of water. Each painting, some of which are up to thirteen feet long, offers an expansion upon the artist’s signature perforation technique. This meticulous method involves applying tiny, hand-made holes to canvas, which is then layered with pointillist-like spots of color that, upon stepping back, mimic the look of halftone printing. Manipulations of light, scale and color deploy slight optical illusions that adjust a viewer’s perception, based on where they’re standing. The immersion in both scene and detail invites proximity and empathy toward the glacial trauma, and its suggestions of imminent climate tragedies. Employing her long-time engagement with archival photographs, these new paintings are inspired by the ongoing documentation of calving icebergs in the remote archipelago of Svalbard, Norway that have been compiled by glaciologists at the Norwegian Polar Institute. The original images, which depict the dramatic changes in our environment caused by climate change, served as the impetus for Furunes to revisit the subject of the calving iceberg, one which she first explored in her early work over two decades ago. Furunes also finds inspiration in the wonder and mystery of the transformations that take shape in the natural world at large. From the changing states of climate, to the different speeds at which bodies of water move in waterfalls or maelstroms, “We see spectacular moments of nature’s force that are awe-inspiring,” she says. “As an artist, I want to remind people of the beauty of nature, [but also that it] will be lost forever unless we change our habits of consuming.” Concepts of slow consumption are imbued not only in each artwork’s invocations, but also in their production. Each painting in ALL MOST is composed manually, laboriously, and lovingly, as Furunes hand-punctures every perforation. Through this process she is literally shedding light on the ongoing destruction of the natural world. Adding dotted layers of indigo, cyan, magenta, and yellow ink to the canvases, Furunes intensifies and deepens the optical effect of each scene: from up close, the pointillist details are entirely abstract, while from afar, the human eye joins red, blue and yellow to create the clarified image. Furunes’ gestures with these dots considers multiple scales and experiences in her compositions, at once creating friction and unity through her precise and astute manipulation of pattern and color. The works, both tragic and captivating, beckon viewers to become re-enchanted by our ecologies. They ignite Furunes’ belief in “a possible future where we can continue to admire life in its manifold shapes and ways,” and in a world where we can more truly “live in harmony with other living beings.” While Furunes’s previous works have powerfully presented human victims of history – particularly her evocative depictions of Norway’s colonized native Sámi people – she now focuses her gaze on the global state of a victimized ecosystem. She reminds us that “nothing is guaranteed unless we all drastically change our way of living,” and in her works offers us agency and the opportunity to ally with the natural world through its appreciation, by understanding its traumas and indulging in a more empathetic cohabitation. Anne-Karin Furunes (b. 1961, Ørland, Norway) is a leading Scandinavian artist in painting and public commissions. Since 1992, Furunes has developed a signature technique of perforating canvas or metal to consider photographic and digital elements of space, light and material. The punctured holes in her canvases mimic the halftone process, most popularly used in periodicals. Furunes does not employ a computer to create her images, instead she composes them manually. Substituting ink for light, she creates a star pattern on a diagonal grid, cutting each hole by hand to create an image through the way the human eye perceives light. Furunes works from archival photographs. She departs from the original images by adjusting color, cropping, light and perspective. This method of removing in order to reveal complements Furunes’s research-based practice that frequently focuses on forgotten histories and people. Trained as an artist and architect, Furunes received her degree from the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art in Norway. In 2021, she was nominated for the ARS Fennica Award in Finland. Her work has been included in solo and group exhibitions at Hå Gamle Prestegard, Nærbø, Norway (2023); Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum, Trondheim, Norway (2022); Paul Robeson Galleries, Rutgers University, NJ (2018); Fondazione Musei Civica, Palazzo Ducale, Venice, Italy (2017); Trondheim Kunstmuseum, Tronheim, Norway (2017); Palazzo Fortuny, in conjunction with the 56th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy (2015); Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Espoo, Finland (2014); International Print Center, NY (2013); Katonah Museum, NY (2013). She is represented in prominent public collections worldwide including Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland; Kistefos Museum, Jevnaker, Norway; Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY; National Museum, Beijing, China; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo, Norway; and Trondheim Kunstmuseum, Trondheim, Norway, among others. Furunes lives and works in Stjørdal, Norway. About RYAN LEE: Celebrating emerging and established artists and estates, RYAN LEE takes a multi-generational approach to its programming, presenting innovative and scholarly exhibitions across all spectrums of art practices, including painting, photography, video, sculpture, and performance. The gallery takes chances on a wide variety of boundary-pushing artists; their work consistently transcends political, cultural, material, or technical boundaries. In addition, RYAN LEE has, throughout its history, demonstrated its long-standing interest and dedication to feminist, Black and Asian American, as well as queer narratives in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Founded in 2013 by Mary Ryan and Jeffrey Lee, the gallery is led by partners of different generations and backgrounds with over six decades of combined experiences informing its unique approach.

RYAN LEE Gallery is pleased to present Michael Mazur: Wakeby Islands, the artist’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition celebrates the artist’s most famous Wakeby series (1982), a remarkable study of landscape and memory that follows Wakeby Pond’s full cycle of birth, life, death, and renewal—a subject Mazur would return to for years to come. The exhibition includes two monoprints (including some of the largest monotypes to date), an oil painting, and three pastels—all of which display his multidisciplinary dexterity across mediums to create a stunning variance in mood and technique.

RYAN LEE is pleased to announce Scenic Microcosms: Wallpapered Rooms Painted by Andrew Raftery. The solo exhibition features ten penetrating views of landmark wallpapers, represented in watercolor. Each work depicts a scene of real-life interiors from across New England whose ornate, ornamental wallpapers inspire questions about the colonialist roots of their creation, installation, and ongoing appreciation. Raftery’s watercolors balance his genuine admiration and deference to the allure and precision of the wallpaper’s artistry, while engaging with contemporary cultural criticism.

RYAN LEE is pleased to present Can You See Me Now? Painting the Aging Body, a group exhibition co-curated by Jeffrey Lee and artist Clarity Haynes. Featuring select works from an expansive and esteemed roster of painters who are women-identifying, the show represents a shared exploration of the aging body across generations. From Samantha Nye’s sexy portrait series of four older women at their most bodacious, to Beverly McIver’s intimate self-portrait holding a doll, the artworks both individually and collectively celebrate the immense grace, grandeur and fortitude of aging. We exist in an era that values women for their reproductive capacities while at the same time limiting them; an era that defines beauty as the province of the young and systematizes the visibility of proto-youthful attributes; an era in which women and people in general are held to the one-way standards of the male gaze. Amidst a global climate in which both bodily autonomy and corporeal dignity are increasingly threatened for women and LGBTQIA people, this exhibition allows and applauds their many tones and figures, recognizing and appreciating their innate diversity. Through the choice to focus on the medium of painting, the curators are deliberately addressing the monumentality and permanence of this perspective. Inspired by Emma Amos’s and May Stevens’s stances on painting as a political act and mechanism for forging visibility, Can You See Me Now? foregrounds the significance and excellence of aging women through their own lenses and narratives, praising the overt visibility of the complexity, stamina and energy of their existence. At the crux of the exhibition is May Stevens, whose series around her aging mother was what first spurred the curators into an exploration of art’s depictions of the aging body. This series is often eclipsed by the rest of Stevens’s robust œuvre, which touches on subjects of landscape and the natural world, characterizations of bigots in the acclaimed Big Daddy series, and the Ordinary/Extraordinary series about Rosa Luxemburg, the persecuted Marxist activist whose identity Stevens often uses as a contrast and parallel to artworks and depictions of her own mother. Why, the curators posed, was the subject matter of aging not granted more consideration within the contexts of this artist’s work overall? Where, in the fine arts, is the aging body given its due pedestal? The works on view present paintings that portray this subject, honoring that everyone ages, everyone’s body is different and distinct, expressive, special, and emotive in its own right; we are meant to be not only visible, but seen. Through her work, Haynes, a queer feminist artist, has expanded boundaries of how we consider the body and its representation. Her ongoing series of torso portraits features a variety of subjects, body forms, gender expressions, ages, and accessorization. Acting as a second conceptual pillar for the show, Haynes’s curatorial and artistic stance reflect an embrace of the vastness of femme, trans and nonbinary bodies, and the requisite honor they deserve. Haynes’s and Stevens’s art engages with other work in the exhibition, including the vivid, narrative portrait Shelia Pepe by Angela Dufresne; work by textural painter Brenda Goodman, whose large-scale nude image of her with her partner, Double Portrait, evokes a lesbian American Gothic. Emma Amos’s kinetic and explosively colorful collage-painting, My Mother was the Greatest Dancer; Joan Semmel’s powerful self-portraiture of her own aging, yet astute and agile, body in Skin Patterns; Samantha Nye’s series of small-scale paintings on the glamor and owned sensuality of being an older woman; Mala Iqbal’s up-close and personal To Ponder, an androgynous, contemplative, gently expressive portrait; Finding Comfort, a painting by Beverly McIver of herself and a mammy-style doll gifted to her by a friend, capturing a vulnerable moment; artist Hung Liu’s stately painting Grandma, and Bailey Doogan’s nuanced, tactile portrait Breast, Age 59. In its holistic and expansive appreciation of aging bodies, this exhibition is a narrative constructed of stories that subvert and usurp the persistent male gaze through their reclamation of perspective. Can You See Me Now? poses its questions to its audience, but also the art industry at large. Collaboratively and intentionally intergenerational, the exhibition celebrates and exalts the body, aging and changing, and uses the exchanges between a diverse set of preeminent artists to explore its ranges of romanticism and solemnity alike – and the agency, power, dignity and beauty inherent to it. Alongside the exhibition, RYAN LEE is publishing a catalogue of writing pertaining to the themes explored in Can You See Me Now?, including an essay by Jillian McManemin. This public resource will endure as a compilation reinforcing the visibility of aging women, trans and nonbinary people in the arts and culture at large. Emma Amos (b. 1937, Atlanta, GA – d. 2020 Bedford, NH) was a dynamic painter and masterful colorist whose commitment to interrogating the art-historical status quo yielded a body of vibrant and intellectually rigorous work. Influenced by modern Western European art, Abstract Expressionism, the Civil Rights Movement, and feminism, Amos was drawn to exploring the politics of culture and issues of racism, sexism and ethnocentrism in her art. Amos was the youngest and only woman member of Spiral, the historic African American collective founded in 1963, as well as a member of the feminist collective and publication Heresies, established in the 1980s. Amos received a BA from Antioch University, OH and the London Central School of Art, UK before receiving her MA from New York University, NY. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the British Museum, UK; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Georgia Museum of Art, GA; National Portrait Gallery, DC; Pinacoteca de São Paulo, Brazil; Tate Modern, UK; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; and de Young Museum, CA, among others. Her work is held in over 40 museum collections, including the British Museum, UK; Museo de las Artes, Mexico; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Museum of Modern Art, NY; National Gallery of Art, DC; and Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, among others. Bailey Doogan (b. 1941, Philadelphia, PA – d. 2022, Tucson, AZ) was an American artist best known for her feminist paintings and drawings that offer an unflinching look at the aging, female body and tackle cultural issues like the equation of beauty with youth. She received her BFA from Moore College of Art, PA and MA from UCLA, CA. Doogan’s work has been exhibited at the Alternative Museum, NY; Altos de Chavón, Dominican Republic; Brooklyn Museum, NY; The Drawing Center, NY; Fresno Art Museum, CA; ICA San José, CA; Knoxville Museum of Art, TN; New Museum, NY; Phoenix Art Museum, AZ; Rutgers University, NJ; San Antonio Museum of Art, CA; Speed Art Museum, KY; Tucson Museum of Art, AZ; and Utah Museum of Fine Arts, UT, among others. Her artwork is featured in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, NY; DiRosa Museum, CA; Rutgers University, NJ; Tucson Museum of Art, AZ; San Jose State University, CA; and University of Arizona Museum of Art, among others. Doogan’s artwork has been reviewed and featured in numerous publications, including Art in America, The Nation, Art Journal, Ms., ARTnews, New Art Examiner, and Harper’s Magazine. Angela Dufresne (b. 1969, Hartford, CT) explores the experience of American womanhood through painting, drawing, printmaking, performance, and community-building. A contemporary lesbian painter committed to championing non-hierarchical narratives, Dufresne references other artists and films in her paintings, drawing connections between history and her own personal experiences and associations as a queer woman. She sees painting as a co-creative process, often prompting her subjects to interact with the painting process through dictation of the backdrop and deciding when the work is finished. Dufresne holds a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute, MO and an MFA from Tyler School of Art, PA. Dufresne has been included in solo and group exhibitions at the Aldrich Art Museum, CT; Brooklyn Academy of Music, NY; Cleveland Institute of Art, OH; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, MA; Hammer Museum, CA; Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA&D, ME; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, MO; Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, NY; MoMA PS1, NY; RISD Museum, RI; Rose Museum, MA; and Warsaw Museum of Modern Art, Poland, among others. Her work is in the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art, OH; Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, NH; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, MO; Middlebury College Art Museum, VT; Puerto Rico Museum of Contemporary Art, PR; and RISD Museum, RI, among others. In 2016, Dufresne was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship. Currently, she is Associate Professor of Painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, RI and lives in Brooklyn, NY. Brenda Goodman (b. 1943, Detroit, MI) has relentlessly explored the physical and psychological limits of abstraction and figuration throughout her illustrious career. Regarded as a “painter’s painter” for her inventive handling of paint, Goodman’s paintings range from thick impasto to thin veils of color, creating deep, interior spaces of personal confrontation and reflection. Between 1994 and 2007, Goodman created a series of ground-breaking self-portraits which critic John Yau called “one of the most powerful and disturbing achievements of portraiture in modern art.” The series combines her expressionist tendencies with figuration to reveal the innate vulnerability and power within one’s own mortality. Goodman received her BFA from the College for Creative Studies, MI, from which she also holds an honorary doctorate. Goodman has exhibited at the Cranbrook Art Museum, MI; Detroit Institute of Arts, MI; Grand Rapids Art Museum, MI; Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU, VA; Jacksonville Art Museum, FL; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; Museum of New Art, MI; Rutgers University, NJ; and Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, among others. Her work is in the collections of the Carnegie Museum of Art, PA; Detroit Institute of Arts, MI; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; and Museum of Modern Art, NY, among others. Goodman is based in New York, NY. Clarity Haynes (b. 1971, McAllen, TX) is known for her long-standing explorations of the torso as a site for painted portraiture. Works in her Breast Portrait project, always painted from life and usually monumental in scale, have focused on themes of healing, trauma, and self-determination. While the bodies tell the intimate stories of other people, a recent series of altars are self-portraits of sorts, made up of mementos and power objects collected by the artist over decades. Feminist and queer craft practices are often honored in her work. Bright colors, lively compositions and multiple narratives conjoin in her depictions of both bodies and altars. Haynes received her MFA from Brooklyn College, NY and CFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, PA. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at the Ackland Art Museum, NC; Art Museum of South Texas, TX; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, MO; Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, NY; Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, NV; National Portrait Gallery, DC; Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts, PA; Tacoma Art Museum, WA; and Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University, MA, among others. Her work has been discussed in publications like The New York Times, Hyperallergic, Art in America, Washington Post, Huffington Post, Artforum, Juxtapoz Magazine, and Beautiful/Decay Magazine. Haynes is based in New York, NY. Mala Iqbal (b. 1973, The Bronx, NY) grew up in a Pakistani-German household in The Bronx where three cultures and four languages intersected. Iqbal’s paintings and works on paper are similarly wide-ranging and polyglot; she draws inspiration from a myriad of visual sources, taking cues from Western landscape painting, Indian miniatures, Japanese ukiyo-e, kitsch, science-fiction book covers, graffiti, cartoons, and things in plain sight. Her practice seeks to add depth and ambiguity to otherwise one-dimensional subjects. Iqbal received her BFA from Columbia University, NY before receiving her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, RI. In 2008, she received a Fellowship in Painting from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Iqbal’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States as well as in Australia, China, Europe and India. Her work has been reviewed in various publications including The New York Times, Village Voice, and The New Yorker. Iqbal is based in Queens, NY. Hung Liu (b. 1948, Changchun, China – d. 2021, Oakland, CA) grew up in China under Mao’s regime, where her artmaking was initially constrained to Socialist Realist and mural painting. In 1984, Liu left China to attend graduate school at the University of California, San Diego, where she began implementing fluid materiality and surrealist visual strategies in her art. Her later works often dissolve historical Chinese photographs of overlooked subjects—prostitutes, refugees, street performers, soldiers, laborers, and prisoners—suggesting the passage of memory into history. Liu’s works have been exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, DC; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, MO; Muscarelle Museum of Art, VA; National Portrait Gallery, DC; New Museum, NY; San Antonio Museum of Art, TX; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Tokyo Photographic Museum, Japan; and Winter Palace of Beijing, China, among others. Her work is in the collections of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Museum of Modern Art, NY; National Gallery of Art, DC; National Museum of Women in the Arts, DC; National Portrait Gallery, DC; San Jose Museum of Art, CA; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; and de Young Museum, CA, among others. Beverly McIver (b. 1962, Greensboro, NC) is widely acknowledged as a significant presence in contemporary American painting, charting new directions as an African American woman artist committed to examining racial, gender, social and occupational identity through self-portraits and images of her family. McIver received an MFA from Penn State University, PA and BA and honorary doctorate from North Carolina Central University, NC. Her work has been featured in group and solo exhibitions at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, NY; Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, CO; Coral Gables Art Museum, FL; Mint Museum, NC; New York Academy of Art, NY; North Carolina Museum of Art, NC; Greenhill Art Center, NC; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, AZ; Shemer Art Center, AZ; and Weatherspoon Center of Art, NC, among others. McIver’s work has been acquired by the Asheville Museum of Art, NC; Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Cameron Art Museum, NC; Crocker Art Museum, CA; David C. Driskell Center, MD; High Museum of Art, GA; Mint Museum, NC; Nasher Museum of Art, NC; National Portrait Gallery, DC; Nelson Fine Arts Center Art at Arizona State University, AZ; North Carolina Museum of Art, NC; and Philadelphia Academy of Art, PA, among others. She is currently based in Durham, NC where she is the Ebenshade Professor of the Practice in Studio Arts at Duke University. Samantha Nye (b. 1980, Hollywood, FL) is a painter and video, performance, and installation artist concerned with capturing the beauty of aging. Through the lenses of pop culture, camp, and stylized erotica, Nye’s paintings and video art invent utopias where intergenerational exchanges between womxn in trans-inclusive spaces expand the parameters of love, sex, agency, and belonging. A native of Hollywood, FL, Nye’s first introduction to performance was as a self-described, relatively unsuccessful child model. Her early lessons about performance and identity have directed her studio practice—in painting, video, and installation—towards investigations of “seduction through reenactment.” Nye received her BA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, MA. In 2021, she was the focus of My Heart’s In a Whirl, a solo exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston that explored beauty across generations. Nye has also been featured in museum exhibitions at the Lehman College Art Gallery, NY; Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, NY; Museum Arnhem, the Netherlands; and Columbia University’s Wallach Gallery, among countless gallery exhibitions. Nye currently lives in Philadelphia, PA. Joan Semmel (b. 1932, New York, NY) began her painting career in the 1960s while living in Madrid as an Abstract Expressionist, exhibiting in Spain and South America. Returning to New York in 1970, she moved to figuration in response to pornography and concerns around representation of women in culture. Since the late-1980s, Semmel has meditated on the aging female physique. Recent paintings continue the artist’s exploration of self-portraiture and female identity, representing the artist’s body doubled, fragmented, and in-motion. Dissolving the space between artist and model, viewer and subject, the paintings are notable for their celebration of color and flesh. Semmel received her BFA from the Pratt Institute, NY. Her work has been exhibited at Dallas Contemporary, TX; Jewish Museum, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Modern Art, NY; National Museum of Scotland, UK; National Portrait Gallery, DC; Paul Modersohn-Becker Museum, Germany; Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken, Germany; and Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, among others. Semmel’s paintings can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Blanton Museum of Art, TX; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Institute of Contemporary Art, MA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Parrish Art Museum, NY; and Tate Modern, UK, among others. Semmel is based in New York, NY. May Stevens (b. 1924, Boston, MA – d. 2019, Santa Fe, NM) was a painter and printmaker whose work was shaped by the various political and social movements she participated in; an ardent, lifelong activist, Stevens was committed to employing art in her fight for women’s liberation, civil rights, and anti-war activism. A founding member of Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics and the Guerilla Girls, Stevens is known for her politically charged paintings that challenge the patriarchal power dynamics of American society. While her political commitment drove her earlier work, her later works tend to be more lyrical, her Ordinary/Extraordinary series highlighting the simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary potential of women through pictures of her late mother, Alice Stevens, and the important Polish-German Marxist Rosa Luxemburg. Stevens received a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art, MA. Stevens’s work has been exhibited at the British Museum, UK; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Detroit Institute of Arts, MI; Jewish Museum, NY; MassArt Art Museum, MA; Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, TX; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; SITE Santa Fe, NM; Smithsonian American Art Museum, DC; and Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, among others. Her work has been acquired by the Brooklyn Museum, NY; deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Modern Art, NY; New Museum, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; and Whitney Museum of American Art, NY.

RYAN LEE is pleased to announce Emma Amos: Classical Legacies, an exhibition of three paintings, six prints, and one cycle of epic monoprints by Emma Amos. The fourth solo presentation of Amos’s work—and sixth overall—at the gallery, the exhibition will focus on the classicist influence on Amos’s œuvre, a fresh take on her substantial body of work.

RYAN LEE is pleased to announce Empathy Lab, the first major exhibition of Masako Miki’s work in New York City. The landmark solo show proudly introduces new works to her Shapeshifters series, which roots its expressions in the animistic polytheism of Shinto traditions. Conceiving of the gallery as a home, Miki constructs various spaces for casual connection and contemplation, from an engawa deck to an open garden-scape dotted with deity-inspired bronze and felt creatures, objects, and forms, alongside vibrant drawings that convey the outside world.

RYAN LEE is pleased to present ANTI-ICON: APOKALYPSIS, a daring new body of work by artist Martine Gutierrez. The series continues her exploration of identity across the cultural landscapes of gender, race and celebrity. In 17 new works, Gutierrez has transformed herself into a multitude of idols. Costumed by the barest of essentials, Gutierrez’s figure is the catalyst, reflecting dystopian futurism upon the symbols of our past. Through each metamorphosis, Gutierrez re-envisions a diverse canon of radical heroines who have achieved legendary cultural influence over thousands of years in both art history and pop culture.