Tilton Gallery

Do you remember the trees? I remember when it was covered with trees. I remember when the grasses were taller than me. And yellow, golden. Yeah, and flowering, and then there was…not lamb’s ear, but purslane Purslane, yes. And you could eat it. And I remember, it was really snowy, and really cold. Yes, the cold. And I remember not being able to leave the house, because it was so muddy. And having so many boots for mud. And each one, weighed like twenty pounds. But those memories… it feels like a second ago, but it was already twenty-eight, thirty years ago. Doesn’t seem like so much time to have so much change. - Fragment of conversation taken from Drought How long is lasting long enough? How do we experience climate shift as something that happens to us? What do we do with our grief? Tilton Gallery is delighted to announce the opening on Wednesday, September 15, 2021 of Wild irises grow in the mountains, an exhibition of new work by Martha Tuttle. There will be a reception for the artist from noon till 8 pm. In her third solo exhibition with Tilton Gallery, the artist will present a group of ten large paintings and a video. An interplay between malleability and permanence, fragility and strength permeate the exhibition, ranging from perceptions about the vulnerability of traditional dyes and textile practices to the grief and mourning that strive to encounter the magnitude of climate change. “I think that the question of how to care throughout change—even if that change is distressful—is one that can be seen as symbolized by the object and extending into the realms of the body and the earth,” the artist writes. “How do we learn to create a culture of care that moves with the needs of that which we care for? How do we disentangle ideas of health from desires for infinite usability and production?” Ten wall works continue the artist’s practice of putting textile elements into delicate equilibrium. To make the paintings, Tuttle spins and weaves wool to make a sculptural material that she sews into compositions with silk, which are in turn painted with stone pigments and plant dyes. The paintings are then stretched around aluminum and wood stretchers. For the artist, this incorporation of the industrial avoids a strict separation between the supposedly organic and inorganic. Drought (2021), the artist’s first video, expands her techniques of juxtaposition. The work overlays conversations between the artist and her mother—poet Mei Mei Berssenbrugge— about their experiences of developing drought with footage of the North American Southwest. Martha Tuttle was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1989. She received her BA from Bard College in 2011 and her MFA from The Yale School of Art in 2015. She has held residencies at the Rauschenberg Foundation in Captiva, FL, 2019, the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program in Brooklyn, NY and A-Z West in Joshua Tree, CA, both 2017, and the UCross Foundation in Clearmont, WY, 2016. In 2014, Tuttle received a Josef Albers Foundation Travelling Fellowship as well as a Donald C. Gallup Research Fellowship from The Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Yale University. She has shown widely in the U.S. and internationally, including in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston and Santa Fe as well as in Brussels, Belgium, Turin, Italy and Tokyo, Japan. Tuttle is represented by Tilton Gallery in New York where she had exhibitions in 2016 and 2018 and by Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago, where she had a solo show in 2019. She currently has an outdoor sculpture exhibition, Outlooks: Martha Tuttle, at Storm King Art Center, open through November 8, 2021. Her work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA and the University of San Diego, CA. Tuttle lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Tilton Gallery is pleased to present “When the Chickens Come Home To Roost,” the first solo exhibition of paintings, watercolors and sculpture by February James in New York. The exhibition will open Friday,May 21st, noon to 8:00pm. February James makes evocative portraits that respond to memory and are located at the nexus between the private self and public persona. They are both profoundly personal and non-specific, imbued with a sense of mystery that allows the viewer to engage with the work and collaborate with it to find their own interpretation.

Tilton Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of photographs by Texas Isaiah, opening Friday, May 21st, noon to 8:00pm. Texas Isaiah is a visual narrator whose photographs, primarily of Black people, especially those of queer, trans, non-binary and gender expansive experiences, create arresting and poignant portraits that are significant both for the subject matter and for their remarkable visual beauty, rich color and soft natural light. Working in black and white and, more often since his move to Los Angeles a few years ago, in color photography, Texas Isaiah captures the essential humanness of his sitters.

Tilton Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new sculpture by Kennedy Yanko, from April 6th to May 15th, 2021. We encourage visitors to call in advance on opening day to assure an even flow and safe viewing experience. Kennedy Yanko continues her ongoing investigation into the combination of the seemingly incongruous materials of metal and paint skins to create voluptuous and unexpected sculptural forms. Salvaged metal, crushed or bent into new forms, is juxtaposed with lushly colored soft-appearing paint skins formulated by the artist to flow organically around or through the harder metal forms, at times seeming to pour out of this less pliant element. Yanko melds the two materials and experiments with her very personal color palette to create works that defy the traditionally static nature of sculpture and that have a sense of continuous movement. In this new body of work, Yanko has added a new element: wires. Straight and taut, they are threaded through the works like drawings in space, exerting pressure on the paint skins while extending the sculptures' essence beyond their perceived boundaries. They become yet another way that Yanko causes the viewer to think anew about the sculptures' relationships to walls and space and in turn to consider our own position in relation to these works within this cultural moment in time. Kennedy Yanko is a Brooklyn-based artist, born in 1988 in St. Louis, Missouri. Yanko's work has been exhibited in group museum exhibitions including Parallels and Peripheries curated by Larry Ossei-Mensah at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit in 2019 and Life During WarTime curated by Christian Viveros at the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum in 2020. She installed her first public sculpture, 3 WAYS, on the Poydras Corridor in New Orleans in collaboration with The Helis Foundation and the Ogden Museum of Art. Yanko has had solo exhibitions at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, Michigan; Jenkins Johnson Project Space, Brooklyn, NY, Denny Dimin Gallery, New York, Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago, and Vielmetter Gallery, Los Angeles. Yanko was named Artforum's "Critic's Pick," received a Colene Brown Art Prize awarded by BRIC Arts Media, and was featured in 100 Sculptors of Tomorrow published by Thames & Hudson.

Tilton Gallery is pleased to present a group of Selected Works that hover between abstraction and figurative content. From the straightforward to political to ironic and self-critical, they are a group of favorites to ring in the New Year.

Tilton Gallery is pleased to present Empty Legs, an exhibition of artworks that feature legs, or their conspicuous absence. Working around the globe and across generations, each artist uses legs as a way to say something about their attitudes and concerns, in other words, where they stood. The exhibitions features works by Eduardo Abaroa, Kim Dingle, Huang Yong Ping, John Outterbridge, Noah Purifoy, Ruth Vollmer, Gang Zhao. Empty Legs has been organized by Jacob Billiar. Simultaneous with this exhibition, Tilton Gallery presents a group show of selected works by Egan Frantz, Tomashi Jackson, Yashua Klos, Antone Könst, Jarbas Lopes, John Outterbridge, Noah Purifoy, Joyce Scott, Berend Strik, Martha Tuttle, Cosima von Bonin and Brenna Youngblood.

Zachary Armstrong, Ed Clark, Luca Dellaverson, Fred Eversley, Keltie Ferris, Egan Frantz, Terri Friedman, Ron Gorchov, Rashid Johnson, Sol LeWitt, Richard Nonas, Kianja Strobert, Chris Succo, Martha Tuttle, Richard Tuttle, Stanley Whitney, Kennedy Yanko, Robert Yasuda, Brenna Youngblood

Works by the Studio Fellows at NXTHVN, upon completion of the first year of this Residency Program founded by Titus Kaphar, Jonathan Brand and Jason Price.