Brainard Carey's Blog, page 3

Michelle Im

Michelle Im creates ceramic sculptures that explore themes of home, displacement, and cultural identity in the context of globalization. Drawing inspiration from ceramic traditions, she examines how historical and cultural forces shape her experience as aKorean American. Using handbuilt figurative forms, Im addresses the psychological tension of embodying conflicting cultural ideologies such as individualism and collectivism. By portraying service workers such as flight attendants, she navigates the nuanced space between cultural dualities, using these figures to reflect on labor, performance, and community.

Michelle Im is a Korean-American ceramic artist based in Queens, NY.In 2024, she was selected as the Artist Fellow at the Museum of Arts & Design. Grants and awards include the Center for Craft Teaching Artist Grant, American Craft CouncilEmerging Artist Grant,Penland School of Craft Distinguished Fellowship, and Ceramics Monthly Emerging Artist Award.Shewas a Visiting Artist in Residence at the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Artsand has attended residencies atTownship10,Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, and Penland School of Craft. Herwork has received mentions byThe New York Times, ARTnews, and The Korea Times.She holds a BA in Biological Sciences & Art from the State University of New York atBuffalo and is a faculty member at Greenwich House Pottery in New York, NY

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Joyce Weidenaar

Joyce Weidenaar is a painter and monoprintmaker living in New York City. She began pursuing art ten years ago after retiring from a real estate career. Her works have been seen in solo and group exhibitions, and in private collections. Her paintings are rendered realistically but with unusual framing, bright colors and often a bit of whimsy. Her prints emphasize texture and are purely abstract. Joyce is a member of the National Association of Women Artists, Pleiades Gallery, The Art Students League of New York and the West Side Arts Coalition. Her paintings and prints are viewable on Instagram (@joyceweidenaar) and on her website (http://www.joyceweidenaarartworks.com). Her gallery talk at the Port Washington Public Library can be seen here. In addition to her art endeavors, Joyce is an avid ballroom dancer and skier.

Adam Cable

Adam Cable (b. 1989) creates vignettes of American domestic life using found digital images. His work entwines perception and narratives into the reconstruction of these environments, highlighting ways that impressions and expectations inform experiences of space. These compositions blur the lines between picture and collage by overlaying keyword-sourced materials onto component shapes. Challenging the conventional idea of “home” as a blank canvas, Cable presents it as a complex space influenced by countless factors. Even seemingly static forms become imbued with emotions and meanings through the images he incorporates, reflecting the intricate dance between social norms and cultural values in our everyday surroundings.

Cable has shown in several group and solo exhibitions, including at the Amos Eno Gallery project space, NYC; The Painting Center, NYC; University of North Carolina, Asheville; PULSE Art Fair, Miami; Local Project, NYC; and The Plaxall Gallery, NYC. At the end of 2020, he co-curated “Annus Horribilis” with Float Magazine, a group exhibition of work created that globally significant year, while in 2021, The Wassaic Project included his work in the book Secrets of the Friendly Woods. Cable holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts (2017) and a BFA from the University of North Carolina, Asheville (2013). He lives and works in Brooklyn NY.

Adam Cable, Am I There Yet?, 2022-23, archival pigment print, 24 x 18 inchesAdam Cable, Unrequited, 2024, archival pigment print, 20 x 14 inchesAdam Cable, Anywhere But Here, 2021, archival pigment print, 15 x 15 inches

Natalia Zourabova

Natalia Zourabova was born in Moscow, Russia in 1975, lives and works in Tel Aviv since 2004. She studied at the Russian Academy of Theater Art in Moscow (1995-2000) and the University of Arts in Berlin (2000-2003).
Zourabova is primarily a figurative painter. She paints scenes that she knows intimately – oftentimes city streets in her neighborhood in Jaffa, or familiar interiors. Color is central to Zourabova’s work; her palette and the mood of her paintings range from naturalistic to absurd, and her paintings vary along the spectrum of realism to abstraction.

Zourabova has exhibited various solo shows in Israel, at Haifa Museum of art (2024), Herzliya Museum of contemporary art (2019-20), Janco Dada Museum, Ein-Hod (2005); as well as at the Iragui Gallery in Russia (2008-2019), and had multiple solo exhibitions across Israel, Russia, France, Sweden and more. She has participated in group shows internationally at such venues as The Israel Museum (2015, 2018), Mediterranean Biennale (2020,2013), the Garage Triennial of Contemporary art (2020; Salaisons in Paris, France (2010); and the Vasternorrland Museum in Sweden (2000), among others.

Zourabova, Nightlight, 2025, 90.5 x 127 in, Oil on CanvasZourabova, Evening Meal, 2024, 51.2 x 51.2 in, Oil on CanvasZourabova, Women, 2024, 47.25 x 67 in, Oil on Canvas

Lin Wang

Lin Wang, China Oslo-based ceramicist Lin Wang produces large-scale still life installations and sculptural assemblages which investigate the corporeality and historic resonance of porcelain. Over centuries, porcelain’s combination of a kaolin-rich white clay body with deep cobalt glazes has registered the ongoing effects of contact and trade, as well as the phantasmic projections of a long-standing dialog between East and West. As an artist working between China and Norway, Wang’s interest in this interchange holds personal significance, tinged by her own wanderlust, homesickness, and experiences of cultural discovery. Since 2016, Wang has explored these themes through a cycle of exhibitions, video works, performances, and workshops titled Exotic Dreams and Poetic Misunderstanding.

As a group, these works intersperse the iconography of traditional blue-and-white chinaware with imagery of sailors’ tattoos, Buddhist and Christian religious deities, and the fantastic creatures populating the terra incognita of early maps. Wang engages these varied histories, combining her own experiences as ceramicist and tattoo artist, traveler and immigrant, fantasist and materialist. Her craft-based interdisciplinary practice is structured by the many forms of sculptural tableaus (the scroll, the folding screen, the still life arrangement) — artistic scenarios rife with complex interactions between personal objects, symbols of status, reminders of mortality, and allegorical stand-ins. Throughout, the delicate materiality and translucence of porcelain — which itself summons comparison with bone and skin — is refigured not only as canvas but as a quasi-corporeal body, marked by the ambitions of commerce and the aftermath of empire.

Wang received a bachelor’s degree in sculpture from the China Academy of Art and a master’s degree in fine art from the University of Bergen. Her central research project Exotic Dreams and Poetic Misunderstandings consists of an ongoing series of exhibitions over the past decade. In 2019, as part of the research for this project, she produced two solo exhibitions at the Kunsthall Grenland and the Vigeland Museum. She has completed numerous public commissions, including for the Hammerfest Hospital, Sarpsborg Library, and Tønsberg Courthouse. Her work is included in the collections of the Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum, Oslo Kommune, Porsgrunn Kommune, and the National Museum, Oslo, Norway.

 

 

Naomi Okubo

Naomi Okubo’s work explores delicate and often uneasy relationships between individuals, society, and the spaces that shape them. Drawing on her personal experiences, particularly her complex relationship with her mother, she examines how guise, decoration, and inherited roles—especially restrictive notions of “femininity”—affect human interactions.

In her early work, Okubo depicted women without faces as a symbol of the pressures to conform in Japanese society. Over time, these faceless figures have come to function more broadly as a mirror, allowing viewers to project themselves and reflecting both individual experiences and societal dynamics. In recent years, she has also been exploring the motif of the “greenhouse/home,” a confined yet seemingly nurturing space that resonates with her upbringing and contemporary life, highlighting how environments can both protect and constrain. Her works involve a complex, multi-layered process, where materials and techniques accumulate to convey the depth and contradictions of lived experience.

Okubo earned her MFA from Musashino Art University in 2011 and lived in New York from 2017–2019 with grants from the Agency for Cultural Affairs of Japan and the Yoshino Gypsum Foundation. She has exhibited widely in Asia, Europe, and the U.S., including Fou Gallery, New York (2024/25); GALLERY MoMo, Tokyo (2023); ELSA ART GALLERY, Taipei (2022); and Yoshino Gypsum Art Foundation, Tokyo (2022). She served as a residency artist at mh PROJECT, New York (2019); Residency Unlimited, New York (2017); and Art Department of Halland Municipality, Sweden (2014). Her work has been featured by Airbnb Magazine, ZEIT-magazine, Contemporary Art Curator Magazine, Financial Times, Juxtapoz Magazine, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and a PBS documentary.

Bird Collector, 2025, Acrylic on raw canvas, 57 × 44 in.Canary Cave, 2025, Acrylic on raw canvas, 38.2 × 51.3 in.Dancing in the Flames, 2025, Acrylic on raw canvas, 28 × 12.4 in.

Eva Lake

Eva Lake studied art history and archaeology at the University of Oregon and painting at the Art Students League of New York. She has exhibited internationally since 1980. As a singer in post punk bands she recorded with Trap Records in the Pacific Northwest. Her day job was in makeup, beauty and fashion and this, plus her studies in art history, have formed the foundation and subject matter for much of her work. For over a dozen years she interviewed other art people on the radio, specifically KPSU and KBOO, and has written about art for various publications including Art Week, Visual Art Source, Preview and the Bay Area Guardian. Lake also curated exhibitions and worked at artist-run and commercial galleries including Lovelake, Chambers Fine Art, Portland Arts Collective and the Russo Lee Gallery. Born in Los Angeles, she then grew up on a dirt road in southern Oregon. Lake currently lives and works in Portland, Oregon and is represented by Frosch and Co in New York City and Modernism in San Francisco.

Eva Lake, Crystal Helmet No. 4 Paper collage 17.5 x 14 2024Eva Lake, Egyptian Sculpture Helmet Paper collage 23.5 x 19.5 inches 2024Eva Lake, Giotto Helmet Paper collage 25.5 x 19.5 inches 2025

Robert Janitz

Robert Janitz (b. 1962, Alsfeld, Germany) is a contemporary painter known for his bold, abstract canvases that balance humor, gesture, and materiality. After studying Sanskrit and art history in Germany, he lived in Paris for many years before relocating to New York and later Mexico City, where he currently lives and works.

Janitz is best recognized for his large-scale works featuring sweeping, textured brushstrokes that recall the motion of everyday acts—like buttering toast or polishing shoes—transforming mundane gestures into painterly abstraction. His practice often blends saturated color fields with playful surfaces, exploring perception, language, and the boundaries of painting itself.

Over the past two decades, his work has been exhibited internationally in museums and galleries, including solo and group shows across Europe, the United States, and Latin America.

His works are part of the permanent collections of the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, France; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, USA; Amorepacific Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea; the Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia and the Hall Art Foundation, Reading, VT, USA.

Robert Janitz, Studio Rats, 2025, Oil, wax, flour on linen, 25 × 20 inches (63.5 × 50.8 cm)Robert Janitz, Masquerade in the Park, 2024, Oil, wax, flour on linen, 25 ½ × 19 ½ inches (65 × 50 cm)Robert Janitz, Camino a Comala, 2024, Oil, wax, flour on linen, 51 × 39 inches (130 × 100 cm)

Avital Burg

The artist photographed by Geoffrey Biddle.

Avital Burg studied at Bezalel Academy, the Hatahana School, the Slade School of Art, and the New York Studio School. Burg was the artist-in-residence at the Interlude Residency, NY, and the Peleh Residency, CA. Her works are in prominent collections, including the Louis-Dreyfus Family Collection (NY), and the Bank Leumi Art Collection.

Burg’s impasto paintings incorporate dry paint pieces from her palette into fresh layers, creating surfaces reminiscent of low-relief sculptures. Some canvases are painted over three or four previous works, signifying how each moment of creation encapsulates multiple points in time. The oil on canvas grows lush with life, prompting Burg to reflect on the impermanence of material existence and inviting guests into a rhythmic and meditative form of viewing. 

Cracks in the Pavement offers a glimpse into nature’s quiet cycles and beauty, often lost in the urban thrum of New York City. In Burg’s newest paintings, blue chicories push through the earth, wildflowers bloom in winter, then wither—making way for spring’s pink and lavender buds. The inevitability of impermanence is layered onto the canvas, with each painting titled after the street where the artist encountered the flower during walks to and from her Brooklyn studio.

Avital Burg, Harlemville Road Purple Loosestrife, 2024, Oil on linen mounted on wood, 10 x 8 in. Image courtesy of the Artist and Fridman GalleryAvital Burg, Summer Crown Heights Flowers, 2024, Oil on linen mounted on wood, 10 x 8.5 in. Image courtesy of the Artist and Fridman GalleryAvital Burg, TJ Hyacinth (Week 35), 2023, Oil on linen, 30 x 26 in. Image courtesy of the Artist and Fridman Gallery

Yatika Starr Fields

Yatika Starr Fields, 2025. Portrait © Tom Fields 2025

Born in 1980 in Tulsa, Yatika Starr Fields is a member of the Cherokee, Creek and Osage tribes, as well as a member of the Bear Clan.

Yatika Fields studied landscape painting at the University of Oklahoma’s Sienna, Italy summer program before enrolling at the Art Institute of Boston from 2001 to 2004. While living on the East Coast, the artist developed a keen interest in street art. His dynamic, vibrant graffiti works quickly attracted attention, generating public and private mural commissions across the country from Portland to Oklahoma City, Phoenix, Santa Fe, and Bentonville.

In 2018, he completed Astonishment of Perception, a monumental site-specific mural in downtown Bentonville, as part of Crystal Bridges Museum’s Art for a New Understanding (2018–2019). Spanning the side of Cripps Law Firm’s two-story building, the work depicts lady justice peeking from behind her blindfold, highlighting the dissonance between America’s ideals and its judicial system in practice. Like many of Fields’s works, the mural blends abstract and stylistic elements, figuration, and allegorical narrative, all in a dynamic, saturated Pop-palette.

After joining the water protectors at the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016, Fields began to give the Indigenous history of hope and struggle a greater focus in his work. In the 2017 series Tent Metaphor Standing Rock, the artist recovered tents after the infamous February 22, 2017 police raid on the protesters, sewing the recovered material into shapes resembling coffins, sleeping bags, or kites. Fields first worked with tents—a mainstay of middle-class camping holidays— after witnessing Seattle’s brightly colored homeless encampments. His interest only increased after noticing the structure’s role in modern protest movements. The artist recombines the vivid material into traditional Indigenous patterns, anti-pipeline slogans like “Stop the Black Snake,” and into dynamic, compelling abstract compositions. In its totality, the series blurs the boundaries between political polemic and abstraction, between distress, resistance, and hope.

The painting, America Realized (2017), also memorializes the experience at Standing Rock. The composition is explosive: Torrents of ice and fire swirl through prayer ties and collapsing tents, recounting the freezing weather, police force, and fires that the activists braved at Oceti Sakowin, the central camp in Cannon Ball, North Dakota. A surveillance drone flies across the top of the expansive canvas packed with razor wire, floodlights, and debris. The scale of the 6- by-6-foot composition allows for Fields to replicate the embodied, fluid performance of mural and street art. As in graffiti works, Fields blurs the line between abstraction and representation, creating stylistic compositions out of recognizable elements, and setting them against dynamic, swirling fields of color and twisting forms.

Fields has participated in over 43 solo and group exhibitions at venues across the United States and Europe, including: the Southern Plains Indian Museum, (2008, Anadarko, Oklahoma); Chiaroscuro Contemporary (2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, Santa Fe); BlueRain Gallery (2015, 2016, 2018, Santa Fe); Peabody Essex Museum, (2015–2016, Salem, MA); Rainmaker Gallery (2017, Bristol, UK); the Grand Palais (2018, Paris); the Philbrook Museum (2018, Tulsa); the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, 2019); and the Gilcrease Museum, (2019, Tulsa). Fields’s paintings are featured in the collections of many museums across the country, including: the Heard Museum (Phoenix); the Hood Museum (Dartmouth College); Oklahoma State Museum of Art; the Peabody Essex Museum; and the Sam Noble Museum (University of Oklahoma).

Yatika Starr Fields, Tahlequah, 2025 Polyester, nylon, aluminum rod and tyvek 67 x 50 inches 170.2 x 127 cmYatika Starr Fields, Impermanence, 2025 Polyester, nylon and mixed media 64 x 47 x 6 inches 162.6 x 119.4 x 15.2 cmYatika Starr Fields, Corrugated Landscape, 2025 Polyester, nylon and mixed media 89 x 102 inches 226.1 x 259.1 cm