SARAH SENSE

Sarah Sense was raised in Sacramento, California. Her maternal grandmother is Choctaw from Oklahoma, and her maternal grandfather is Chitimacha from Louisiana. From her grandmother, she gained a love of baskets and an interest in practicing basket weaving. A member of the Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana and the Choctaw Nation, Sense weaves contemporary images of Oklahoma with historical maps and manuscripts, entangling the histories that shaped her family’s reservation into physical representations of the ever-present nature of colonial violence. Lewis and Clark’s travel journals and a 1902 allotment map are folded into scenic landscape photographs, all arranged in the pattern of a traditional basket created by the artist’s great-great-grandmother.

Sense's work is held in private and public collections, including the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth, the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey, the Portland Museum of Art in Oregon, and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

GINA BEAVERS

In her newest body of work—the Comfortcore Paintings—Gina Beavers transforms into intimate textured relief paintings an endless stream of domestic goods for sale in a seductive range of comforting patterns, colors, and textures. Beavers retreats from the social media-derived narrative subjects that have defined her work since the early 2000s, looking instead to the barrage of advertising that permeates our digital lives. She borrows product photos of home decor—towels, blankets, pillows, curtains, and sheets—from Google and Amazon retail ads that follow internet users through their online lives. Pulling these found images into Photoshop, Beavers reworks them into intuitive, improvisational photo collages that draw on traditional painting genres—particularly still life and landscape. Beavers then recreates the images on canvas, sculpting the forms and textures with foam and paper pulp before finishing them with oil paint. In the resulting paintings, Beavers transforms quotidian domestic textiles—linen, chunky knits, terry cloth, upholstery—into painterly abstraction. 

Gina Beavers earned an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, an MS in Education from Brooklyn College, and a BA in Studio Art and Anthropology from the University of Virginia. She served as an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University from 2019–2020. Beavers lives and works in the Oranges, New Jersey. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Perez Art Museum Miami, FL; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Kistefos Museum, Jevnaker, Norway: RISD Museum, Providence, RI; Deji Art Museum, Nanjing, China; and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel.

Comfortcore Paintings is on view through October 5 in New York. Work will be featured in forthcoming exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL.

LIZA LOU

Painting is an exhibition of new work by Los Angeles-based artist, Liza Lou. It features a series of abstract works on canvas in which Lou explores the most singular feature of a painting—the brushstroke. Activating the intense refractive qualities of glass beads, Lou uses her signature material to flow and coagulate into a new form of paint, applying beads in free-form gestures through an intuitive approach.

As they collide and overlap on the canvas, Lou’s beads reconstruct strokes of paint. Known for her community-based approach, Lou’s current work emerges from a period of solitude spent living and working alone in the Mojave desert in Southern California. From this undiluted experience in nature, Lou reveals a close look at the act of painting itself, magnifying granular gestures and, as she has described, “listening to the material.” 

Concurrent to this exhibition, Lou’s landmark Trailer (1998–2000) will be installed in the Brooklyn Museum lobby gallery; it is a recent addition to the permanent collection, offering an opportunity to experience the artist’s most recent work alongside this rarely-seen immersive sculpture. 

PAUL ANTHONY SMITH

Paul Anthony Smith continues his exploration of the ways in which memory, both personal and historical, can shape the present and fragment the past. This body of works stems from photographs Smith made during Carnival festivities in Trinidad and Tobago from 2020 to 2023. These paintings combine a documentary technique with that of painterly expression, rupturing time and disrupting photographic continuity in a formal, at times even compositional, way, as he figuratively interprets how we store information and process events as memory.

The use of picotage, so central to previous bodies of work, is now but one technique among several that he uses to push beyond the hard-edged specificity of the photographic image, opting also to blur and distort detail, or to repeat and remove information altogether. Through a process of printing his images on either canvas or linen and then working over the surfaces with acrylic and spray paint, Smith complicates what might otherwise be a smooth translation of photographic information into literal or even symbolic meaning. The added use of picotage to create surface patterns, those which often invoke window grates or breeze blocks, further complicates our ability to “read” these images for concrete information that we might use to inform or educate us. Instead of providing straightforward documentation, Smith’s paintings come to express the levity and communal release of Carnival through increasingly greater degrees of abstraction, revealing something close to the spirit of the multi-day celebration.

Paul Anthony Smith was born in Jamaica in 1988 but currently lives and works in New York. He received his BFA from Kansas City Art Institute. Smith’s work is held in numerous public collections, including the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, NC; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada; the Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN; the Colby Museum of Art, ME; and the Blanton Museum at the University of Texas, Austin, TX. 

Antillean is on view in New York through October 26.