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Sue Williams came to prominence in the early 1980s for her densely composed, figurative paintings that explore the body and violence against women. Painted directly onto unprimed canvas, Future Angst with Capybara Lower Left is representative of Williams’s more recent work. Since 2017, she has been painting colorful, loose compositions where figurative elements intermingle with swaths of pure color. Williams is a skilled draftsperson whose early work was strongly influenced by cartoons and comic strips. In her recent, less crowded canvases, the quality of drawing is especially able to come through. While some figurative elements are identifiable—from naked bodies in ambivalent repose, to the titular capybara (a South and Central American species of rodent) at the canvas’s lower left—many elements are left unfinished or dissolve into meandering lines or patchy blocks of pale pinks, yellows, blues, and greens. Future Angst with Capybara Lower Left continues many of the themes and bodily motifs that characterized Williams’s early work, such as gaping bodily orifices and the omnipresent threats of violence and violation, while introducing Williams’s recent interest in open space and sketched renderings of figures.

Boston-born and New York–based artist Sarah Sze explores the peripheries of the built environment and our increasingly image saturated world through everyday materials in her ambitious paintings, sculptures, and installations. In Surround Sound (After Studio), Sze continues to build upon her longstanding interest in merging art with built space through a personal investigation of the artist’s studio. In 2019, Sze presented a room-size installation that replicated her studio through layered cardboard, folding chairs, a ladder, and blue-taped images on standard printer paper. Surround Sound (After Studio) was presented within this installation, connecting the artist’s painting practice to the expansive and mediated space of the studio. “After” is often used in titles of copies that reference another artist’s work, but, here, Sze “copies” her own studio in a two-dimensional painting that considers the ways in which the studio space shapes paintings. Sze layers images of speakers, Post-it notes, and mirrored surfaces to construct the complex pictorial space that defines Surround Sound (After Studio), which stands over eight feet high and combines a vast array of media. As in her sculptures and installations, Sze resists a singular perspective and conveys a sense of ongoing construction before the viewer’s eyes. In Surround Sound (After Studio), Sze evokes the layered, sensorial, and reflective space of the artist’s studio and the contemporary world writ large through a refracted surface that captures the unique sonic, physical, and aesthetic space of the artist’s studio.

In her monumental paintings, sculptures, and installations, Firelei Báez (Born 1981 in Santiago De Los Caballeros, Dominican Republic) creates fictional worlds that explore legacies of colonial rule across the Americas, the African diaspora, the Caribbean, and far beyond. Her exuberant artworks contain complex and layered uses of pattern, decoration, and abstract gestures alongside symbols rooted in Afro-Caribbean cultures. Báez painted Tone tonal time (or an economy of care) on the occasion of her first North American survey, organized by the ICA/Boston in 2024. 

The artist’s quintessential paintings overlay paint onto reproductions of colonial-era maps, architectural plans, and other archival documents. These layered works challenge our understanding of acknowledged power, suggest alternative histories, and create expansive narratives of renewal and recalibration. In Tone tonal time…, a figure rendered in energetically layered paint merges with a finely detailed tableau of flora and glass. Drawing from her extensive art historical training, Báez engages with the traditions of still life vanitas paintings from the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch Golden Age of painting, and often contain animals, flowers, insects, rotting food, and skulls to convey the moral message that earthly life is transient and finite. While vanitas paintings consider death as their primary subject, Báez’s Dutch flowers and Murano glass—both symbols of global trade—center beauty and enduring life. A reproduction of a seventeenth-century Dutch maritime map provides the ground of Báez’s painting. While charming at first glance with its cherublike figures, such maps were frequently used by colonizers to expand into Africa and the Americas. Báez acknowledges this history while her painting imagines an alternative rendering focusing on an expansive femme subject who contains an entire galaxy of color. Ultimately, Báez’s intervention is not one of obliteration, but rather one of reimagining a past, present, and future that foregrounds beauty and belonging.

Tammy Nguyen (Born 1984 in San Francisco, California) creates paintings, works on paper, unique artist books, and publications. In the densely layered symphonic space of her gilded paintings, Nguyen explores contradiction and confusion through intertwining narratives of geopolitical, environmental, and spiritual subjects. Many of her paintings are composite images that reconsider lesser-known histories against the backdrop of lush landscapes teeming with insects, plants, and animals imbued with agency, and varied symbols of violent conquest or soft power. In 2023, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston organized Nguyen’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States.

Ralph Waldo Emerson belongs to a series of works Nguyen made for her ICA exhibition related to the relationship between people and nature, landscape, and wilderness, as articulated in Emerson’s influential essay “Nature,” written in 1836 in Concord, Massachusetts. In the essay, Emerson outlines the spiritual and philosophical basis of transcendentalism, which suggests that God is reflected everywhere in nature and that reality can be understood by interacting directly with nature. This painting is a portrait of Emerson (in many ways the central figure of Nguyen’s exhibition), surrounded by dense layers of foliage combining the plants and trees of the Northeast with the flora and fauna of tropical environments, such as Vietnam. Nguyen portrays Emerson’s body as interchangeable with nature, a literal representation of his philosophical worldview. Nguyen layers the surface of the painting with elements drawn from the U.S. National Archives about land reform programs in Vietnam following the Vietnam War. The artist poetically maps out how ideas Emerson penned nearly 200 years ago echo across time and space to influence U.S. policies abroad.

Didier William (Born 1983 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti) creates fantastical figurative paintings on wooden panels that incorporate carving, collage, and traditional Haitian iconography to explore themes of personal belonging and transnationalism. Throughout his oeuvre, William depicts figures suspended in space as if underwater or floating in the air. The artist notes that the absence of gravity and a stable foundation speaks to both queerness and diaspora as unmoored states that require constant navigation to construct a sense of belonging. In 2023, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston included William’s work in its presentation of Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s–Today.

In Gwo Tet, a large, central figure hunches over a grainy wooden floor, their arms raised above their head in a defensive gesture. To the upper left, four hands extend menacingly from beyond the edges of the panel as if beckoning or casting a spell on the central figure. In Haitian Creole, gwo tét means “big head,” a phrase used pejoratively. William candidly notes that many of his works reconstruct memories of traumatic events. In this case, Gwo Tet depicts an episode where the artist was ridiculed on his walk home from school. The title is not translated to English, a move the artist has linked with a desire to withhold information about his subjects and his memories. In this way, the use of titles in Haitian Creole, or Kreyól, in his work is both a gesture toward Haitian diasporic identity and a way of maintaining a form of privacy. This tension between the knowable and the unknowable is also present in William’s singular iconography. The artist covers his figures in a cloak of carved eyes, a formal device he says liberates them from constant perception. William typically transfers sketches onto wood panels, which he dyes with ink before carving into their surface with a rotary tool. William employs this intervention to layer deeper meaning across his works through carved patterns and collages that echo Haitian textiles from his childhood. Here, William’s ambiguous figures, sexless and ageless, modulate the viewer’s ability to superficially understand them. The work suggests that living with a degree of uncertainty and maintaining anonymity is a right not often afforded to those who fall outside the bounds of white, heteropatriarchal systems.

Zoe Pettijohn Schade (Born 1973 in Boston, Massachusetts) creates heavily detailed, labor-intensive, geometric gouache paintings by repeating imagery. Drawing from her own life, memories, and direct observation, Pettijohn Schade creates complex patterns from everyday images to produce layered and dizzying optical experiences. Pettijohn Schade’s work was included in the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston’s exhibition Less is a Bore: Maximalist Art & Design (2019).

Attempts at Self Organization: Prevailing Bonds is the culmination of two years of work in which Pettijohn Schade meticulously draws from life using mirror devices that generate internally repeated structures and patterns. The foundational layer of the painting is a marbled pattern that the artist creates using traditional techniques, swirling pigment suspended on a liquid surface and laying paper on the liquid to absorb the patterned color. The artist then paints in gouache the shapes and patterns she observes by placing plants, rocks, a feather, and other materials inside a mirrored polyhedron. As the artist describes, “Mirror symmetry differs from other forms of tiling in that the symmetry—the tiles facing each other as they repeat, has an element of self-regard as well as self-replication.” Her approach lends the work an all-over composition in which no single element stands out, but each tile is entirely unique. In this work, she has paid particular attention to moments when long edges align—or bond. Among these precisely rendered shapes, there are blotches that break up the image’s geometric perfection. Reminiscent of Hermann Rorschach’s psychological tests—during which patients are asked to interpret various inkblots, with their responses being analyzed by the tester to better understand an individual’s subconscious—these shapes interrupt the patterning, inviting viewers to form their own images. Pettijohn Schade outlines the distinct polygons with thin, gilded metallic lines, which create a lattice-like layer that appears and disappears as a viewer moves around the work. Through this series of works, the artist draws upon texts by classical philosophers and theologians, such as Plato and St. Augustine, seeking to explore fundamental questions about the organization of matter and the self.

Josephine Halvorson’s (Born 1981 in Brewster, Massachusetts) painting practice focuses on place and the careful acts of observation and transcription. Working outdoors, Halvorson selects a particular site, sets up her tools and materials, and takes in her surroundings, translating what she sees into painted marks. The resulting paintings capture the heterogeneity and brilliance of the mundane, revealing each square inch of earth to hold countless colors, shapes, and textures. 

Station Meter is from a body of paintings (many of which were made during the COVID-19 pandemic), centered on artistic genres of still life and memento mori, which “hover between liveliness and decay,” according to the artist. Halvorson settles on many of her subjects—often overlooked scenes that appear to hold little value otherwise—during her walks and travels, drawn primarily to seemingly forgotten corners of different environments. It is Halvorson’s deep investment in her subjects through which she locates the latent meaning of each scene. She spends hours looking closely and working in a vérité style in order “to make a painting that remembers better than I can,” says Halvorson.  

Station Meter centers on a watt hour meter, a device that measures and records the electric power flowing through a circuit over time. The meter is mounted on a weathered piece of wood whose brilliant blue paint is peeling, its appearance neglected. The mounted meter is represented frontally and crowds the canvas against a backdrop of train tracks, an overpass, and electrical lines, conveyed through an economy of means in very little space. As in many of Halvorson’s works, the meter is painted with a poetic exactitude that renders it with a quiet dignity. It appears to suggest that despite being overlooked, the work nevertheless must go on. The passing and measuring of time apparent in the scene are analogous to Halvorson’s investment in moments of beauty that often go unnoticed. 

Aubrey Levinthal’s (Born 1986 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) figurative paintings and still lifes suggest meditative and melancholic atmosphere that offer less a portrait of her subjects than an evocation of an emotional state, expressing her interest in what she calls the “uncanny in our everyday lives.” Drawing on scenes and experiences from her life, she slowly builds up layers of thin, semitransparent washes of paint on panel and then scrapes them down with a razor, lending her works an ethereal quality as if seen through the haze of time.  

In her most recent body of work, Levinthal shifts from a focus on her private life to encounters in the public sphere, all while continuing her emphasis on intimacy, close observation, and restrained compositions. In Airport, two figures sit facing one another at a small, circular table against the unmistakable setting of an airport terminal—its enormous windows opening to a gray tarmac and cloudy sky. One of the most striking features of this work is the merged faces of the seated couple: the bearded face of the rear figure joins the turned face of the closest figure to create a singular tonal plane, where the subtlest brushstrokes both define and defy the edges of the two figures. Likely a portrait of the artist and her husband, the painting reflects Levinthal’s characteristic use of distortion to heighten the mood and convey narratives within her paintings. “I hope my work is a real, tender accounting of my particular visual life,” says the artist. “The paintings can be inventive and distorted, as I often work from memory and through process, but I want them to carry resonance of my experience, which happens to be as a painter, woman, and mother.” 

For over twenty years, São Paulo-based artist Rivane Neuenschwander (Born 1967 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil) has honed a distinct multimedia practice that investigates the roles of collaboration and chance in the creative act. Whether in film, photography, or installation, Neuenschwander is principally concerned with what she calls “ethereal materialism,” or the role that ephemeral or everyday materials have in creating momentary experiences of wonder, chance, and enchantment in public space. The installation Um festival embananado is the sixth installment of a series of works Neuenschwander began making in 2004 titled Zé Carioca. The series title is a reference to the comic character José “Zé” Carioca, a dapper Brazilian parrot first created in 1941 by cartoonist José Carlos de Brito. The next year, the character was famously adapted by the Walt Disney Company as a companion of Donald Duck and later of Mickey Mouse. The creation of Disney’s new character was an extension of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, which sought to maintain strategic relations in the Americas—in this case through popular culture. Frequently featured in comic strips, animated films, and television shows, Zé Carioca has become synonymous with Brazilian culture even as the character’s stereotypical traits as a suave, streetwise malandro (rascal) speak to the complicated history of American political interference in Latin America in the twentieth century. In her series, Neuenschwander creates mural blocks of Zé Carioca’s comic panels stripped of the original text and image, leaving only vibrant, Technicolor squares and blank speech bubbles. The artist then invites the public to continue the artwork by writing or drawing directly on the murals. The result is a collective form of social and individual expression determined entirely by the chance encounter in public space. 

New York-based artist María Berrío (Born 1982 in Bogotá, Colombia) crafts her large-scale, watercolor paintings through a meticulous process of collaging and painting torn pieces of Japanese paper. The Conference of the Sparrows is part of Berrío’s most recent series, The Children’s Crusade, which blends the history of the Children’s Crusade of 1212 CE with the contemporary mass movement of peoples across borders. Berrío frames her series as a fictional tale, with each painting and its descriptive text serving as a scene from an unfolding story. In The Conference of the Sparrows, a family appears on a boat in a vast expanse of dappled water. As in many of Berrío’s works, this painting merges recognizable and iconic imagery with flights of imagination and fantasy. The blue wooden boat resembles those used by many migrants crossing the Mediterranean, its hull filled with domestic items, foodstuff, and figural details. These realistic elements merge with the otherworldly, including a nude, winged central figure that appears like an angel or a ship’s figurehead, hovering over a plastic bucket and conjuring safe passage. About this work, the artist writes: “To make the crossing required as much hope and courage as it did desperation, or nearly so. But the children had been assured that their gods would look over them. Their faith in a better world to come would protect them.”