Contents for January 12th, 2026
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1. Javier Téllez, FF Alumn, now online at Hyperallergic.com
2. Alva Rogers, FF Alumn, at Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, IL, Jan. 22-24
3. Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens, FF Alumns, at Cushion Works, San Francisco, CA, Jan 17, 24, and more
4. Naoto Nakagawa, FF Alumn, at Kapow Gallery, Manhattan, opening Jan. 23
5. Kimsooja, FF Alumn, January news
6. John Kelly, FF Alumn, January news
7. Adrianne Wortzel, FF Alumn, at JDJ, Manhattan, thru Jan. 31
8. Jody Oberfelder, FF Alumn, at Judson Church, Manhattan, Jan. 12
9. R. Sikoryak & Kriota Willberg, FF Alumns, at Society of Illustrators, Manhattan
10. Paul Zelevansky, FF Alumn, now online at https://vimeo.com/1152547839
11. Joyce Kozloff, Carrie Moyer, FF Alumns, at DC Moore Gallery, Manhattan, opening Jan. 15
12. RT Livingston, FF Alumn, at SBTC, Santa Barbara, CA, thru March 3
13. Barbara Rosenthal, FF Alumn, at East Village Poets, Manhattan, Jan. 16
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1. FF Alumn, now online at Hyperallergic.com
Please visit this link:
https://hyperallergic.com/five-venezuelan-artists-respond-to-us-attacks
Thank you.
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2. Alva Rogers, FF Alumn, at Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, IL, Jan. 22-24
Alva Rogers*, FF Alumn, and Alva Puppet Theater Company will present The Harlem Doll Palace at 2026 Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, January 22 – 24
The 2026 Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival will present Alva Puppet Theater’s Harlem Doll Palace at the Reva & David Logan Center for the Arts – 915 E 60th St Chicago, IL, January 22 – 24, Thursday & Friday at 4pm and 7:30pm, and Saturday at 6pm.
Welcome to The Harlem Doll Palace, based on the true story of Lenon Holder Hoyt, better known as Aunt Len, a public school art teacher for 40 years and mental health advocate for children, who created a doll museum in her Harlem brownstone. Join the dolls from the “dollection” inside Aunt Len’s Doll and Toy Museum as they recreate their journeys to the museum and seek to keep its beloved founder alive while Harlem deteriorates around her.
* Recipient of a Jim Henson Foundation Production Grant (2024) and Workshop Grant (2023)
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3. Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens, FF Alumns, at Cushion Works, San Francisco, CA, Jan 17, 24, and more
CONTENTS
Earth Lab SF’s Project 2026
The Climax of Bazoombas in Love
Annie Sprinkle’s Breast Cancer Update
We’re Hot to Trot to East Coast, LA, Canada and Europe
Premiere of Caught in the Web of Love
We appreciate YOU!
Dear Earthling,
Greetings from Beth & Annie in San Francisco. We bring you good wishes for this new year, and we sure do hope our paths will cross with yours in 2026. Out with the old, in with the new! Let’s go!
Earth Lab SF’s Project 2026
Thankfully our missions were accomplished last year–in spite of the challenges. It was productive, creative, fun and satisfying. Now we’re ready to launch our Project 2026 to resist their Project 2026. Magic is afoot.
E.A.R.T.H. Lab SF produces Environmental Art, Research, Theory and Happenings. We aim to counter and expand mainstream’s limited notions of love, sexuality, environmentalism and gender. We make films, performances, talks, symposiums, visual art and support the artists and activists we love. Our projects build and strengthen our communities, offer hope, nourishment and visibility. We are just one little art org, but together with other like-minded art orgs, we can make a big difference.
The Climax of Bazoombas in Love
Our Bazoombas In Love exhibition at Cushion Works Gallery in San Francisco’s Mission District was an absolute delight to manifest and we had several very sweet events there. Gallery goers squealed with delight and also some expressed deep emotions. It’s truly been a healing space for us, and by all accounts, for other folks too. Our gallerist, Jordan Stein has been wonderful.
To top off the show (pun intended), we have three Saturday afternoon events planned in the gallery. January 10th is Tit Lit, with some excellent writers/readers, featuring Sarah Thornton, the author of the fantastic book, Tits Up—What Sex Workers, Milk Bankers, Plastic Surgeons, Bra Designers and Witches Tell Us about Breasts. Then there will be an open mic where any body can read or simply tell a chest related story. On January 17th will be a special Breast Cancer Stories & Healing Circle event. Every body is welcome. Legendary performance artist and wise woman, Linda M. Montano, will be offering a unique healing blessing at the end. On January 24th, we (Beth & Annie) will be offering Titillating Gallery Tours. Plus from 12 til 5:00 pm you can come receive a love infusion in our Love Infusion Clinic, from one of our excellent clinicians. For our grand finale closing event, we’ll walk a couple blocks to the iconic, newly renovated experimental art venue, THE LAB, where we’ll host a Milk Bar Community Dinner for 200 people from 6:00–9:00 pm. It will be a Bazoombas themed dinner, created by Chef Leif Hedendal. Everything is FREE, thanks to Andrew Smith, the visionary Director of THE LAB, . RSVP.
Because of the many bare boobies in our exhibition, it has been a bit of a challenge to navigate today’s censorship in the media and on social networks. Nevertheless, Bazoombas got some great coverage. Check out the fabulous San Francisco Chronicle article by Tony Bravo, the adorable and stylish Arts & Culture man-about-town who really understands our work. Also the talented Vita Hewitt did a story and fun video for Broke Ass Stuart.
If you can’t make it to Cushion Works in the flesh, go to their website and see photos of the work, much of which is for sale! If you are interested in buying something, Jordan will set you up. Get it while you can. Cushionworks.org
Annie’s Breast Cancer Update
During the run of Bazoombas in Love, Annie sailed through three weeks of breast cancer radiation treatments at UCSF’s excellent Mission Bay Cancer Care Center. The worst part was she couldn’t go swimming for ten weeks. Boo hoo. Going forward, Annie will have to monitor her (still plentiful) breasts with the usual screenings. But for now, she’s good as new and ready to travel, rock and roll. We made some cool artworks from our medical scans and surgery photos. We made some cool artworks from Annie’s Surgery photos, in collaboration with Samantha Nye and Vanessa Rees, and the piece is on display at NYU’s Clive Davis Gallery.
Hot to Trot to East Coast, LA, Canada and Europe
As activist artists and educators, we feel strongly that screening our new doc feature film, Playing with Fire—An Ecosexual Emergency, seems to be our best way to contribute to making the world a better place as we imagine it. In spring, we will screen the film in British Columbia, then screen it at the Athens (Ohio) International Film Fest. Then on to the Art Academy of Cincinnati, where our friend and collaborator Sarah Stolar is the new Dean. We’ll continue on to the International Frauen Film Fest in Cologne, Germany, hop over to Hamburg’s Kampnagel Theater, then on to Queer Zagreb in Croatia. Exact dates TBA. In the works for summer are a Manhattan premiere with Climate Film Festival and an LA premiere at the gorgeous, prestigious Red Cat Theater with a Q & A led by the innovative director, Zachary Drucker.
Our film won its first award, the Santa Cruz Film Festival’s Audience Choice Award. Proud to report that we have received standing ovations at every screening of Playing with Fire so far. So, our goal this year is to do as many in person screenings as we can. We are also seeking a good distributor so we can come to a streaming platform near you. If you know film curators and distributors, please send them our way.
Premiering Caught in the Web of Love
Last September, we had the great fortune of spending four, fantasmagorical, fun packed, romantic days at the Madonna Inn shooting a sexy music video with artist Samantha Nye. We’ll be going to San Luis Obispo for the world premiere of Caught in the Web of Love at the Miossi Art Gallery. The video will be projected on four walls, and viewed by sitting in heart shaped hot tubs As part of the premiere festivities, on January 28th, we (Beth & Annie) will do a short artist talk then show Playing with Fire followed by Q & A. The next day, January 29th, Samantha will do her artist talk about her phenomenal work. These still photos from the shoot give you a taste of what’s to come. Click here to reserve your free spot.
We appreciate YOU!
Thank you for following along on our adventures and for being part of our ecosexy ecosystem. Let’s live it up while we can.
With breast wishes,
Beth Stephens & Annie Sprinkle
PS—For more event details, go to Cushionworks.org. When some dates are more firm, we will be updating our website calendars in about a week at Sprinklestephens.org and earthlabsf.org
Visit Beth & Annie’s website: sprinklestephens.org
Annie’s Instagram | E.A.R.T.H. Lab SF Instagram
If you would like to support our film, performance events, visual art projects, environmental artists outside the box, and loving the Earth through artivism, we welcome your donations to the EARTH. Lab SF. Financial donations are tax-deductible. Our EIN number is 86-2761295
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4. Naoto Nakagawa, FF Alumn, at Kapow Gallery, Manhattan, opening Jan. 23
Naoto Nakagawa 2026
January 23 – February 22, 2026
23 Monroe Street, New York, NY
Opening Reception: Friday Jan 23, 6 – 8 pm
Press Contact: Kourosh Mahboubian
Phone/WhatsApp: +1 917-750-4607
KAPOW is pleased to present Naoto Nakagawa 2026, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by the New York–based artist, on view from January 23 through February 22, 2026. The exhibition brings together recent acrylic paintings, intimate watercolors, and a significant group of new works, situating Nakagawa’s recent practice within both the long history of Japanese erotic art and the artist’s own six-decade exploration of perception, material culture, and the natural world.
Shunga—literally “spring pictures”—occupied a prominent place in Japanese visual culture during the Edo period, when ukiyo-e artists such as Hokusai, Utamaro, and Harunobu used erotic imagery not only to depict sexuality but also to explore humor, social relations, and the permeability between the human and natural worlds. Nakagawa’s contemporary paintings and drawings extend this lineage while decisively reconfiguring it. His works retain the immediacy, wit, and frankness of historical shunga, yet they replace the floating interiors and classical settings of Edo-period prints with the textures of contemporary life: domestic objects, commercial signage, and the psychological charge of the present moment.
Across the exhibition, Nakagawa’s works resonate with themes that have defined his career since the 1960s—most notably his persistent pairing of man-made objects with organic life. Erotic encounters unfold among pencils, toothpaste tubes, wine openers, or fragments of urban detritus, collapsing distinctions between desire, labor, consump tion, and daily ritual. In Nakagawa’s hands, sexuality is not isolated from the world but embedded within it, echoing traditional shunga’s refusal to separate the erotic from the everyday.
This integration of the human and the nonhuman has long been central to Nakagawa’s practice. Earlier bodies of work often approached this relationship from a cosmic or metaphysical scale, situating the Earth as one element within a vast, unknowable universe. In the works presented here, that expansive perspective has shifted decisively toward the local and the immediate. New York City—its streets, signs, and overlooked corners—becomes the site where philosophical concerns are lived out in miniature.
A key painting in the exhibition, Canal Street (2025), encapsulates this turn. A lizard—an animal both exotic and pre historic—consumes or overtakes a street crossing sign, a quintessential marker of Manhattan’s commercial geogra phy. The image functions iconographically as a quiet reversal: nature devouring language, instinct overwhelming sys tems of order, the organic asserting itself within the rigid framework of urban signage. The lizard recalls Nakagawa’s
long-standing interest in primordial life forms, symbols of endurance and deep time, now transplanted into the hyper specific context of Lower Manhattan. What once might have been framed as a cosmic allegory is here grounded in a single street, a single sign, a single act of consumption.
Other works, including still lifes with wine openers, lemons, and pomegranates, and watercolors such as Tom & Colgate and Pencil War, further underscore Nakagawa’s enduring fascination with the charged relationship between objects and bodies. These compositions echo still-life and realist investigations from his earlier career while introduc ing an increased intimacy and looseness of touch. The drawings, in particular, feel both playful and meditative—at once humorous, tender, and quietly philosophical.
Taken together, the works in this show reveal Nakagawa’s continued evolution while remaining deeply rooted in his foundational concerns. By bringing the historical language of Japanese shunga into dialogue with contemporary ur ban life, he bridges centuries and geographies, offering a vision of desire, nature, and material culture that is at once ancient and urgently present. His shift from cosmic distance to street-level observation affirms a renewed devotion to planet Earth—not as abstraction, but as lived, contested, and lovingly observed terrain.
23 Monroe Street, New York, NY 10002 Phone/WhatsApp +1 917-750-4607 www.kapowgallery.
Naoto Nakagawa 2026
January 23 – February 22, 2026
23 Monroe Street, New York, NY
Opening Reception: Friday Jan 23, 6 – 8 pm
Press Contact: Kourosh Mahboubian
Phone/WhatsApp: +1 917-750-4607
Artist’s Bio:
Naoto Nakagawa was born in Kobe, Japan, in 1944 and in 1962 he immigrated to New York City. His paintings have been widely exhibited, starting in 1968 at the legendary avant-garde Judson Gallery in GreenwichVillage; followed by the Obelisk Gallery in Boston; New York galleries Reese Paley, Allan Frumkin, OK Harris, Victoria Munroe, and Feature Inc.; and at FujiTelevision Gallery in Tokyo and Kasahara Fine Art in Osaka, Japan. An exhibition at the Cooper Union Humanities Gallery was curated by Dore Ashton. A two-part survey of Nakagawa’s work was mounted in 2007 with his early work at White Box, NY and his current work at Ethan Cohen Fine Arts, NY, with catalogue essays by Alexandra Munroe, Eric Shiner, John Perreault, and Jonathan Goodman. He has participated in numerous group shows at, among others, the Guggenheim Museum, Japan Society Gallery, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and an ancillary installation at the Venice Biennale in 2005. His work is included in many public and private collections in the USA, Europe, and Japan, including the New York Museum of Modern Art, 9/11 Memorial & Museum, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Worcester Art Museum, and the National Museums of Modern Art in Osaka and in Kyoto. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, Nakagawa has taught at Columbia University and Parsons School of Design. He has been a guest lecturer at the Museum of Modern Art and the Japan Society, NY, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA, and the Portland Museum, OR.
For press and all other inquiries, including scheduled viewings, artist access and interviews, please contact KAPOW directly:
Phone: + 1 917.750.4607
Email: info@kapowgallery.com
23 Monroe Street, New York, NY 10002 Phone/WhatsApp +1 917-750-4607 www.kapowgallery.com
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5. Kimsooja, FF Alumn, January news
To Breathe at He Art Museum, Foshan
Kimsooja’s newly commissioned To Breathe for the He Art Museum brings her long-standing exploration of light, space, and perception into dialogue with Tadao Ando’s circular architecture and Foshan’s cultural heritage. Using diffraction film, reflection, and subtle shifts of natural light, the work transforms the museum’s iconic spiraling void into an immersive environment where color, breath, and movement unfold as a shared sensory experience.
In Foshan—a region shaped by Lingnan aesthetics that emphasizes harmony, balance, and the interplay of natural elements—To Breathe resonates as both a poetic echo of local traditions and a universal meditation on presence and interconnectedness. The installation becomes a luminous gesture that celebrates the museum’s growth while inviting visitors to pause, breathe, and encounter the space, themselves, and one another with renewed awareness.
An opening ceremony was held on the 5th of December, 2025, where an artist talk and reception were held at the installation site, offering the attendees the chance to engage with Kimsooja closely. For this talk, the artist took a retrospective approach, reflecting on key moments and works from across her career to trace the evolution of her artistic practice, culminating in her commissioned work at He Art Museum that responds directly to its architectural and spatial context.
ON VIEW
Meta-Painting
20 December, 2025 – 14 March, 2026
Galerie Tschudi, Zuoz
Kimsooja presents Meta-Painting as the centerpieces of her latest exhibition at Galerie Tschudi. Together with Meta-Painting – Seven Colors, Meta Painting – Glass Samples and the photography series Deductive Language, her work opens a dialogue on human reflection by confronting the viewer with themselves in relation to unassuming sensations evoked through material and light.
In Meta-Painting, Kimsooja deepens her exploration of perception, materiality, and the thresholds of vision through a surface composed of countless layers of ultra–light-absorbing black pigment. This dense, absorptive field resists visual legibility, drawing the viewer into a space where the act of looking becomes an introspective experience. Rather than offering an image, the work presents a site of near-total darkness—what the artist describes as The Unknown—inviting each viewer to encounter the limits of sight and the quiet, internal reflections that arise within that encounter.
Dream Rooms: Environments by Woman Artists 1950s – Now
November 6, 2025 – February 15, 2026
M+ Museum, Hong Kong
24th Bienal de Arte Paiz: The World Tree
Curated by Eugenio Viola
November 6, 2025 – February 15, 2026
Antigua and Guatemala City, Guatemala
1+1. The Relational Years
Curated by Nicolas Bourriaud
October 29, 2025 – March 1, 2026
National Museum of XXI Century Arts (MAXXI), Rome, Italy
Unwrapping the Horizon, 2025
Permanent Public Art Installation with Ballard Fine Art at Anthem Properties, Vancouver, Canada
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6. John Kelly, FF Alumn, January news
Dear Friends,
I have much to report ~
P·P·O·W (https://www.ppowgallery.com/) is pleased to present A FRIEND GAVE ME A BOOK, John Kelly’s first exhibition with the gallery, and the inaugural display of the artist’s epic 182-panel hand-illustrated graphic memoir. Shown here alongside a multi-channel video performance of the same name — that both incorporates and responds to the visual autobiography — this work simultaneously represents the culmination of more than a decade of artistic creation, as well as a continuation of Kelly’s radical adoption of various historical and pop cultural personae as vehicles for exploring ideas of gender, truth, death, and the pursuit for creative identity.
Kelly came up in New York’s burgeoning downtown performance scene of the early-1980s. A student of both the American Ballet Theatre and Parsons School of Design, the artist employed his understanding of three- and two-dimensional form — segueing from the scrutinizing mirror of the dance studio to the mirror utilized for self-portraiture — to produce flamboyant one-acts at storied East Village venues, most notably The Pyramid Club, which Kelly has called “my home, my school, my shrine.” The embodiment of cultural figures (both real and imagined) became a throughline in these performances, with Kelly assuming the role of such characters as Egon Schiele, Antonin Artaud, Jackie Kennedy, Joni Mitchell, and most frequently Dagmar Onassis, the artist’s invented lovechild of Maria Callas and Aristotle Onassis.
In 2006, while preparing for a performance inspired by his obsession with the seventeenth-century Italian painter Caravaggio, Kelly broke his neck after falling from a trapeze. A FRIEND GAVE ME A BOOK, 2016-2025, is the artist’s retelling of this incident, interweaving his own personal trauma through narrative and poetry. In the process, Kelly points the viewer to examine lives lived fully despite the hazards of estrangement, loneliness, and death, and consequently takes on the risk for a promise of understanding and reprieve.
However, Kelly’s transposition of tragedy into visual memoir is importantly not proscriptive. Rather than use the personal to address the political, the artist instead offers multiple inroads for dealing with feelings of isolation and sense of self, in which reality becomes a palimpsest of interior monologue, human interaction, cultural allusion, and externalization. In the artist’s words, “My works flow out of a desire to embody a particular challenge or event, whether from imagination, actual persons’ reality, or personal history: life imagined, life considered, life experienced.” In this way, Kelly uses art to invite his audience into his illustrated world, not as witnesses, but as participants in the quest for consequence and acceptance.
Accompanying the larger-than-life installation is a video presentation that mirrors the chronology of the memoir, seeing Kelly utilize his command of voice, movement, and physical transformation to expound on his constructed reality. The artist has also transposed several panels from the memoir into gorgeously rendered oil on wood compositions, as evidenced by Self-portrait with Trapeze, 2025, providing the viewer with another channel for experiencing Kelly’s touching synthesis of Italian art history, forms of self-preservation, and modes of resilience.
On February 12, at 7pm in the Gallery, Kelly will activate the memoir and video, performing original music at the gallery that stems from and responds to the works on view.
FULL INFO (http://https//www.ppowgallery.com/exhibitions/john-kelly2#tab:thumbnails)
Celebrate the closing of David Wojnarowicz: Arthur Rimbaud in New York (https://leslielohman.org/exhibitions/david-wojnarowicz) at Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art with a 7pm musical performance by Rimbaud Hattie on Saturday, January 17th at 7pm.
This five-piece band was formed in the spirit of Brian “Hattie” Butterick, whose masked presence appears in all but two of Wojnarowicz’s Arthur Rimbaud In New York photographs. Cynthia Carr, author of the 2012 biography Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz, will open the evening with a reflective offering on this period in Wojnarowicz’s life. The band’s Doug Bressler and Julie Hair played alongside Butterick and Wojnarowicz in the iconic 1980s post-punk noise band, 3 Teens Kill 4.
Rimbaud Hattie is an investigational art song collective involving innovatory chanteuse and actress Heather Litteer; genre-defying performance artist John Kelly; percussionist Dany Johnson, a founding member of Samba Reggae Drum Line Fogo Azul; and Hair and Bressler. The performance will include original songs by Bressler and Kelly, and covers of songs by Butterick, Destructo, Peter Raben & David Ambach, and Jefferson Airplane.
FREE TICKET LINK (https://secure.qgiv.com/for/leslie-lohmanmuseum/event/rimbaudhattie/)
Cynthia Carr is the author, most recently, of Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar, winner of the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for biography. Her previous biography, Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz, won a Lambda Literary Award and was a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize.
Artist/tinkerer Doug Bressler asked Heather, John, and Julie to collaborate on a Never Records recording slot in 2020, which started the band. Always a fan of Dany’s work, he’s thrilled she’s joined the group.
Julie Hair is a former member of the 80s art rock band 3 Teens Kill 4 and continues to play in bands in NYC. She serves on the board of ABC No Rio, a volunteer-led nonprofit community center for arts and activism.
Dany Johnson is a founding member and assistant director of Fogo Azul NYC, the 130-member, all-women and nonbinary samba reggae drumline.
John Kelly is an award-winning performance and visual artist whose career began in the East Village clubs of the 1980s. A solo exhibition of his graphic memoir A Friend Gave Me A Book is on view at P·P·O·W Gallery January 9 -February 21.
Heather Litteer has worked from Lincoln Center Stages to The Limelight Cages. She’s vital to the NYC performance and film scene, writing and performing her solo show Lemonade at La MaMa NYC, and in Edinburgh and London and curating her Femme Fest On The Verge. She is a member of Big Art Group, and appeared at the Venice Biennale, and Jackie Factory.
My friends Laura Donnelley and Philip Yenawine introduced me to the Chicago and New York based gallerist Phyllis Kind (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phyllis_Kind), who was an early champion for the work of “outsider artists”, specifically the work of Henry Darger (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Darger). In 1972, Phyllis presented her first group show of outsider art, The Artless Artist: Contemporary Naive Works. She was also the first American gallerist to show contemporary and outsider work together.
So, when I was asked by the director Martha Clarke if I would be interested in portraying Darger in her new production of Bughouse for the Vineyard Theatre, I recalled having been exposed to his work through the advocacy of Phyllis, and found that I’d already developed a kinship with his work. He was a great artist. And I’m about to dive into a challenging and kaleidoscopic world. Wish me luck!
TICKETS FOR BUGHOUSE (https://vineyardtheatre.org/shows/bughouse/)
RIMBAUD HATTIE
photo by Ande Whyland
Hoping that 2026 will bring you peace, health, and prosperity.
~ John
DONATE (https://fundraising.fracturedatlas.org/john-kelly-performance)
Donations to John Kelly Performance made through Fractured Atlas are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law. Follow the link to make a secure online donation or get information on how to donate by check.
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7. Adrianne Wortzel, FF Alumn, at JDJ, Manhattan, thru Jan. 31
JDJ Field Notes January 6–31, 2026 Opening reception: Friday, January 9th, 6-8pm JDJ 370 Broadway, 2nd floor New York, NY 10013 Jayden Ashley Barrow Parke Myles Bennett Azadeh Gholizadeh Wendi Gross Heather Guertin Sofia del mar Collins Julia Felsenthal Rachel Garrard Nathaniel Robinson Susan Weil Adrianne Wortzel JDJ is pleased to present Field Notes, a group exhibition bringing together artists whose practices move between abstraction and landscape, foregrounding material processes and methods of making that translate observation, experience, and environment into form. Spanning multiple generations, the exhibition brings together a group of artists working across painting, drawing, textile, sculpture, and works on paper who approach landscape as a site of encounter: geological, political, bodily, atmospheric, and psychological. Rather than rendering specific places, these works register the traces of looking, moving through, or responding to the world. Susan Weil’s Figure as Landscape, c. 1971, made with spray paint on paper, collapses bodily and environmental forms into a single, shifting silhouette, while her sculptural painting Soft Landscape, 1972 depicts a clear horizon despite the folds of its pleated surface. Adrianne Wortzel’s acrylic paintings from the 1960s and 1970s similarly hover between organic movement and formal structure, their undulating color fields evoking horizon lines or shifting ground. Material specificity becomes a form of observation throughout the exhibition. Rachel Garrard’s works, created with rock powder pigment on linen, draw directly from geological matter; their softly radiating compositions—such as Genesis, 2023 and Two Peaks, 2024— feel both elemental and meditative. Meanwhile Julia Felsenthal’s densely articulated watercolor paintings of the ocean find poetic ambivalence in the attempt to use water to depict water—a process, seemingly intuitive, that succeeds only though the artist’s sustained intervention. The resulting works celebrate the protean nature of water and air while indulging and interrogating the human desire to halt time, to fix what is fluid. Jayden Ashley and Barrow Parke show how landscape can be transformed through shifting political boundaries. Ashley’s Bête Noire, 2025 reinterprets 1930s redlining maps of Fort Greene through fractured concrete panels, using the material as a metaphor for how systemic racial exclusion has evolved into contemporary gentrification and ongoing social and economic constraint. Barrow Parke’s Pangaea, 2024, uses embroidery and weaving— 370 Broadway, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10013 JDJ arguably humanity’s oldest form of technology—to depict the supercontinent Pangaea with current-day country borders superimposed onto the landmass, revealing the arbitrary constructs imposed long after cultural and material knowledge were formed and shared. A number of artists translate fleeting atmospheric conditions into carefully built surfaces. Myles Bennett’s graphite, ink, and colored pencil works—ranging from the volcanic references of Eruption (Vernet Volcano), 2024 to the glowing optical density of Penumbra #13, 2026—use accumulated mark-making to evoke light, shadow, and depth. Wendi Gross’s Soft Rain, 2025, made with dye on canvas, allows pigment to move, flow, and fully permeate the canvas, settling organically and recalling rainfall, erosion, and vapor dispersing. Azadeh Gholizadeh’s Clouds: Puget Sound, 2023 translates an observed atmospheric condition into a woven-painterly surface, where merino wool and acrylic are layered across canvas mesh to render shifting cloud forms through systems of repetition, texture, and material density rather than pictorial illusion. Other works register landscape through gesture, movement, and scale. Heather Guertin’s paintings transform spliced fragments of discarded printed imagery into densely textured abstractions, where layered brushwork and hybrid forms translate recognizable source material into a painterly language shaped by process, perception, and transformation. Her painting Blue Valley, 2025 unfolds as a vibrant, animated terrain. Nathaniel Robinson’s Through Leaves, 2022, builds a dense, flickering field of accumulated brushstrokes that translate foliage, light and shadow into an immersive surface, where landscape emerges through repetition. Sofia del mar Collins’s Seaskirt, 2024, constructed from ink on handdyed silk and muslin, introduces a sculptural, textile response to coastal environments, where fabric becomes a stand-in for water, motion, and permeability. 370 Broadway, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10013
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8. Jody Oberfelder, FF Alumn, at Judson Church, Manhattan, Jan. 12
Dear Colleagues, Friends, and Presenters,
I received this email from our composer John King last night, which made me think about the worth of it all. Yes, in the face of everything destructive in the world, creativity and collaboration give us a reason.
hi jody,
when they walked off today after the run i said to myself, that was a performance, a performance level intensity and focus and it just felt like WOW! what a beautiful work!!
We invite you to our first work in progress iteration of Palimpsest, at Movement Research at Judson Church. MONDAY, JANUARY 12TH, 7 PM on a shared bill with Symara Sarai and NAKA Dance Theater. Doors open at 6:30 PM (FREE)). entrance 115 Thompson St.
If cannot attend Judson, your are welcome to our open rehearsal SUNDAY, JANUARY 11TH, 10:30-1 pm. At NOON we’ll offer a 15-minute informal performance at 12 PM, followed by conversation JOYCE CENTER FOR CREATIVITY AND DANCE Studio 5. entrance: 287 East 10th on the corner of Avenue A
The word “palimpsest” stems from papyrus or parchment, original text scraped off and then reused so that old writing remains faintly visible beneath new words. It can also be used to describe an historically layered place. We layer ourselves in life, just as the world layers itself in time. Dance exists within this framework. In future renderings, the work will eventually unfold in layered “rooms” where audiences experience and shape the present alongside performers.The movement will be more than abstract—it is human, responsive, and alive. The adventure comes from linking conceptual prompts to new material, allowing intuition and imagination to lead.
Collaborators: Dancers: Andi Farley Shimota, Mariah Anton Arters, Caleb Patterson Music: Marianne Faithful and John King Dramaturg: Rebekah Morin, Costumes: Katrin Schnabl
With hope for 2026, and for a world of connections,
Jody Oberfelder
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9. R. Sikoryak & Kriota Willberg, FF Alumns, at Society of Illustrators, Manhattan
Happy New Year!
I hope you’re holding on.
Here’s what I’ve got coming up:
Anatomy Workshop at SOI with Kriota and me (starting Jan 20)
Zines and minis available from Radiator Comics
Video of Carousel from the Small Press Expo
New book this June!
Details below:
Anatomy for Illustrators Workshop in person at Society of Illustrators
January 20 – February 10
Join cartoonists Kriota Willberg and R. Sikoryak for a 4-week workshop series focused on anatomical illustration. Willberg will draw on live models, tracing muscle and bone, giving participants the opportunity to draw the anatomy of a living body from the inside out. Sikoryak will demonstrate the application of anatomical understanding to various illustration and cartoon styles.
Through presentations, in-class exercises, and optional at-home assignments, participants will learn to see and draw the structures and tissues giving the body shape and character. Participants will practice drawing from live models in class and learn to apply the lessons to their own characters.
4 sessions on Tuesdays, January 20 – February 10
6:30pm – 8:30pm
At the Society of Illustrators
128 East 63rd Street
New York, NY 10065
$300 members / $350 non-members
Tickets and Info: https://societyillustrators.org/event/anatomy-sketch-night-series-2026/
Recent minis are now available from Radiator Comics, including R. Sikoryak’s Sketchbook zines and Kriota’s Cadaver Chronicles series.
https://www.radiatorcomics.com/creator/r-sikoryak
https://www.radiatorcomics.com/creator/kriota-willberg
From September, the full video of the Carousel at Small Press Expo.
Featuring comics readings and performances by Gigi Murakami (Resenter), Keith Knight (K Chronicles), Kevin Huizenga (Curses), Tom Gauld (Revenge of The Librarians), Julia Gfrörer (World Within the World) with Carl Antonowicz, and R.S.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAQ3FoMx2kw&list=PLbBfl7COkHI8HADj_C8aAtmi7bEGk_D8B&index=18
And finally:
My new book, Declaration / Emancipation Illustrated is coming this June from Drawn and Quarterly!
Early preview: https://drawnandquarterly.com/books/declaration-illustrated/
More to be revealed!
Thanks for reading to the end, hope to see you soon!
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10. Paul Zelevansky, FF Alumn, now online at https://vimeo.com/1152547839
TO THE GREAT BLANKNESS
MAILING LIST:
“Grab your coat and
snatch your hat…”
PZ, January 8, 2026
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11. Joyce Kozloff, Carrie Moyer, FF Alumns, at DC Moore Gallery, Manhattan, opening Jan. 15
Please visit this link:
https://www.dcmooregallery.com/exhibitions
Thank you.
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12. RT Livingston, FF Alumn, at SBTC, Santa Barbara, CA, thru March 3
2nd Frida
Abstract 9+
Second Fridays: Art @ SBTC
ARTISTS:
Lynn Dodge, Lee Anne Dollison, Karen Frishman,
Patricia Heller, Fred Lehto, RT Livingston, Judy Neunuebel,
Marcia Rickard, Veronica Walmsley, Paige Wilson.
The Abstract 9+1 is an evolving and diverse group of artists whose work connects and conveys individual interpretations of non-objective art.
Abstract artists use a visual language of shape, form, color and line to create compositions which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world. The main purpose of abstraction is to go beyond representation to create an intangible and emotional art experience for the viewer. The artists’ works range from non-objective, fully abstract work, to that where some objects or texts are recognizable.
Artists Reception: January 9th, 4:30 – 6:00pm
Exhibition Dates: January 2th – March 3th.
Gallery Hours: 10:00 am – 6:00 pm daily
Santa Barbara Tennis Club
2375 Foothill Road, Santa Barbara, CA 93105 • (805) 682-4722
Curator/Director: Susan Tibbles
Celebrating art + people.
Featuring new artists on the 2nd Friday of the month.
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13. Barbara Rosenthal, FF Alumn, at East Village Poets, Manhattan, Jan. 16
Barbara Rosenthal, FF Alumn, will read on Zoom at 1pm Sat Jan 16 in the MLK DAY SUSTAINED RESISTANCE READINGS curated by Joanie Zoskie of East Village Poets.
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For subscriptions, un-subscriptions, queries and comments, please email mail@franklinfurnace.org
Join Franklin Furnace today:
https://franklinfurnace.org/membership/
Goings On for Artists is compiled weekly by Rohan Subramaniam, Archive Intern, 2024/2025
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