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Gallery

Mar 31 - Apr 25 2026 - Last day

The Painting Center is pleased to present Projections in the Deluge, a solo exhibition of recent work by Thomas Berding in the main gallery and project room. The exhibition opens on Tuesday, March 31, and runs through Saturday, April 25, 2026. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, April 2, from 5 to 8 pm. This exhibition continues the artist’s decades-long exploration of painting as a space for re-ambiguating the world through collapsing histories and categorical understandings. By creating speculative environments that combine observations of contemporary life with biographical material, Berding positions painting as a field where memory, culture, and personal experience intersect. Each painting in this series begins with inkjet images drawn from oft-overlooked cultural and personal ephemera. In any given painting, he might draw from third-class mailings, screen captures from web searches, iPhone snapshots taken in shopping aisles, or vernacular images reflecting his experience of growing up and living in the postindustrial Midwest. Themes of loss, memory, and recovery emerge from these fragments and are further developed through Berding’s inventive deployment of varied painting techniques and surfaces, including the collaging of paint skins and remnants from his own palettes. The resulting paintings possess a distinctly lived-in aesthetic, carrying visible traces of their own making. At the same time, they present dense layers of references and materials organized with an idiosyncratic logic that invites exploration while resisting any fixed interpretive framework. Responding to the deluge of information and material surplus that define contemporary life—as well as the persistence of memory—Berding’s works highlight the presence of the past within the present. In doing so, they affirm the aesthetic potential of reuse and the role art plays in processing experience and in constructing imagined futures. Thomas Berding was born in Cincinnati, Ohio and received an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design. His paintings have been widely exhibited and recognized with awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and NEA/Mid America Arts Alliance. Berding currently lives and works in East Lansing where he is a Professor of Studio Art at Michigan State University. For more information on the artist, visit thomasberding.com

Mar 31 - Apr 25 2026 - Last day

The Painting Center is pleased to present Beneath the Palms, a solo exhibition of recent work by Alisa Henriquez in the main gallery and project room. The exhibition opens on Tuesday, March 31, and runs through Saturday, April 25, 2026. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, April 2, from 5 to 8 pm. Drawing from her family’s genealogical research and oral histories, Henriquez’s latest work imaginatively re-stages inherited family mythologies and stories set within the lush landscape of Jamaica. While informed by personal narratives, the paintings also pose larger questions about identity and history as unstable formations—constructed, inherited, and continually reconfigured. Situated in imagined topographies, filled with fractured flora and invented geographies, Henriquez layers elusive moments that point to her family’s migratory history and generational stories. Particular attention is paid to the role women play, with female figures appearing, not as portraits, but as mutable presences shaped by abstraction, erasure, and historical forces. The abstracted female figure exists as a shifting structure, asserting and dissolving into hybrid spatial fields. In addition to her use of the figure, motifs found in the landscape also play a prominent role. The image of the palm tree fonds, recurs throughout this series, artfully functioning in a myriad of ways, serving not just a geographical locator, but also as an engulfing, nurturing form, and a rhythmic visual beat across the space that often hides as much as it reveals. Collectively, Henriquez’s choreographed use of color and pattern, coupled with her use of overlapping contours and ruptured boundaries, mirror the instability of memory and the continual revision of narrative. Through the process of viewing these works, the concept of identity emerges as an ongoing living abstraction—layered, provisional, unresolved and ultimately, a rich landscape unto itself. Alisa Henriquez, born in Kingston, Jamaica, received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Indiana University, Bloomington. Her work is represented by David Klein Gallery and has been exhibited at many venues, nationally and internationally. Henriquez is currently a Professor of Studio Art at Michigan State University.

Apr 28 - May 23 2026

The Painting Center is pleased to present the solo exhibition, Caught Looking by artist Perri Neri, featuring an intimate series of portrait paintings born from a radical shift in practice and a contemporary experiment in collaboration. The exhibition will run from April 28–May 23, 2026, with an opening reception on Thursday, April 30 from 5–8 PM. Known for large-scale abstract-figurative paintings that explore bodies moving through space and the simultaneity of multiple truths, Neri faced an unexpected turning point when studio constraints forced her to abandon her signature 72 × 60 inch canvases. The result is a surprising departure: a focused investigation of the single face, a singular moment, and the contemporary selfie as a form of self-portraiture. Caught Looking began with a simple call to action on social media. Neri invited her followers—some close friends, others virtual strangers—to submit selfies for her to interpret in paint. Within one day, she received over 30 entries. The project taps into the currency of our image-saturated age: the carefully composed self-portrait meant for an audience of intimates or of the entire internet, where the subject’s gaze meets the camera almost—but not quite—eye to eye. These are not commissions. Each 16 × 12 inch painting is Neri’s interpretation, rendered in a direct, painterly realism rather than photographic precision. The uniform scale creates a democratic grid of contemporary faces, each offered voluntarily, each claiming space. Participants receive a print of their portrait; if a work sells, they share in the proceeds—a gesture that acknowledges collaboration and complicates traditional artist-subject dynamics. Caught Looking is conceived as an ongoing project, and its full strength will be revealed in its numbers. Neri intends to complete all submitted selfies and present the work in its entirety in the near future. In this way, The Painting Center exhibition is less a conclusion than an introduction—a first glimpse of a series whose ambition mirrors her earlier investigation of the moving body across large canvases: a multiplicity of presences, each distinct, accumulating into something greater than the sum of its parts. In moving from multiplicity to singularity, from sweeping gesture to concentrated gaze, Neri has found new terrain. Caught Looking is an exploration of how we present ourselves, how we are seen, and what happens when the artist’s hand mediates the self-image we broadcast to the world. Perri Neri is an artist and curator working in New York City and Boston. She is the founder and former creative director of Living Room NYC and founder and creative director of Refrigerator Poetry Visual Art Archive. Neri holds an MFA in Painting from Pratt Institute and has had solo exhibitions at The Painting Center and Ceres Gallery in New York City. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Caelum Gallery and AIR Gallery in Brooklyn, and a retrospective was exhibited at The Morean Center for the Arts in St. Petersburg, Florida (2020). Additional exhibitions include the Orlando Museum of Art, Polk Museum of Art, and Tampa Museum of Art. Her curatorial projects include "I Am My Best Work" (2020), "New Optics" (2020), "Truth, Beauty, Freedom, Love" (2021), and "Indivisible Spectrum" (2022). Neri's work has been featured in Studio Visit Magazine and Honeysuckle Magazine.

Apr 28 - May 23 2026

The Painting Center is pleased to announce the solo exhibition Inhale by Mary Crenshaw in the Main Gallery. The exhibition will run from April 28 through May 23, 2026, with an opening reception on Thursday, April 30, from 5 to 8 PM. The concept for a series of immigrant portraits began last summer during a walk to the studio, when Crenshaw glimpsed, through the window of a daycare center, a display of large faces on paper drawn by small children. This moment formed the initial idea, which expanded through meeting and conversing with her subjects on the bus, in parks, and in stores, as well as including people she already knew. For a couple of years, she had also been taking iPhone photos of cigarette butts embedded in city sidewalks. Viewing a consumed cigarette as a metaphor for the migrant—carelessly tossed aside, crushed, and forgotten—she decided to include this object as subject matter in her paintings, while incorporating thrifted picture frames to emphasize the idea of rejection. Worn, ornate, and mismatched, the frames elevate the cigarette stubs into portrait-like presences. By pairing these overlooked remnants with salvaged structures, Crenshaw underscores themes of displacement, resilience, value, and disposability. Mary Crenshaw received a BFA in Painting and Printmaking from VCU, an MFA from Lesley University College of Art and Design, and a DFA from the University of East London with a body of work titled “Materiality and Dislocation.” She explores diverse techniques, inventing objects that combine painting with varied media. She has exhibited at Prince Street Gallery (New York), Poplar Union Arts Centre (London), PigPrints (Milan), CICA Museum (Seoul), the Hunterdon Art Museum (NJ), Shoebox Gallery (LA), KrautArt (Berlin), the Palazzo Ducale Atina (Italy), Gate 44 (Milan), The Painting Center (NY), No Barking Art (London), Hartslane Gallery (London), Galleria L’Affiche (Milan), Il Castello Borromeo (Milan), The Apartment/Bow Arts (London), Jewett Gallery, Wellesley College (MA), the Katonah Museum of Art (NY), and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VA). Her paintings are in the public collections of Brunel University (London), CICA Museum, and L’Istituto dei Tumori (Milan). Crenshaw has been a resident artist at the Vermont Studio Center (VT), Centre d’Art de Marnay-sur-Seine (France), The League at Vyt (NY), and Atina (Italy). This exhibition was made possible thanks to the PS 122 Project Studio Program in New York, where Crenshaw is currently a residency recipient. For more information on the artist, visit: https://marycrenshaw.com/home.html and @crenshawpaints