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Mar 31 - Apr 25 2026 - 23 days left

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 - 23 days left

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.