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Mar 03 - Mar 28 2026 - 3 days left

The Painting Center is pleased to present Uncultivated, a solo exhibition of oil paintings by artist Claire McConaughy. The exhibition opens on Tuesday, March 3, and runs through Saturday, March 28, 2026. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, March 5, from 5 to 8 pm. The exhibition Uncultivated relates the wild, uncultivated nature of painting to an environment left to its own without human intervention. These ten paintings present heightened, dreamlike images of nature rooted in reality, yet transformed through subconscious perception and the physical act of painting. McConaughy’s source is the vivid, radiant energy of the natural world, a vitality she seeks to both channel and convey. McConaughy’s process begins with direct encounters in nature—exploring forests, woods, and rural areas, as well as observing the trees, flowers, and weeds of New York City, where she has lived for thirty years. She carries these experiences into her studio, where they are reimagined through exaggerated color and expressive mark-making. Through this transformation, representations of nature evolve into vibrant paintings that confront the viewer. Her work finds its precursors in the reverence for nature found in 19th-century American landscape painting, as well as the "interior vision" practiced by the French Symbolists. Like them, McConaughy does not merely observe the external world; she translates the relationship between inner experience and outward creation. Claire McConaughy lives and works in Brooklyn and upstate New York. She has exhibited nationally at venues including Nick Ryan Gallery, The Drawing Center, 490 Atlantic, Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art, Zürcher Gallery, Red Fox Contemporary Art, and Garvey-Simon West. She is the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship and residencies at Millay Arts, Ucross Foundation, and the Santa Fe Art Institute. Her work has been reviewed in Art Spiel, Artcritical, Whitehot Magazine, Hamptons Art Hub, and other publications. For over a decade, she served on the editorial board and staff of the art journal New Observations. She has taught at several New York City art colleges and is a full professor at Bergen Community College. Originally from southwestern Pennsylvania, McConaughy earned an MFA in Painting from Columbia University and a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University. For more information on the artist, visit: www.clairemcconaughy.com and @clairemc431.

Mar 03 - Mar 28 2026 - 3 days left

The Painting Center is pleased to present the solo exhibition What She Knows by artist Tracy Burtz in the Main Gallery and the Project Room. The exhibition opens on Tuesday, March 3, and runs through Saturday, March 28, 2026. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, March 5, from 5 to 8 pm. Tracy Burtz’s paintings draw the viewer into moments that are intimate and deeply felt. Nothing declares itself, yet everything feels held. Contained within color, pattern, and subtlety, What She Knows is a meditation on the interior life of women: how it gathers, splits, mirrors itself, and shines through moments that might otherwise go unnoticed. Tracy Burtz paints the lives of women as spaces to be entered rather than observed. The scenes invite the viewer inward. We are not positioned as observers at a distance, but as participants pulled into the room, asked to sit down, to linger just a little longer. Burtz’s compositions resist spectacle; instead, they offer intimacy and the slow accumulation of meaning in everyday moments. The paintings remind us that when nothing appears to be happening, something profound is often happening just under the surface. The focus is personal. Burtz draws from her own life—having grown up among four sisters and having lost her father at a young age. The world she constructs is one governed by women: emotionally, spatially, and symbolically. Within this landscape, women often appear alongside animals, particularly dogs whose bodies form a protective, gentle constellation around them. These animals are not decorative; they are essential, signifying unconditional love, safety, and steadfast presence. Formally, Burtz’s paintings engage in a playful tension between depth and flatness. After more than forty-five years of painting, Burtz moves beyond her formal training, allowing space to become abstract and elastic. The canvas is treated as a surface to be activated rather than a window to be entered. Color and pattern carve out scenes more than line or strict perspective. The result is work that holds moments still while also allowing them to move fluidly through paint. What She Knows is not a declaration of certainty. It is an offering of awareness—a reminder that knowledge can be intuitive, embodied, and quietly powerful. And the most intimate moments often carry the most color. Tracy Burtz is a New York-based artist. She received her BFA from Boston University School for the Arts and her MFA from CUNY Queens College. She also studied at The New York Studio School’s program in Paris. She is represented by Edgewater Gallery, Middlebury, VT; Thomas Dean Fine Art Gallery, Atlanta, GA; East End Gallery, Nantucket, MA; Nantucket Looms, Nantucket, MA; and The Painting Center, NYC. She has had twenty solo exhibitions and been in forty-six group shows. For more information on the artist, visit: tracyburtz.com and @tracyburtz.

Mar 31 - Apr 25 2026

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

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.