Many works in this exhibition—even the most meticulously crafted—emphasize the process of their making, drawing attention to their materiality. Louise Fishman’s visceral 1990 collage, for instance, captures the sensibility of a simultaneously frantic yet ordered mind, a determined hand working faster than the eye itself. This work was made the same year as a devastating studio fire and partakes of that tragic, yet resolute energy, with its torn, slashed, pasted, and painted strips of paper. Like Fishman, Betty Parsons’s 1977 gouache palpably manifests its rapid execution, with layers of paint smudging into one another, dashing vivid strokes, and doodles scratched into the still-wet patches of paint. Chuck Webster’s 2015 drawing Untitled (Cathedral), with its characteristic luster and rich patina, was created by vigorously scraping down thick handmade paper between successive washes of ink, visually manifesting in a single image a time consuming material process. In Blue Chair & Flowered Hat (2021), Marta Lee uses acrylic and Acrylagouache laid down in discrete, richly textured layers and set against a monochromic background. Depicting real world objects drawn into idiosyncratic arrangements, Lee’s still life holds the line between representation and abstraction, the recognizable and the mysterious, drawing and painting.

Like Lee, other artists walk the line between abstraction and representation. Lee Maxey, for instance, depicts a cluster of seashells, whose vivid interiors seem to open into other universes. Attilio Salemme, in his 1944 watercolor, depicts a tight-knit group of disembodied voyeurs as if transformed into a cluster of colorful geometric shapes. Allan D’Arcangelo’s acrylic and pastel drawing, Study for Proposition #2 (1966), demonstrates his longstanding dedication to landscape, here reduced to its most basic and suggestive elements: a hint of green grass and a band of blue sky. While strictly speaking non-objective in subject matter, Jack Arthur Wood’s mixed media collage evokes a yearning for landscape as well, where brightly colored gradients flash across a highly textured and optically buzzing field with an off-kilter symmetry.