Isca Greenfield-Sanders

ISCA GREENFIELD-SANDERS

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IGOTTOKEEPMETHERE (AWAKEONATRAIN), 2014 Acrylic, oil, and collage on canvas 100 x 80 inches 254 x 203.2 cm

ISCA GREENFIELD-SANDERS KEEP THEM STILL

AMERINGER McENERY YOHE

525 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011 tel 212 445 0051 www.amy-nyc.com

KEEP THEM STILL

By Adam Gopnik

The first impression of Isca Greenfield-Sanders’ paintings is one of simple, intense visual pleasure, which is made deeper by the emotional accessibility of the scenes. A spare monochrome exquisiteness, lit by sudden flares of a single bright color (a dark red bathing suit on a pale green sand dune, a pink hat against a harmony of blue sky, sea blues, and bright composite whites) is her signature style. The aerated elegance of her surfaces may recall Milton Avery; her concentration on the single, plaintive isolated figure may recall Edward Hopper.

Hers is an austere figurative style, sweetly touched by nostalgia and by longing. We recognize the bright light of an unspecified beach, somewhere in Maine or in a (then) unspoiled Bridgehampton or Cape Cod. It is a 1962 world still pre–logo and not so much prelapsarian as pre-lapse—before the errors of mass branding. The girls in their bathing caps and old-fashioned, undaring one-pieces seem more like creatures born out of a Lands’ End catalogue and national memory than people from any one place. A particular kind of American pleasure, a particular kind of American leisure, and, if you insist, a particular kind of American privilege are gently inspected here: men, women, dogs, and children walking and wading on improbably pristine shores. They touch us at a very deep level: The exquisitely minimal and elegant pictures show us the summer we thought we’d had but probably never did—old shots at happiness long gone wide.

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But at the same time, anyone with a marginally sensitive eye for the language of painting realizes that there is something not disquieting but disarming about her art. The longer you look, the more premeditated it seems. You absorb this truth exactly as you should absorb a language of art—not through a set of overt signals but through a system of clandestine clues. It’s there in the way the pictures are tellingly divided into neat grids, in the austere and highly stylized reductions of color, in the epigrammatic severity of form. We sense at second sight that we are in the presence of experience that has in some way passed through a prism of purpose.

We see, somehow, that the principles of American pleasure have been interrogated rather than simply memorialized. One senses in her painting something not “unsettling” in the normal sense (as Eric Fischl, for example, filled his early beach and barbecue scenes with the neurotic underpinnings of American pleasure) but more intellectual, what used to be called “conceptual.” Her art feels closer to Georges Seurat than it does to summer snapshots, with rigor organizing pleasure. The experience is not so much of something timeless or something eternal, as of something rooted in a specific time, but a time that we cannot quite locate and a beach we cannot quite visit—something stilled that challenges our imagination and moves us by its immobility. Her work feels less timeless than timed: snapshots of a world we once knew and have now lost. The emotion provided is less nostalgic than dream-like, since dreams often strike us as involving memories of events that we somehow don’t quite recall. (“How did we get back into the old house?” we ask in dreams, even as the events unfold.) Then we go back to appreciating the beautiful surface, only to return to the order beneath in a cycle of contradiction that we rightly call the special experience of visual art.

If you interrogate Greenfield-Sanders about her working method, you learn that the effect is the consequence of very knowing, shrewd, and sly strategies on her part.

The result is an effect of method more than of luck. The cycle we see is a cycle of purpose implanted. From thousands of vintage color slides, rescued from the basements of old houses, she fishes and sieves for imagery. Her reservoir of imagery is the heyday of American Kodachrome in the 1950s and 1960s, imagery saved from the lost world of the family slideshow—the bright white eye of the projector, the hissing of its fan, and the drop-and-click advance sounds of the carousel. It is a world that Paul Simon hymned, just as it was ending, in his song “Kodachrome”: “They give us those nice bright colors.

They give us the greens of summers. Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day.”

From those vintage slides, she carefully extracts—not roughly, as with scissors, but with infinite care, as with tweezers—specific images, poses, and scenes, all of the people and poses that we see. She then turns these choices into squares of watercolor painted on rice paper, which in turn become the gridded basis for the finished oils. So what we see is not merely twice distilled, but thrice distilled—first from the exhaustive scrutiny of “found” photographic imagery, then from the distillation of that reservoir of imagery into specific figures and scenes, and finally through the last transformation from watercolor to full oil painting.

In the end, painting always moves us by taking an effect that is available only to vision—one that isn’t conceptual at all but that somehow implicates itself in an intellectual act by its very form. Seurat’s dots resonate not because they actually short-circuit the optic nerve and “combine” complementary colors into some third hue, but because they provide a consistent visual metaphor for the power of analysis—they become scientific not because they blend in our eyes but because they symbolize the mind’s own process of division.

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In the same spirit, Greenfield-Sanders doesn’t pedantically preach on the weight of the “mediated” image on our minds, critique the conspiracy of pleasure in American visual culture, or in any sense satirize the way that we create an imagery with which we enslave ourselves—the slides of the family holiday that never actually took place. Instead, her art critiques our experience by exemplifying it, by analyzing it, by taking a microscope to its nature. These are the emotional qualities that make her work so remarkable. The echoing space between pleasure and the analysis of pleasure have their own drama in the process by which she makes her art.

Greenfield-Sanders is the daughter and granddaughter of painters and photographers, some of them very well known. She grew up in a privileged place in the positive sense—she knows the way art gets made and has a witty sense of how it works.

So her work seems to belong less to the recent, unembarrassed revival of figurative painting open to an imagery of pleasure and personality, as with Elizabeth Peyton or, in a more eccentric way, John Currin. (Though surely her work has its analogies there.) Instead, a candid inspection of her work (and a candid conversation with the artist) reminds us that she should more rightly be placed in the second generation (or is it the third?) of what were once called “media artists”—those who take as their subject the ways that the previous packaging of experience affects our own immediate appreciation of it. So, we think of Doug and Mike Starn, the Starn twins, favorites of hers, who also use borrowed imagery and rectilinear collage, not to declare the incapacity of art to compete with media, but rather to insist that it is only through the wise acknowledgement of the previous arbitration of our experience by things we have already seen that we can arrive at an honest image of our inner selves. We are the slides we rescue and transform.

Then there’s an even more powerful sense that behind that particular contradictory dialogue (between the assertion of pleasure and its analysis, between the warmly remembered moments of ordinary leisure and the cool emotion of noting them down, between casual observation and serial exactitude, between pleasure sought and system found) is a deeply American apprehension. It is the central form of the artist who she cites often as a hero, Winslow Homer, whose skating and sailing scenes of the 1870s, particularly in their woodcut realizations—in his case oil painting turning into reproduced imagery, instead of the other way around—are the bedrock of Greenfield-Sanders’ particular channel of American sensibility. From something “sporting,” we arrive at something stilled; from the old collective memory of pleasure we move toward an art of chaste rectitude; from the muddle of seashores and swimsuits, an art of enigmatic solitudes.

The more we look at her art, the less simple the pleasure that it offers becomes, and the more complicated the pleasure that it provides. And, as first-rate painting should, her artwork opens new doors onto experience it has not yet embraced. The Kodachrome labs that her reservoir of old slides depends on closed for good in 2009.

When we think of this, we realize that we, too, sit on an even larger reservoir of improvised imagery, there on our iPhones and other electronic devices. One day soon, these will be as “period” in feeling and finish as the old slides with which Greenfield-Sanders begins. Old images of the lost search for pleasure are always in need of salvage and— can we say it?—they can only be truly made sacred by the hand of art. n Adam Gopnik is an American writer and essayist. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker. Since 1986, he has contributed nonfiction, fiction, memoir, and criticism to the magazine, and he was its art critic from 1987 to 1995. He co-curated with Kirk Varnedoe the exhibition High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and is the author of many exhibition essays, including essays for retrospectives of Wayne Thiebaud and Richard Avedon.

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Rose Cove, 2016 Mixed media oil on canvas 14 x 14 inches 35.6 x 35.6 cm

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Wave Detail (Blue), 2016 Mixed media oil on canvas 14 x 14 inches 35.6 x 35.6 cm

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Yellow Surfboard, 2016 Mixed media oil on canvas 14 x 14 inches 35.6 x 35.6 cm

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Beach Detail, 2017 Mixed media oil on canvas 14 x 14 inches 35.6 x 35.6 cm

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Beach Detail, 2017 Mixed media oil on canvas 14 x 14 inches 35.6 x 35.6 cm

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Dock Girls, 2017 Mixed media oil on canvas 14 x 14 inches 35.6 x 35.6 cm

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Dunes, 2017 Mixed media oil on canvas 14 x 14 inches 35.6 x 35.6 cm

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Dunes Detail, 2017 Mixed media oil on canvas 14 x 14 inches 35.6 x 35.6 cm

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Evening Walk, 2017 Mixed media oil on canvas 14 x 14 inches 35.6 x 35.6 cm

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Moon Beach, 2017 Mixed media oil on canvas 14 x 14 inches 35.6 x 35.6 cm

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Orange Raft, 2017 Mixed media oil on canvas 14 x 14 inches 35.6 x 35.6 cm

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Pattern Beach, 2017 Mixed media oil on canvas 14 x 14 inches 35.6 x 35.6 cm

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Purple Marram Grass, 2017 Mixed media oil on canvas 14 x 14 inches 35.6 x 35.6 cm

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Two Bathers (Pink), 2017 Mixed media oil on canvas 14 x 14 inches 35.6 x 35.6 cm

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Two Girls, 2017 Mixed media oil on canvas 14 x 14 inches 35.6 x 35.6 cm

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Wave Detail (Pink), 2017 Mixed media oil on canvas 14 x 14 inches 35.6 x 35.6 cm

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Dock Girls, 2016 Mixed media oil on canvas 35 x 35 inches 88.9 x 88.9 cm

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Net Fishing, 2016 Mixed media oil on canvas 35 x 35 inches 88.9 x 88.9 cm

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Prop Plane, 2016 Mixed media oil on canvas 35 x 35 inches 88.9 x 88.9 cm

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Wave Detail (Blue), 2016 Mixed media oil on canvas 35 x 35 inches 88.9 x 88.9 cm

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Woman on the Rocks I, 2016 Mixed media oil on canvas 35 x 35 inches 88.9 x 88.9 cm

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Woman on the Rocks II, 2016 Mixed media oil on canvas 35 x 35 inches 88.9 x 88.9 cm

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Dune Detail, 2017 Mixed media oil on canvas 35 x 35 inches 88.9 x 88.9 cm

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Moon Beach, 2017 Mixed media oil on canvas 35 x 35 inches 88.9 x 88.9 cm

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Purple Marram Grass, 2017 Mixed media oil on canvas 35 x 35 inches 88.9 x 88.9 cm

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The Dunes, 2016 Mixed media oil on canvas 63 x 63 inches 160 x 160 cm

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Untitled (Beach), 2016 Mixed media oil on canvas 63 x 63 inches 160 x 160 cm

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West Coast, 2016 Mixed media oil on canvas 63 x 63 inches 160 x 160 cm

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Beach (Detail), 2017 Mixed media oil on canvas 63 x 63 inches 160 x 160 cm

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Pattern Beach, 2017 Mixed media oil on canvas 63 x 63 inches 160 x 160 cm

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Two Bathers (Pink), 2017 Mixed media oil on canvas 63 x 63 inches 160 x 160 cm

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Wave Detail (Blue), 2017 Mixed media oil on canvas 63 x 63 inches 160 x 160 cm

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Wave Detail (Pink), 2017 Mixed media oil on canvas 63 x 63 inches 160 x 160 cm

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Dune, 2017 Mixed media oil on canvas 63 x 56 inches 160 x 142.2 cm

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Portrait by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders 16 February 2017

ISCA GREENFIELD-SANDERS was born in 1978 in New York City and grew up in the East Village, where she currently lives and works. She graduated from Brown University in 2000 with a double major in fine arts and mathematics. In 2001, she was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome.

SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2017 Keep Them Still, Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY 2016 Balance Point, Reynolds Gallery, Richmond, VA All Roads in My Mind, Wetterling Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden 2015 Those Few Hours, Baldwin Gallery, Aspen, CO I’ll Be Your Mirror, Dubner Moderne Galerie d’Art, Lausanne, Switzerland 2014 Somewhere Else, Somewhere Good, John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2013 Marines, Galerie Klüser, Munich, Germany 2012 Second State, Haunch of Venison, London, England 2011 The Ocean Between, Haunch of Venison, New York, NY Film Edges, Wetterling Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden 2010 Field at Hollow Road, John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, CA Light Leaks, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Denver, CO 2009 A Beautiful Place to Get Lost, Galerie Klüser, Munich, Germany Light Leak, Baldwin Gallery, Aspen, CO

2008 Against the Fall, Goff & Rosenthal, New York, NY 2007 Red Boat Beaches, John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2006 Isca Greenfield-Sanders, Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, Germany Viridian Isle, Galerie Klüser, Munich, Germany Pinelawn Pools, Goff & Rosenthal, New York, NY Swimming Pool Paintings, Wetterling Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden 2005 Sky of Blue, Sea of Green, John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, CA Paintings for Harley, Baldwin Gallery, Aspen, CO 2004 Silver Cove, Galerie Klüser, Munich, Germany 2003 Rose Point, MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY Windswept Fields, Galerie Klüser, Munich, Germany 2002 Beachwood Park, Lombard-Freid Fine Arts, New York, NY New Work, Baldwin Gallery, Aspen, CO 2001 Three Project Rooms, Galleria In Arco, Turin, Italy 2000 Memories, Galleria In Arco, Turin, Italy

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GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2017 Isca Greenfield-Sanders in Conversation with Julian Opie, Galerie Fluegel-Roncak, Nuremberg, Germany 2016 Paulson Bott Press: Celebrating Twenty Years, de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA WATER|BODIES, Southampton Arts Center, Southampton, NY 2014 Sargent’s Daughters, Sargent’s Daughters, New York, NY Domesticity, Jason McCoy Gallery, New York, NY 2013 Missed Connection, Reynolds Gallery, Richmond, VA Ten Years, Wallspace Gallery, New York, NY Playing with Process: Explorations in Experimental Printmaking, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Houston, TX The Distaff Side, The Granary, Sharon, CT 1XX, Launch F18, New York, NY, curated by Sam Trioli 78

2012 Radical Terrain, Rubin Museum of Art, New York, NY Beached, Gallery Valentine, East Hampton, NY Boundaries Obscured, Haunch of Venison, New York, NY 2011 U.S. Department of State, Art in Embassies Program, Tel Aviv, Israel Out of Focus, After Gerhard Richter, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany The Art of Giving, John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, CA 2010 Nothing Gold Can Stay, Robert Goff Gallery, New York, NY 2009 Extended Family: Contemporary Connections, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, curated by Eugenie Tsai One Size Fits All, On Stellar Rays, New York, NY In Their Own Right: Contemporary Women Printmakers, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX 2006 Summer Group Show, Carl Hammer Gallery, Chicago, IL

2005 Carla Mattii, Isca Greenfield-Sanders, Silvia Zotti, UnoSuNove, Rome, Italy Convertible Fabric Pyramid, Benevento, Italy, curated by Demetrio Paparoni The Dreamland Artist Club 2005, Creative Time, Brooklyn, NY The General’s Jamboree: Second Annual Watercolor Show, Guild & Greyshkul Gallery, New York, NY 2004 River Arts, Cassola Gallery, Peekskill, NY 2003 Frans von Lenbach and Art Today, Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, Germany Prague Biennale: Peripheries Become the Center, Veletrzni Palac, Prague, Czech Republic Photography as Model, Wallspace Gallery, New York, NY After Matisse & Picasso, MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY All About Me, Spike Gallery, New York, NY Sanders & Greenfield-Sanders, Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Miami, FL Up and Coming, Arco Art Fair, Madrid, Spain 25th Anniversary Show, Wetterling Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden 2002 Painting as Paradox, Artists Space, New York, NY Gothic Mood, Palazzo Delle Stelline, Milan, Italy Friends and Family, Lombard-Freid Fine Arts, New York, NY 27 Emerging Artists, Spike Gallery, New York, NY 2001 Vice Versa, Rare Gallery, New York, NY Addition | Subtraction, Carlin Space, New York, NY Collectors Choice, Exit Art, New York, NY Nostalgia, Ubanetc., Brooklyn, NY 2000 Biblioteca Comunale, Torre del Castello, Turin, Italy School of Visual Arts Digital Salon, Palacio de Santa Cruz, Valladolid, Spain 1999 School of Visual Arts Digital Salon, Visual Arts Museum, New York, NY School of Visual Arts Digital Salon, Circulo de Bellas Artes, Madrid, Spain

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PUBLIC AND CORPORATE COLLECTIONS

“Isca Greenfield-Sanders,” SLICE Ann Arbor, October 4, 2016.

Molly Osberg, “Isca Greenfield-Sanders Captures Summer Days and the Beauty of Nostalgia,” Artsy, February 2016.

Gill Saunders, “Prix de Print No. 5: Pikes Peak by Isca Greenfield-Sanders,” Art in Print, May–June 2014.

Susan Tallman, “Isca Greenfield-Sanders,” Art in Print 2, No. 2 July–August 2012.

Leanne Goebel, “Isca Greenfield-Sanders and Marc Brandenburg,” The Huffington Post, February 2, 2011.

Charlie Finch, “Where’s the Ball,” Artnet, October 2010.

“Bio Pic,” Modern Painters, October 2010, p. 37.

Meredith Mendelsohn, “Isca Greenfield-Sanders,” ARTnews, January 2009.

Charlie Finch, “Comfort and Joy,” Artnet Magazine, September 2008.

Emma Pearse, “Artist Isca Greenfield-Sanders Falls to Earth,” New York Magazine, September 2008.

Donald Kuspit, “Isca Greenfield-Sanders,” Artforum, November 2006, p. 300.

Thomas W. Kuhn, “Isca and Timothy Greenfield-Sanders,” ARTnews, November 2006, p. 202.

“Goings On About Town,” The New Yorker, October 2006, p. 71.

Charlie Finch, “Pools of Wonder,” Artnet, September 2006.

Bridget L. Goodbody, “Review: Isca Greenfield-Sanders,” Time Out New York, September 2006.

“A.M. Homes, Striking Oil,” Vanity Fair, September 2006.

Deborah Phillips, “Isca Greenfield-Sanders,” ARTnews, December 2005.

Randy Kennedy, “Flash, Dash and Now, Art,” The New York Times, June 17, 2005.

Linda Yablonsky, “Painted Love,” Time Out New York, June 16–20, 2005, p. 31.

Carlo McCormick, “Crazy in Love, Valentines by Our Favorite Artists,” Paper Magazine, February 2005, p. 45.

Amanda Coulson, “Isca Greenfield-Sanders.” ARTnews, October 2003, p. 152.

Lauri Firstenberg, “Beachwood Park,” Tema Celeste, July– August 2002.

Joyce Korotkin, “Isca Greenfield-Sanders,” NY Arts Magazine, June 2002.

Tiziana Conti, “Isca Greenfield-Sanders,” Tema Celeste, September 2000.

Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY Estée Lauder Corporation, New York, NY Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston, TX Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen, Germany Palm Springs Museum, Palm Springs, CA Progressive Corporation, Mayfield, OH Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England

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Published on the occasion of the exhibition

ISCA GREENFIELD-SANDERS KEEP THEM STILL 1 June – 1 July 2017 Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe 525 West 22nd Street New York, NY 10011 tel 212 445 0051 www.amy-nyc.com Publication © 2017 Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe All rights reserved Essay © Adam Gopnik 80

Photography by Christopher Burke Studios, New York, NY Portrait by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders 16 February 2017 Catalogue designed by HHA Design, New York, NY ISBN: 978-0-9979454-6-1 Cover: Wave Detail (Blue) (detail), 2017

AMERINGER McENERY YOHE

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IGOTTOKEEPMETHERE (AWAKEONATRAIN), 2014 Acrylic, oil, and collage on canvas 100 x 80 inches 254 x 203.2 cm