Aaron Krach
Alex Gartelmann
Alex Schmidt
Amelia Briggs
Amy Brener
Assaf Evron
Barry Flanagan
Chang Sujung
Duncan McGillivray-Smith
DW Fitzpatrick
Emmy Thelander
Herbert Holsey
Isabelle Frances McGuire
Jamie Mirabella
Jamie Nares
Joe Cool
Julia Rooney
Kate Klingbeil
Kazuki Guzmán
kg
Krzysztof Walaszek
Margot Kalach
Mary Tooley Parker
Michelle Alexander
Nanako Kono
Patrick Carlin Mohundro
Rodrigo Lara
Roscoe Mitchell
Samuel Stevens
Sasha Miasnikova
Zuza Golinska
Ackerman Clarke
Corbett vs. Dempsey
DK Collection
Essex Flowers
Fundacja Art House
Good Naked Gallery
Gordon Robichaux
Hans Goodrich
Harlesden High Street
INTERNATIONAL WATERS
Ivory Gate
Jack Barrett
Julius Caesar
Junior. Gallery
Laura (the Gallery)
THE MISSION PROJECTS
Olney Gleason
Ortega y Gasset Projects
OSMOS
P.A.D.
ro art services
Romance
Sheet Cake Gallery
Western Exhibitions
BARELY FAIR is pleased to present SPOTLIGHT PROGRAM 2026. An extension of our in-person fair, SPOTLIGHT introduces the galleries and artists exhibiting at our fair.
SPOTLIGHT page will update with new artist profiles on a regular basis between now and the fair's opening on April 3rd. Follow us on instagram to be notified of program updates.
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Ackerman Clarke
Chicago
Named for and dedicated to two inspiring Grandmothers, Ackerman Clarke is an evolving endeavor committed to the sales, promotion, and further development of select contemporary visual art. Initiated in the Fall of 2019 by John Schmid, the Chicago-based pursuit expands on thirteen years in the field and seeks to hybridize expected and innovative models of presentation and brokerage.
Duncan McGillivray-Smith
Duncan McGillivray-Smith blends facets of everyday observations and samples from art history to generate his non-narrative technicolor paintings. The scenes, ushered from memory or direct observation, document American places, characters, and snapshots of activities, frozen in anxious waiting.
Born in 1998, McGillivray-Smith grew up in New York City. He attended Pratt Institute and is currently finishing his MFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in May. Ackerman Clarke hosted his first solo exhibition, Ataraxia, in October of 2025. McGillivray-Smith has shown work at the New Art Dealers Association (NADA) Miami fair in 2025 and will be a part of the gallery's forthcoming exhibition schedule for ARCOlisboa 2026.
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Corbett vs. Dempsey
Chicago
Founded in 2004 by John Corbett and Jim Dempsey, Corbett vs. Dempsey is an art gallery with an associated record label, book imprint, and historical archive, specializing in contemporary art, art in Chicago, and improvised and experimental music.
Roscoe Mitchell
At Barely Fair 2026, Corbett vs. Dempsey presents a solo booth of paintings and sculpture by Roscoe Mitchell. One of the most acclaimed and accomplished figures in contemporary creative music, since the time of his debut record Sound (released sixty years ago in 1966), Roscoe Mitchell (b. 1940) has maintained a parallel practice as a visual artist. In this HO scale presentation, CvsD assembles a group of his four-inch-square paintings, often abstract and painted in vivid colors, together with new sculptures made of painted wooden geometric objects.
Roscoe Mitchell (b. 1940) has been a leading figure in the performing arts for over 50 years. Born and raised in Chicago, Mitchell formed the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble in 1966, featuring Lester Bowie and Malachi Favors, which transformed into the Art Ensemble of Chicago with the addition of Joseph Jarman in 1969. Mitchell began painting in 1963, and he continued on and off into the heyday of the Art Ensemble and through a hyperproductive sequence of decades of solo music, improvised encounters, and music for Mitchell-led ensembles. The pandemic afforded Mitchell time off-road in which he began painting avidly again. Since 2023, his paintings have been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago; the Pit, Los Angeles; and Maintenant, Marfa.
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DK Collection
Chicago
DK Collection, located in Chicago, contains works of artists, performers, and writers from different countries and different backgrounds including Europe—especially Poland—and representing South America, Mexico, Africa, USA, and other international regions. A hallmark of the collection is a focus on language.
Zuza Golinska
Zuza Golińska has a close relationship with space, sculpture, and performance. Her practice is based on transforming and responding to various environments. Drawing on the connection between materiality and symbolism, her work is rooted in Eastern European experiences, often examining the impact of architecture and public space on the human individual. Her multidisciplinary practice reflects on the ways human physical and mental wellbeing is influenced by the psychology of space in the time of civilizational acceleration and late-stage capitalism. Golińska frequently disrupts clear-cut divisions between the functional and the aesthetic as she examines the influence that spatial forms have on the emotions and decisions of users.
Zuza Golińska (b. 1990, Poland) is an artist living and working in Warsaw. A graduate of the Mirosław Bałka Studio of Spatial Activities at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, she is the recipient of scholarships from the Ministry of Science and Higher Education and the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. In 2015, Golińska was nominated for the StartPoint Prize. In 2018, she received the ArtePrize awarded by the Delfina Foundation in London. In 2022, she became the recipient of the Dorothea von Stetten Art Award held by the Kunstmuseum in Bonn. She has presented her works in many institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, the Zachęta National Gallery, the National Gallery in Prague, and the Yokohama Museum of Art. She is represented by Piktogram Gallery in Warsaw Poland. www.pictogram.org
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DK Collection
Chicago
DK Collection, located in Chicago, contains works of artists, performers, and writers from different countries and different backgrounds including Europe—especially Poland—and representing South America, Mexico, Africa, USA, and other international regions. A hallmark of the collection is a focus on language.
Margot Kalach
Margot Kalach’s practice explores the contemplation and recognition of time’s passage and its effects on matter, approaching time not only as a physical process but as an event that bridges reality with metaphysical experience. Working within a laboratory-like environment, she simulates temporal phenomena to generate and assemble images and objects that register the engravings of time in space.
Rooted in photography, her work pushes the medium toward its limits in both scale and technique. By constructing her own tools for image-making, Kalach expands the possibilities of the photographic process, allowing it to move beyond representation into material investigation. Through this approach, her practice has gradually shifted from a predominantly time-based methodology toward the subtle thresholds of the sculptural, where images, objects, and processes converge.
Margot Kalach (Mexico City, 1992) holds a BA in Photography from Bard College (2016). She completed the SOMA Mexico Academic Program (2017–2019) and was awarded the FONCA Jóvenes Creadores grant (2019). Selected solo and dual exhibitions include El Sueño de la Piedra (Ex Convento de Tepoztlán, 2021), Reverberaciones(Córdoba Lab, Oaxaca, 2022), Vidrio de Cielo (UNAM Museum of Geology, 2024), Probabilities, Records, Experiments, and Technique (Galería Hilario Galguera, Madrid, 2024), The Body´s Voice in the Machine´s Ear (MACO Museum Oaxaca), and XXI Photography Bienal (Centro de la Imagen CDMX). She has participated in art fairs including Photo London (2023), ACME (2024), and MACO (2025). Artist residencies include Casa Wabi (2021), ITHAQUE Paris (2023), and SITU festival (2025). Her work is held in the Cantor Arts Center collection. She is co-founder of CROMA (Mexico City).
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Essex Flowers
New York City
Essex Flowers is a New York City based artist-run cooperative gallery founded in 2013. Over the past decade, the collective has mounted over 100 projects and exhibitions, with a focus on emerging and contemporary art. Originally housed in the basement of an eponymous flower shop on Grand Street, Essex Flowers reopened in 2016 in a storefront gallery at 19 Monroe Street, situated at the intersection of Chinatown, Two Bridges, and the Lower East Side.
Aaron Krach
"Rocks, words, pictures, lost earrings, firewood, old books, fireworks, stuff. My work is about—and made from—the stuff around us. I collect, remix, isolate, and re-frame objects, images, text, and ideas to reveal what is overlooked. I want to highlight what's missing to ask questions such as: Where are we going? What is freedom? Who am I?
I want to make art that is sincere, authentic, but also light: Who needs more darkness these days? Lately this means pressing words and objects into the clay to mark it with evidence of life. I’m very drawn to the patterns around me, on trees, the street, and various found objects. Once the texture is set, I use the fragments to create objects that can and should be used."
Aaron Krach (March, 2026)
Aaron Krach is an artist who makes work from the stuff of everyday life—vodka, firewood, old sympathy cards, decoy owls. He believes in art that can spreads, that can reach people wherever they are. In 2023, he started @ND to publish experimental collaborations. His own artist books are held in many museum libraries including MoMA and the Whitney. When he’s not in the studio, or out running, he teaches art and design in New York City.
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Essex Flowers
New York City
Essex Flowers is a New York City based artist-run cooperative gallery founded in 2013. Over the past decade, the collective has mounted over 100 projects and exhibitions, with a focus on emerging and contemporary art. Originally housed in the basement of an eponymous flower shop on Grand Street, Essex Flowers reopened in 2016 in a storefront gallery at 19 Monroe Street, situated at the intersection of Chinatown, Two Bridges, and the Lower East Side.
Julia Rooney
Julia Rooney creates paintings and site-specific installations grounded in real space, analog material, and the human body. Sensitive to the increasing dominance of a screen-based world, she often works at radically different sizes—from 2 inches to 6 feet—to mimic the way online platforms often juxtapose the micro with the macro, distorting one’s sense of scale. Her paintings reference both contemporary and historic forms of viewing technology, including QR codes, green screens, 35mm slides, screens, windows and webs.
Julia Rooney (b. 1989, New York, NY) is a painter who plays with the increasingly porous boundaries between real space and digital space. She has had solo and two-person shows at Freight+Volume (New York, NY), Below Grand (New York, NY), Essex Flowers (New York, NY), Band of Vices (Los Angeles, CA), and Jennifer Terzian (Litchfield, CT), among others. She has received fellowships and residencies from The Joan Mitchell Center, Yale University Art Gallery, The Rema Hort Mann Foundation, More Art, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and MASS MoCA. Rooney received her BA in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard College and her MFA in Painting/Printmaking from Yale School of Art. She was born and raised in New York City, where she is currently based. In addition to her studio practice, she works as a Teaching Artist at the Museum of Modern Art, The High Line, and other cultural institutions throughout New York.
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Essex Flowers
New York City
Essex Flowers is a New York City based artist-run cooperative gallery founded in 2013. Over the past decade, the collective has mounted over 100 projects and exhibitions, with a focus on emerging and contemporary art. Originally housed in the basement of an eponymous flower shop on Grand Street, Essex Flowers reopened in 2016 in a storefront gallery at 19 Monroe Street, situated at the intersection of Chinatown, Two Bridges, and the Lower East Side.
Emmy Thelander
I’m compelled by the relationship between a hollow frame and spontaneous activity because it is a metaphor for how an individual creates a life, such as how a tennis court shapes the rules of play. I devise templates for myself to fill in: for example, I ascribe the borders of paintings and drawings priorities that vie for my attention—relaxation, friends, time alone, intellectual stimulation—and these determine an abstract composition in the center. In this work and others, the act of occupying emptiness is symbolic; when a person doodles, the passing time matters more than the drawing.
Appropriating visual vocabularies of scientific data, information graphics, adolescent notebooks, and 20th century painting, Emmy Thelander diagrams daily routines and architectures that mold subjectivity. She received her MFA from the Yale School of Art and a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis. She was awarded fellowships and residences including: Alex Brown Foundation, Lighthouse Works, Fountainhead at Virginia Commonwealth University, ACRE and Alice Kimball English Traveling Grant. Exhibitions include solo projects in Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Jackson Hole, and Richmond. In 2018 she was the Herndon Smith Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis and is currently Assistant Professor at Binghamton University, SUNY.
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Fundacja Art House
Olesnica, Poland
Fundacja Art House is an artist-run initiative presenting a diverse and experimental program of contemporary art. It operates as a peripatetic laboratory rethinking ideas of periphery and center-- reflecting on small-town culture in Poland, Europe (and the world). The foundation supports art and culture through exhibitions, performances, residencies, and community projects that encourage intercultural exchange, mobility, and artistic research.
Samuel Stevens
Samuel Stevens holds an MFA in Sculpture from the Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Fine Art and Design, Wrocław (2020) and a BFA in Painting from the Kansas City Art Institute (2016). His practice embraces site-specificity and experimental making, weaving together elements of craft, architecture, and ephemeral encounters to reimagine our relationship to space and objects.
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Fundacja Art House
Olesnica, Poland
Fundacja Art House is an artist-run initiative presenting a diverse and experimental program of contemporary art. It operates as a peripatetic laboratory rethinking ideas of periphery and center-- reflecting on small-town culture in Poland, Europe (and the world). The foundation supports art and culture through exhibitions, performances, residencies, and community projects that encourage intercultural exchange, mobility, and artistic research.
Krzysztof Walaszek
Krzysztof Wałaszek is fundamentally a painter. Yet he is a painter after painting—after conceptualism, the neo‑avant-garde, and the innovations that dethroned the canvas as a potential site of masterpiece, a guarantee of initiation into some other, into a better world.
Though an individualist working outside collectives, his understated, ironic style resonates with the circle of artists around Wroclaw’s LUXUS. This collective was known for its nonchalance—a slightly posed coolness that nevertheless concealed a deep belief in art as a space of freedom. Its generation experienced not only censorship but also the monopolization of media. Perhaps for that reason, their aim was rarely to create masterpieces; it was to stage interventions. Their “silly” provocations were meant to unsettle the “wise,” a mission that, in retrospect, can be seen as puncturing the balloon of hypocrisy. This, in turn, allowed not only themselves but everyone around them to breathe freely.
Anna Markowska
Krzysztof Walaszek (b. 1960, Tarnow) graduated from the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Wrocław (now the Academy of Fine Arts and Design). Working across painting, sculpture, drawing, collage and ceramics, he places language at the core of his practice. His work interrogates the contemporary commodification of social life and the erosion of values attached to concepts such as faith, patriotism and family. Each gesture invites a critical reading of the absurdities, manipulations and hollow rhetoric circulating through politics, the media and religion.
Walaszek has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions. His works are held in the collection of Zacheta – National Gallery of Art, as well as in several museum collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Wroclaw and the District Museum in Tarnow, in the Gerymski Family Foundation, and in private collections. He is currently a lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław, where he teaches drawing. He lives in Ksiezyce, near Wroclaw.
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Good Naked Gallery
New York City
Good Naked (New York, NY) is a roving exhibition program curated by Jaqueline Cedar. Titled after a Seinfeld episode, it is with levity and sincerity that Good Naked’s programming hovers around the intimate and awkward. The focus is on work that engages tactility, humor, movement, and play. Good Naked's exhibitions are responsive and generative, prioritizing space for new voices and dialogue amongst contemporary artists.
Mary Tooley Parker
Mary Tooley Parker makes textile art using a time-intensive, historic rug making technique. She is a true fiber artist who has been enthralled with every fiber related making format since the age of 8 and is mostly self-taught. She trained as a dancer, and studied music for many years, but has no visual art background. Her process involves cutting fabrics into strips and pulling them up through a linen foundation using a primitive, wood handled hook. Incorporated in her work are new and recycled wool, cotton and silk fabric, fleece, handspun and commercial yarn, metallic fibers, and more. She also works with natural and synthetic dyes to create colors as needed, and her use of non-traditional materials creates a densely textured work that draws the viewer in to both examine the fiber materials and engage with the innate warmth and familiarity of them. Her work offers a clear evocation of people, places and things that resonate deeply with others' experiences. Though using a traditional, folk art medium, Parker's tableaus, vivid colors, humor, detail, and wide use of new and exotic fibers give rug hooking a contemporary aesthetic and lifts her rugs off the floor to be viewed as art.
Mary Tooley Parker is a textile maker using wool and other fibers as paint. After a career in dance and then in art production at Vanity Fair and GQ magazines, Tooley Parker left New York City for a more rural environment. She then began pursuing an interest in textiles of different forms, eventually leading her to the American folk art of rug hooking, though her pieces are not rugs for the floor. Parker's work has been exhibited internationally including New York, London, and Denmark and is held in public and private collections. She is honored to have been awarded a New York State Council on the Arts/New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship twice (2015 and 2024), and has also served as a NYFA panelist. Art critic John Yau recently wrote a review of her work in Hyperallergic.
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Gordon Robichaux
New York, New York
Gordon Robichaux is a gallery and curatorial agency that nurtures and promotes underrecognized and emerging artists and offers new perspectives on established artists. Gordon Robichaux develops and presents exhibitions, performances, readings, publications, and multiples; supports artists with special projects; works closely with nonprofit organizations; and participates in art fairs to cultivate new audiences.
DW Fitzpatrick
Gordon Robichaux will participate in the 2026 edition of Barely Fair, Chicago, April 3-19th, with a presentation of new work by DW Fitzpatrick. The tableau of small, screwball assemblage sculptures features pairings of found objects, among them an aluminum letter 'U' and a bent steel wrench.
DW Fitzpatrick (born 1964, Long Island, New York) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Fitzpatrick has presented solo exhibitions at Gordon Robichaux, New York (2025, 2018); Beware of Dog, Long Island City, NY (2023); Artist Curated Projects (ACP), Los Angeles (2017); Lighthouse Works, Fishers Island, NY (2015); Art in General, New York (2014); Know More Games, Brooklyn, NY (2013); Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan (2012); Museum 52, New York (2010); La MaMa Galleria, New York (2008); and Bellwether Gallery, New York (2007).
Their work has been included in group exhibitions at MACRO – Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma, Rome; Demisch Danant, New York (Curated by Robert Gober); Higher Pictures, New York; Artist Curated Projects (ACP), Los Angeles; Morán Morán, Los Angeles; Participant Inc., New York; Know More Games, New York; Public Fiction, Los Angeles; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PN; Trial BALLOON, New York; Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan; M+B, Los Angeles; American Contemporary, New York; Art In General, New York; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE); Saatchi Gallery, London; Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Sandroni Rey Gallery, Los Angeles; Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco; Cohan and Leslie, New York; Brent Sikkema, New York; Baltimore Contemporary Art Museum; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven.
Fitzpatrick’s work has been reviewed in Artforum, The New York Times, and The New Yorker and is featured in Vitamin 3-D: New Perspectives in Sculpture and Installation (Phaidon Press). They were a faculty member in sculpture at the Yale School of Art from 2001 to 2011, and taught at The Cooper Union, ICP/Bard, and Bard College from 2015 to 2025.
Fitzpatrick has contributed work to the publications Artforum, North Drive Press, and Interview Magazine. They have been an artist-in-residence at BOFFO and FIAR in Fire Island, New York, and at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan, and have received grants from Art Matters and the Jerome Foundation.
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Hans Goodrich
Chicago
Hans Goodrich is a contemporary art gallery located in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois.
The gallery was co-founded by Peter Anastos and Daisy Sanchez in 2024.
Isabelle Frances McGuire
"As Isabelle Frances McGuire assembles their work, they employ the strategies of history and violence in a play of chance against seriousness, that is, against all odds. If they're lucky, the resulting monstrosity will be beyond seriousness, called up from some forgotten basement. If not, there is always another round; for when luck is your strategy, chance is your game, and play is your happiness."
Max Hart, IFM: Beyond Seriousness
Isabelle Frances McGuire (b. 1994, Austin, TX) lives and works in Chicago, IL
Selected solo and two-person presentations include The Renaissance Society, Chicago, IL (2025), What Pipeline, Detroit, MI (2023), King’s Leap, New York, NY (2023), Scherben, Berlin, DE (2022), Mickey, Chicago, IL (2021), Et al., San Francisco, CA (2020), From The Desk of Lucy Bull, Los Angeles, CA (2020)
Selected group shows include the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2026), Hans Goodrich, Chicago, IL (2025), DREI, Cologne, DE (2025), High Art & Sister, Seoul, KR (2024), Artists Space, New York, NY (2024), Petzel Gallery, New York, NY (2024), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL (2024), Bel Ami, Los Angeles, CA (2024), Shore, Vienna, AT (2023)
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Harlesden High Street
London
Harlesden High Street is a POC run experimental space founded with the mission of facilitating access between experimental/outsider artists and the traditional gallery system, hosting only people of colour and giving a platform to those who lack access, bridging social and cultural gaps against the homogeny found in contemporary art.
Joe Cool
We are presenting a joint presentation with Miri, presenting the legacy of Joe Cool and Riskie Brent.
Set within a domestic environment, Miri is presenting a local satelitte fair in Chicago called 'Neighbors' within this setting we are honoring the 30th anniversary of the end of Death Row Records.
Miri is a cultural platform dedicated to the authorship and preservation of contemporary practice, operating across editorial, strategy, and archival form. At Barely Fair, in collaboration with Harlesden High Street, Miri presents a co-authored booth that conceptually alludes to Neighbors, a new exhibition and fair exploring how art is encountered within a domestic space. This framework brings work into closer proximity with the conditions of living, where presence, scale, and context shape perception. The presentation reflects Miri’s commitment to extending artistic work beyond the exhibition format, situating it within a continuous and deliberate cultural memory.
Death Row records was built on talent and hunger but also destroyed because Suge Knight lacked the ability or guidance needed to separate the streets from the music.
Unfortunately,this narrative is so often the case: that a person of colour will go down a path of self-destruction due to lack of recognition and understanding.
This installation depicts the remains of what was once the biggest black owned record label, destroyed by one man’s lack of foresight and had an impact on the future Black culture with the death of 2pac Shakur, Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg no longer having the quality control they once had whilst with the label and then Puff Daddy going onto encourage people like Jennifer Lopez who cannot sing, to have a career, this had quite an impact on music.
The presentation shall also celebrate 30 years since the release of Snoop Doggy Dogg’s
debut album Doggystyle, as well Snoop now owning and taking over Death Row records.
If Snoop had taken over Death Row back in 1996, after 2pac’s death, we believe there
would’ve been a different discourse in how music would affect culture and in turn affect the
way we live today. Black and underground culuture in the West is something that has an affect on everyone globally, socially and politically.
Darryl "Joe Cool" Daniel (b. 1968 - d. 2024) is an artist from Long Beach, CA. His artwork has graced the covers of millions of records sold worldwide, starting with the cover of his cousin Snoop Dogg’s smash success, ‘DoggyStyle’.
In the pantheon of hip-hop’s visual history, Joe Cool’s artwork is iconic, and his unique illustrations hark back to a time before commonplace computer graphics.
Joe has partnered with many global brands and retailers to create memorable original designs including ADIDAS, 7-11 and Supreme Clothing to name a few.
Joe Cool also travels the world touring with Snoop Dogg. He has performed onstage in over 30 countries and 48 states as "The Nasty Dogg" as well dozens of broadcast television shows and events.
When not drawing or touring with Snoop, Joe stays busy in comedic acting as well as touring giving motivational speeches. He works with several recovery and art therapy non-profits.
He is currently based in the Long Beach, California.
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INTERNATIONAL WATERS
New York City
International Waters is run by Matt Taber and Trang Tran. Constantly drifting, International Waters is a platform for art and discourse.
Patrick Carlin Mohundro
My work begins with an idea that provides the structure for creative movement. It can be a more formal consideration (what if canvas was replaced with porcelain, and paint stained glass) or a clever or funny idea that pushes the medium or process (if you use copper tape to solder stained glass, what else can that tape go on? A hammer? A nail? A hot dog?).
I follow the structure to its aesthetic conclusion, feeling pretty free and playful within the safety net of the structure that I have created. This allows for the creative process to be open and collaborative. I often invite others to help make decisions (orientations, compositions) or outright invite other artists to collaborate on works.
Pathetic Abstraction is my antidote to cynicism–an attempt to feel connected to the world around me in hope of distilling truth and meaning in these hard times.
Always starting with ideas, this way of working is a way for me to reconnect to my emotional sensibility. I like to think of it as pathetic—not in the common sense but in an archaic way: “affecting emotion.” For Aristotle it was a rhetorical technique in opposition to logic and ethics. For me, it is a way to learn to feel again while engaging with otherwise abstract concerns (technology, politics, etc).
As an approach, I call the field Pathetic Abstraction. It is my antidote to cynicism. As a hopeless thinker, this way of working is an attempt to feel connected to the world around me in hope of distilling truth and meaning from the cascade of content we experience in the 21st century.
Patrick Carlin Mohundro lives and works in New York. He is from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and holds an MFA from Hunter College (2019). He is currently the director of P.A.D, an introductory NADA member and pop-up exhibition space in historic SOHO (South of Houston) District in New York City. He is the recipient of NYFA and Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency grants and has received awards from Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (NY, 2011), Salem Art Works (NY, 2012), St. Nicks Alliance’s Arts@Renaissance (NY, 2013), Incheon Art Platform (Seoul, 2014), the Founding Fellowship at Offshore Residency (ME, 2016), Famous Chimps’ artist-in-residence program (Ridgewood, 2019), Carrizozo Arts (NM, 2021), and A-Z West Artist (CA, 2021). He has had solo exhibitions and presentations with Essex Flowers (NY, 2024), Home Gallery (NY, 2023), Lonesome Dove (NY, 2023), and Collar Works (NY, 2013) and exhibited in group exhibitions at the Finnish Cultural Institute (NY, 2023), International Waters (NY, 2025), and O’Flaherty’s (NY, 2022). He will be an artist-in-residence at the Clouse House in Minneapolis this summer.
![Airsparagus [collaboration with Nathaniel de Large], 2025, Stained Glass and Claw Hammer, 23” x 23” x 7”, Courtesy of International Waters](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/e414c2_acb386b806cc4fb8bcfafc8a179bbd39~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_980,h_735,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/e414c2_acb386b806cc4fb8bcfafc8a179bbd39~mv2.jpg)
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Ivory Gate
Shanghai
Ivory Gate is an artist-run contemporary art gallery. Founded in 2023 in Chicago's Gold Coast, Ivory Gate opened a Shanghai location in 2024.
Michelle Alexander
My work begins with the body, not as an image but as a site of pressure, memory, and endurance. I work with materials that have already lived alongside the body, including garments, hairpieces, casts, and surfaces meant to be worn, held, or stepped on. These materials carry traces of touch, weight, and repetition.
Through a process of cutting, pinning, binding, and reshaping by hand, I transform these materials into sculptural forms that hold tension. They often appear stretched, hardened, or on the verge of collapse. The work reflects the pressures placed on the body by media, beauty culture, discipline, and social expectation.
My background in fashion and athletics deeply informs this practice. Both disciplines train the body to perform, improve, and endure. I am interested in the moment when that effort becomes visible, when the body strains against the standards placed upon it.
The work asks what the body absorbs over time, and what remains when it can no longer hold itself together.
Michelle Alexander is a Canadian multidisciplinary artist working between Montreal and Chicago. Her practice begins with the body, not as an image but as a site of pressure, memory, and endurance. Through sculpture and installation, she works with materials that have lived alongside the body, including garments, hairpieces, casts, and photographic traces. By cutting, pinning, binding, and reshaping these materials, she reveals the invisible pressures placed on the body by media, beauty culture, and social expectation. Her work holds the tension between discipline and vulnerability, asking how the body absorbs, resists, and remembers.
Alexander holds a BFA from the University of Miami, an AAS in Fashion Design from Parsons, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited at the Design Museum of Chicago, Mana Contemporary, The Current, and Ivory Gate Gallery.
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Jack Barrett
New York City
Jack Barrett has focused on showcasing emerging artists working across diverse multidisciplinary practices. First opening in the Lower East Side, the gallery has since relocated to a storefront in Tribeca, where it continues to develop the practices of a roster of represented artists, along with fostering newly emergent voices in contemporary art. Today, the gallery maintains regular programming and participates yearly in art fairs.
Amy Brener
Through her sculptures, Amy Brener seeks to level hierarchies between sacred and mundane material, and question what we choose to preserve and discard. Her monumental or seemingly devotional forms serve as holders for disposable objects like q-tips and plastic drinking straws, elevating them to the status of treasured relics. Brener’s work merges diverse historical influences, including classical sculpture, baroque ornamentation, Art Deco, and early science fiction, unified by a palette shaped by 1980s nostalgia and contemporary consumerism. Having worked in various casting media for many years, Brener has recently expanded into paper and ceramic sculpture, investigating how her use of found objects can be reconfigured within these different material frameworks.
(On 'Keeper', 2025) In her first foray into ceramics, Amy Brener’s lilac-hued figure—part goddess, part reliquary—fuses the fragmented body of a classical Venus with single-use detritus. Tubular receptacles resembling organ pipes hold disposable plastic straws, while architectural urns affixed to the structure are stuffed with lavender Q-tips. These throw-away objects function as both ornament and cryptic code, a record of a consumerist era preserved within a form that could as easily be excavated from antiquity as imagined in a speculative future. For Brener, the work serves as a temporal hybrid, compressing ancient iconography, present-day manufactured ephemera, and suggestions of a precarious tomorrow into a single, uncanny moment.
Caitlin Monachino
Amy Brener (b. 1982, Victoria, BC, Canada) lives and works in New York. Since graduating with an MFA from Hunter College, Brener’s work has been exhibited at galleries and institutions in the US, Canada, Europe and China. Museum exhibitions include MoMA PS1 in New York, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut, The Speed Museum of Art in Kentucky, Hafnarborg Museum in Iceland, MacLaren Art Centre in Ontario and Riverside Art Museum in Beijing. Brener has had three solo exhibitions at Jack Barrett gallery in New York, where she is represented. Other gallery exhibition highlights include Galerie Pact in Paris, Wentrup Gallery in Berlin, Berthold Pott in Cologne and Reyes Projects in Detroit. Her work has been featured in publications such as The New York Times, Art in America, CURA, Hyperallergic, Artnet News and The Brooklyn Rail.
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Julius Caesar
Chicago
Julius Caesar (JC) is an independent artist collective founded in Chicago's East Garfield neighborhood. Supporting Chicago’s contemporary art scene outside the commercial gallery ecosystem since 2008, JC began as a Sunday afternoon showcase of SAIC students, graduates and teachers. JC has since evolved in leadership and scope, regularly exhibiting national and international artists, and founding BARELY FAIR in 2019.
Assaf Evron
Assaf Evron applies photographic thinking across media to examine the collapsed relationship between culture and nature and how visual forms participate in broader systems of knowledge and power amid the melancholy of the Anthropocene. Treating photography as both material process and conceptual framework, he extends it into spatial, architectural, and durational forms, often through subtle misalignment and repetition, engaging non-anthropocentric and queer ecological perspectives. His recent work navigates the limits of photographic representation through formal experimentation in abstraction, objecthood, appearance, and symbolic systems. While being philosophical and literary inquiries, the works remain grounded in photographic materials and processes.
Past series by the artist have reflected on two central themes: cameras as language machines, and architecture, both modern and ancient. The works’ formal and material presence have a matter-of-fact quality, highlighting the camera’s language of representation as the medium through which it communicates. The work presents the illusion of representation with an ever-present awareness of its construction and limitation, making the language through which the picture speaks central to the works.
Earthly Delights, the exhibition at Julius Caesar serving as the basis for our BARELY FAIR presentation, included cave works by Assaf titled “The Anonymous Shapes of Words.” The series began when his spelunking throughout the Midwest became portraits of the American landscape through its interior forms. A subject carved by millions of years of geological activity, they not only exist on a scale far-longer than human history, but have also formed some of the oldest exhibition spaces for human art. The series presented cryptic depictions of gravity and form, a space where culture, nature, and legibility collapse into abstraction.
The photograph presented for BARELY FAIR came from a subsequent series, “I Want to Believe Sea Cucumbers Are Happy.” Captured during dives in the Red Sea, Evron used a GoPro along with an assortment of other cameras while SCUBA diving. An intimate series of sea cucumbers in their natural habitat, the portraits capture a creature who lives in an environment without gravity, but whose life is rooted to the sandy floor. Ancient worms passing the raw materials of their environment through their bodies, the sand-eating beings filter through space as creatures of cavernous nature and form.
- Ro Miller
Since 2019, Evron has produced a series of large-scale photographic interventions on buildings designed by Mies van der Rohe, installing landscape images on glass façades to destabilize the distinction between modernist structure and natural form. In parallel, his sustained engagement with subterranean environments treats caves as material and semiotic systems in which geology operates as matter rather than as a backdrop.
Assaf Evron (b. 1977, Israel) is an artist and educator based in Chicago. He received a BA from Tel Aviv University in 2007, and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013 in Photography. He continued his education with a MA in 2017 from The Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel-Aviv University. Evron’s work investigates the nature of vision and the ways in which it is reflected in socially constructed structures, where he applies photographic thinking to two and three-dimensional media. Collapsing the relationship between culture and nature, his work takes a critical eye on language, experience, and geology with a sense of loss and melancholy emanating from the Anthropocene. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums internationally including The Museum for Contemporary Art in Chicago, Crystal Bridges Museum for American Art and The Israel Museum in Jerusalem among others. Recent Solo and Two-Person exhibitions include ro art services (New York City), David Slain Creative (Chicago), Arts Club of Chicago (Chicago), S.R. Crow Hall (Chicago), Center for Digital Art (Holon), MCA (Chicago), Elmhurst Art Museum (Illinois), Neubauer Collegium (Chicago), Chicago Architecture Biennial (Chicago), Andrew Rafacz Gallery (Chicago), Haifa Museum for Art (Haifa), and Habres + Partner Galerie (Vienna). Selected Group Exhibitions include Gwangju Biennial (South Korea), Julius Caesar (Chicago), Fosdick-Nelson Gallery (NY), Chicago Manual of Style (Chicago), Crystal Bridges Museum for American Art (Arkansas).
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Junior. Gallery
Chicago
Junior. Gallery, founded in spring 2025, is an artist-run space dedicated to supporting underrepresented artists, and amplifying voices often overlooked in the art world. Providing a platform for experimentation and innovation, while offering artists the opportunity to exhibit works that don't fit into a mold.
Founded by Mat Mancini, Noël Morical, and Nick Schuzenhofer, Junior. Gallery is rooted in Chicago’s DIY artist-run tradition; and we’re here to give you the good shit.
Kate Klingbeil
Kate Klingbeil is captivated by the subterranean: an unseen world that contains both the beginning and the end, where germination and burial exist simultaneously. Her work maps psychological systems onto biological networks, constructing ecosystems of highly textured, figurative terrain from fragments of paint, stone, brick, fossils, metal, ceramic and mycelium. In the ways that our bodies remember our experiences, so does the land we inhabit and the detritus we leave behind. What can a closer look at what is buried, hidden and discarded teach us about our deepest fears, our hidden desires, and our innate curiosities?
Kate Klingbeil is a visual artist based in Milwaukee, WI. Her work charts ecological networks as emotional ecosystems through various mediums. She has presented solo exhibitions with Steve Turner, (Nervous System, 2024, Unseen Animal, 2022 & Grown Woman, 2021, Los Angeles, CA); and Hesse Flatow (Uprooted, New York, 2021). Kate has been awarded artist residencies including Silver Arts (NY, NY, 2021-22), Oak Spring Garden Foundation (Upperville, VA, 2021), the Arts/Industries program at JMKAC (Sheboygan, WI, 2020) and Yaddo (Saratoga Springs, NY, 2019), among others. Kate received a BFA in Printmaking from California College of the Arts in Oakland, CA in 2012.
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Junior. Gallery
Chicago
Junior. Gallery, founded in spring 2025, is an artist-run space dedicated to supporting underrepresented artists, and amplifying voices often overlooked in the art world. Providing a platform for experimentation and innovation, while offering artists the opportunity to exhibit works that don't fit into a mold.
Founded by Mat Mancini, Noël Morical, and Nick Schuzenhofer, Junior. Gallery is rooted in Chicago’s DIY artist-run tradition; and we’re here to give you the good shit.
Alex Gartelmann
"I grew up in a family of craftspeople with few financial resources, in a rural place that morphed into a wealthy suburban environment during my youth. The clash of those worlds, economic, social, and cultural, foundationally informs how I pay attention to the world as an artist. I seek out gestures of making do, which I consider a folk tradition. I’m always scanning for quotidian acts of creativity, whether an architectural palimpsest or intervention, a homemade yard object, or the remnants of an effort to maintain, that are acts of agency in the face of limited resources. I’m interested in flattening the hierarchy around creative practice and what it means. I want to make space to elevate expression that is often overlooked or dismissed."
Alex Gartelmann (New Jersey, 1984) lives and works in Milwaukee, WI. He is one half of the artist collaborative Sebura&Gartelmann with artist Jonas Sebura, and a partner in Fools Gold with artist Rachel Reichert. He received his BFA from The University of the Arts, and his MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
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Laura (the Gallery)
Houston
Laura (the gallery) is a curatorially driven project space based in Houston, Texas. Founded in 2022 by New York–transplant Laura Burton, the gallery fosters dialogue between an international network of artists and the cultural landscape of Texas. Its program spans emerging, mid-career, and historically overlooked artists, with a particular focus on practices rooted in New York and the broader East Coast, Texas, Latin America, and Asia.
Chang Sujung
A Frog Tailor
One night, I was a “frog tailor” in my dream. Nothing else happened. It was simply the realization of a new occupation in a new body. Like many people, when I have a peculiar dream, I try to trace it back, wondering why I had it and what it might mean.
I often think of myself as a frog. In Korean culture, derived from the fable of the tree frog, a frog symbolizes someone who does the opposite of what they are told, someone who persists even more when told not to. I think the dream came from my identification with the frog, intertwined with my daily studio work where I was spending long hours sewing garment components for new sculptures.
The moral of the story, which I probably read in first or second grade, made me think that I should listen to my mother more often. Revisiting the story as an adult, growing older means that there is no longer anyone left to rebel against. Ultimately, I can only rebel against myself.
The works presented here were made by the “frog tailor,” as I imagine myself in the dream.
The Fable of the Tree Frog
Long ago, there lived a tree frog who always did the opposite of whatever his parents told him. When his mother was dying, her deepest wish was to be buried in the mountains. But knowing that her son would surely do the opposite of whatever she might ask, she told him to bury her by the stream instead.
After she passed away, the frog felt deep regret for his lifelong disobedience. Wanting to honor her final words, he buried her by the stream just as she had asked. One night, during a terrible storm, the frog awoke, terrified that the rising water might wash her grave away. He rushed to the burial site only to find water. To this day, it is said that the growing sound of frogs croaking before a storm is actually the cries of this very frog crying out in sorrow for his mother.
Chang Sujung lives and works in New York City. Chang was born in Seoul, South Korea, and moved to the US in 2014. She received her MFA from Hunter College in 2017 and BFA from Ewha Womans University, Seoul, South Korea, in 2013. Her recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Alteration, Laura (the Gallery), Houston (2025), Detour: cul-de-sac, International Waters, New York (2022), 88.61 lbs, Hesse Flatow, New York (2020), and Beginningless sky, Endless ground, Jungganjijeom, Seoul (2019). Her work has been shown in several group exhibitions including Marinaro, New York, 56 Henry, New York, A.I.R Gallery, New York, International Objects, New York, Helena Anrather, New York, Yeh Art Gallery, St. Johns University, New York, The Richard and Dolly Maass Gallery, Purchase College, New York, Galerie Christine Mayer, Munich, Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery, New York, Ilmin Museum of Art, Seoul, and others. She has participated in residencies at Carving Studio and Sculpture Center, Vermont (2022), BRIClab: Bridge Space, New York (2021-2022), Hercules Art Studio Program, New York (2018-2021), the Wassaic Artist Residency, New York (2017) and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine (2017). Chang is her last name and Sujung is her first name.
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THE MISSION PROJECTS
Chicago
THE MISSION PROJECTS champions emerging and mid-career artists from the United States and Latin America through an itinerant exhibition program spanning galleries, alternative project spaces, pop-up exhibitions, and art fairs. Its latest initiative, THE RESIDENCE, a residential exhibition space in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood, advances this mission by showcasing contemporary art of the Americas, with a focus on Latin American practices.
Rodrigo Lara
My work explores memory — how we build monuments not only from stone and clay, but from ritual, family history, and lived experience. I am interested in how we choose to remember, what we honor, and what gets left out of official histories.
I grew up near the Municipal Cemetery in Querétaro, Mexico, surrounded by tombs, religious art, and everyday acts of remembrance. These spaces felt active, filled with offerings and stories. As a child, I was both an altar boy and a conchero dancer, taking part in Catholic ceremonies and Indigenous rituals. Living between these traditions shaped how I understand identity, belief, and time.
My sculptures draw from these layered experiences. I combine references to family altars, colonial architecture, Indigenous ritual, and personal memories from Mexico and the United States. I work mainly with colored porcelain. It reminds me of the plasticine I used as a child — soft and direct. I shape forms that feel both intimate and symbolic.
The faces in my work come from memory — people I’ve observed, figures inspired by pre-Columbian sculpture, and Catholic imagery. They become imagined guardians and deities. Through clay, I reflect on how material holds memory and how we create new mythologies from the past.
Rodrigo Lara Zendajas
Born 1981, Mexico.
Rodrigo Lara Zendejas, Assistant Professor/Area Head of the Ceramics Department; University of Notre Dame. He received an MFA from SAIC in 2013 and his BFA from the Universidad de Guanajuato in Mexico in 2003. Lara has had solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Museo de Arte Moderno in the state of Mexico; Museo de la Ciudad in Querétaro, Mexico; Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago; the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago; C.G. Boerner in New York City; Kruger Gallery in Marfa, Texas; THE MISSION PROJECTS in Chicago; among others. Lara has two monographs of his work, Máscaras y Artefactos and Memorials. He won the first prize in sculpture at the Premio Nacional de las Artes Visuales in Mexico in 2010. He has received several awards including: IAPG, DCASE, Chicago; Proyectos Especiales and Jóvenes Creadores, FONCA, Mexico City; Emerging Artist Grant, Joan Mitchell Foundation, NYC; James Nelson Raymond Fellowship, 2013 SAIC; PECDA Estudios en el extranjero, IQCA; International Graduate Scholarship, SAIC; and the John W. Kurtich Travel Scholarship, SAIC, Berlin/Kassel, Germany, among others. He currently lives and works in Chicago.
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Olney Gleason
New York City
Olney Gleason was founded by Nicholas Olney and Eric Gleason in 2025. Across two locations in Chelsea, New York, the gallery presents exhibitions that bring international contemporary artists into dialogue with practices that have shaped the last century of art history. Spanning generations and media, the program is grounded in the gallery’s commitment to long-term artist representation and highly-researched exhibitions.
Barry Flanagan
Truly, sculpture is always going on. With proper physical circumstances and the visual invitation, one simply joins in and makes the work.
—Barry Flanagan
Establishing himself as a leading figure among the avant-garde and a proponent of emerging movements like Arte Povera, Land art, Process art, and Conceptual art, Barry Flanagan first began revolutionizing the language of sculpture and the prospects of artmaking in three dimensions while exhibiting soft sculpture and concrete poetry in the 1960s, before his decisive turn to bronze in the 1980s. Flanagan's small-scale bronzes revisit the formal language of his monumental sculptures, from his landmark soft sculptures to his iconic bronze hares of later decades.
Barry Flanagan’s innumerable contributions to and achievements in the history of sculpture, as well as his selection as the representative of Britain at the 40th Venice Biennale in 1982 and his election to the Royal Academy of Arts and recognition with an OBE in 1991, substantiate his position as one of Britain’s most important and innovative sculptors. Flanagan has been the subject of major institutional retrospectives across the globe.
Describe your image
Describe your image
Describe your image
Describe your image
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Olney Gleason
New York City
Olney Gleason was founded by Nicholas Olney and Eric Gleason in 2025. Across two locations in Chelsea, New York, the gallery presents exhibitions that bring international contemporary artists into dialogue with practices that have shaped the last century of art history. Spanning generations and media, the program is grounded in the gallery’s commitment to long-term artist representation and highly-researched exhibitions.
Jamie Nares
There’s something immediate and elusive about paper. It’s delicate and quicker to work with. Paper lends itself to thoughts.
—Jamie Nares
Over the course of a five-decade career, Jamie Nares has investigated, challenged, and expanded the boundaries of her multi-media practice that encompasses film, music, painting, photography, and performance. Created between 1988 and 1992, Nares’s ink and watercolor works on note cards reveal a universe in which her jottings, words and sketches appear together, ranging from elusive word play to inventive formations, consistent with the technique Nares employed to draft film scripts in the 1970s.
Jamie Nares established herself as a fixture among a milieu of avant-garde filmmakers, musicians, and visual artists in downtown New York in the late 1970s, before redirecting her attention to painting in 1982. She continues to employ various media to explore physicality, motion, and the unfolding of time. Nares has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and a career-spanning retrospective at the Milwaukee Art Museum in 2019.
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Ortega y Gasset Projects
Brooklyn
Ortega y Gasset Projects came together as an artist-run space in Brooklyn, NY in April 2013. OyG is entirely run by working artists, who recognize that exploration is key to artistic vitality. We embrace an exploratory model where artists take the role of curator, critic and promoter. The goal of OyG is to mount exhibitions that support under-represented, and emerging artists, provoke dialogue and bolster the artistic community.
Jamie Mirabella
I make images that feel glamorous yet broken. My work explores display and desire through found photographic imagery. Reprinting and combining found photos from my archive, I manipulate scale and focus to arrive at altered images that play with figure ground relationships and break with the visual logic of the original source material. I am especially drawn to familiar images that appear at fi rst glance to be unambiguous, such as scientific documentation, product still lives, and staged portraits. I distort and combine these to create disorienting fictional spaces and objects. The work speaks to beliefs about what is natural and valuable and invites viewers to engage in creative reading of photography.
Example B is a collection of small collages that explore the visual language of photographic display. By reprinting, cutting, and combining found images from disparate genres, Mirabella invites viewers to question how photographic images shape ideas of beauty, value and desire.
Jamie Mirabella (b. 1971, Denver CO) is a visual artist and educator based in New York. She creates collages and site specific works using found photographic imagery. Her work has been exhibited in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Pittsburg. She holds an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University and a MA in Education from City College New York. Mirabella lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
jamiemirabella.com @jamie.mirabella
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OSMOS
New York City
OSMOS began in 1997 in Berlin and was re-established in 2012 as platform for curatorial and editorial activities with locations in New York City and the Western Catskills.
OSMOS has developed a particular expertise in handling artists’ estates and reintroducing historic positions, especially constructivist tendencies, photography, and works by women artists. OSMOS also works with younger artists that reinvigorate historic legacies we champion.
Herbert Holsey
OSMOS is pleased to mount a presentation of collages by Herbert Holsey (1949-1995). This presentation marks the first posthumous showing of Holsey’s work and the first after his last exhibition at 1590 DeKalb in Atlanta, only weeks before his passing, in 1995
“Herbert was a friend from Atlanta, who invited me into his home to collaborate and watch the soaps if I brought my scissors and a stack of magazines to cut up. He left all his work with me.”
Cay Sophie Rabinowitz
Herbert Holsey (1949-1995) was a queer veteran who served in Vietnam and later lived with his lover, an officer in the US Army, while stationed in Germany. It was there that Holsey began to work prolifically in collage. His compositions and commentary represent a candid, humorous, and at times acerbic look at personal, political, social issues of the 1980s and 1990s. Herbert Holsey was an occasional performer at Atlanta’s Backstreet, the most iconic 24/7 gay club in the deep south. Holsey used drag to personify a “housewife” or a “bag lady”, while the likes of Charlie Brown and Ru Paul would come on later in the evening and present the glamorous side of drag celebrity. Holsey died of AIDS at home in Midtown Atlanta, surrounded by the cut-up bits and pieces he used to assemble a story of his own.
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P.A.D.
New York City
P.A.D. [Project Art Distribution] is an art exhibition space in historic SoHo (South of Houston) Arts District in New York City. It reflects the bustling economy of artists making, selling and promoting their artworks on the street year-round, weather permitting. The aim of the space is to platform small and editioned works by artists that are interested in embracing new contexts for exhibiting.
Alex Schmidt
A painter, performer, and collaborator, Schmidt was one of the first contributors to P.A.D. In 2019, they co-organized an exhibition with P.A.D., 'Best Foot Forward', featuring active members of the queer soccer community, Dyke Soccer. In recent years, they have participated in a number of important projects and exhibitions, including the traveling retrospective 'In with the Old' (2021-2022), ‘P.A.D. x Parent Company’ at Parent Company (2024), and last year’s presentation at Barely Fair where she collaborated with the artist, Harry Moritz (2025). We are delighted to present our first solo project with Schmidt for this year's Barely Fair.
Patrick, Director of P.A.D.
Using improvisation, humor, and relationality, Alex Schmidt fondles fault lines between performance (figure modeling, plays, video), social engagement (audience participation, pedagogy), text (scripts, songs, books), and painting. These forms infest one another, evolving into mixed-media works that engage with precarity and the paradox of choice. Schmidt treats each gesture as rehearsal for ongoing work, scaffolding tropes such as tableau vivant, homage, mise en abyme, and set design. Performances and their painted counterparts are palimpsests referencing countless rehearsals woven into becoming. Whereas their paintings incorporate past choices not retained, modular, participatory performances remix asymptotically. Paintings act as props, set pieces, and co-stars; a pose feeds a painting; a wall becomes a body; a poem is both sculpture and song; the audience is an actor. Texts underscore the ambivalent and ouroboric power dynamic of “utopian parasitism.” Citing and repeating, Schmidt's practice asserts that no artist is an island and no artwork is static: today is tomorrow’s yesterday.
Alex Schmidt (b. Chicago, IL) works across performance, painting, text, social-engagement, and set design. Schmidt is a Whitney Museum Independent Study Program Elaine G. Weitzen Studio Fellow (2024-2025). They have held solo presentations at Leslie-Lohman Museum (New York, NY), 21st Street Projects for Critical Practices Inc (New York, NY), ENTRANCE Gallery (Marfa, TX), and Olympia (New York, NY), among others. They have performed at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Swiss Institute, MoMA PS1, the Kitchen, BOFFO, Blade Study, Galerie Timonier, Duplex NYC, OLYMPIA, Essex Flowers, Abrons Art Center, and PERFORMA, among others. Schmidt was a Shandaken: Storm King Artist in Residency (2025), a Ruth Stanton Scholar from 2020-2023, and the 2024 Mayer Foundation grant recipient. Schmidt’s work has been reviewed by the New Yorker, Vogue, Dazed Magazine, Office Magazine, Paper, New York Magazine, The Guardian, and Art 21. Schmidt has written for The Whitney Review, Cosmopolitan Magazine, and The Public Review.
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ro art services
Chicago
ro art services combines components of an art advisory and artist agency, providing collectors direct access to contemporary art inventory and artists with gallery representation services. Curatorial programming and object-forward presentations include art fair and gallery exhibitions in New York and Chicago. Often partnering with galleries for exhibitions of emerging and mid-career contemporary artists, RAS’s collaborative model is built on a foundation of mutual investment.
kg
Making weavings, sculpture and poetry through the logic of memoir, kg’s studio is a site embedded with personal history. Drawing on their experiences of emigrating Poland as a child, adopting 60’s counterculture as a teen in 90’s, growing up queer in rural Pennsylvania, working a program as a sober alcoholic, living with and loving their dog, or intertwining histories of feminism and the fiber arts, kg’s memory and experience become narrative material. Intangible form of theory, memory and experience lace through their weavings beside objects of encounter and chosen fiber. Narrative comes in and out of picture as another thread in their poetic material lists, where the location of their textiles are rendered into poetic material lists.
I play with the idea of what is noteworthy, using materials that retain my daily narratives. Cerulean blue plastic dog waste bags that litter all of my jacket pockets, pre-fabricated paper joints left over from treating my father’s lost battle with cancer, broken bungee chords that have given in to the stress of transporting my sculptures, a hoodie drawstring from a trip to L.A., jewelry from people who are special to me and gold paper lettering from a funeral wreath all appear in my work.
- kg
Their practice adopts a ritual of labor with presence of experience. Passing threads interlock with objects of borrowed history, melding materials into works emblematic of shared and divergent cultural values. The artist embraces the split of presence between the visible and metaphysical by writing each material list as a poem, combining the tangible material of a work while invoking the details of making. Each poetic text becomes key to accessing the adorning but invisible tendrils of histories: through memory and feeling, the never-seen but present.
kg (b.1980, Poland) makes weavings and writes poetry from their home studio by the lake in Chicago. kg values the small the domestic and the everyday, situating those politics in their studio and curatorial practices. They have exhibited work with Horse and Pony (Berlin), The Brooklyn Academy Of Music,The Bruce High Quality Foundation and The Gowanas Ballroom (New York), Left Field Gallery and Adjunct Positions (Los Angeles), Katherine E. Nash Gallery (Minneapolis), Monique Meloche Gallery, Gallery 400, Julius Caesar and LVL3 (Chicago), The John Michael Kohler Art Center (Wisconsin) and their most recent solo exhibition, Here Comes That Feeling at Hawthorne Contemporary in Milwaukee. Some Kind Of Duty, Their expansive weaving survey hosted by The DePaul Art Museum is available as a monograph through the museum shop and online. In 2017 kg attended The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and The Vermont Studio Center as a fellow in 2018. Recent exhibitions include Intranarratives hosted by the Musée d'art Contemporain de Montréal and Beyond: Tapestry Expanded at The Peeler Art Center at DePaul University. Upcoming shows include Floral Methods curated by Theo Bignon at Bunker Projects in Pittsburg PA, NEver. Again! a solo exhibition in Color Club’s Museum Space, and We May Be Soft at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.
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ro art services
Chicago
ro art services combines components of an art advisory and artist agency, providing collectors direct access to contemporary art inventory and artists with gallery representation services. Curatorial programming and object-forward presentations include art fair and gallery exhibitions in New York and Chicago. Often partnering with galleries for exhibitions of emerging and mid-career contemporary artists, RAS’s collaborative model is built on a foundation of mutual investment.
Kazuki Guzmán
For BARELY FAIR, ro art services will be presenting works from Guzman’s Hammer Study. The series blends the poetry of language, semiotics of traditional culture, efficiency of contemporary fabrication, and a subject dating back over 3 million years: the hammer. Embracing the ubiquitous tool as a symbol of labor and transformation, the works begin as formal and phonetic interpretations of Japanese onomatopoeia. Each sculpture takes inspiration for title and form in a Japanese expression of mimesis, and are then fabricated by combining 21st century technology with materials, colors, and treatments selected for their traditional cultural symbolism.
Chon-Chon, for example, is a small wooden hammer worn on the index finger, transforming the familiar act of striking into an intimate, rhythmic gesture. The name, chon-chon, comes from the Japanese onomatopoeia for something striking lightly and repeatedly or a small object hopping rhythmically. The sound embodies the action, evoking both a sensory and cultural resonance that feels instinctive to anyone who has ever crafted something by hand.
In creating this piece, I wanted to reimagine the hammer, a standard symbol of labor and transformation, as a personal object—a piece of paraphernalia specific to the practice of a maker. By reducing its size and adapting it to fit on a single finger, Chon-Chon becomes a reflection of the desire to be close to the material, to feel every tap and impression more directly. It’s a tool of connection, a means of bringing the act of making into the most intimate, precise contact.
-Kazuki Guzmán
Acknowledging an age of ever-increasing automation and digital design, Hammer Study utilizes contemporary fabrication while paying homage to traditional Japanese folk-crafts. Guzman’s work, often known for utilizing industrial techniques to achieve his designs, finds inspiration in mingei. A 20th century arts and crafts movement in Japan, the folk craft tradition focused on the beauty of the everyday- a belief in making objects for the people, by the people. Guzman’s appreciation for mingei and his use of technology to create his work brings a thoughtful engagement to technology in the arts, often seen as a subject of contradiction. The same technology associated with a loss of traditional culture and labor can also be the democratization of industrial production for artisans, and these objects embrace the contradiction of our time. The metal components were designed by the artist in Chicago, fabricated by a metal 3D printer in the Netherlands, and patinated by a metal workshop in Japan. Muro Kanamono, a more than 200 year old workshop in Kyoto, used colors and processes determined by traditional techniques to treat and color the metal. Guzman finally finished the hammers in Chicago by assembling the patinated metal with wood and handcrafted metal fasteners.
Kazuki Guzmán is an artist, educator and designer based in Chicago. Specializing in domestic objects and furniture, his work is deeply inspired by Mingei, the Japanese folk-craft tradition. He embraces the influence as a celebration of handmade culture and promote sustainable design. Through a practice centered on collection, collaboration, and curation, Guzmán strives to broaden the accessibility and vocabulary of traditional crafts, fostering innovative collaborations across various fields. He has recently exhibited at Freadricks & Mae’s “Paraphernalia” in NYC, the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago, Silver Room Design Pavilion in Chicago, the Highland Park Art Center in Chicago, Taiwan Design Museum in Taipei, Houston Center for Contemporary Crafts in Houston, Universidad de Chile in Santiago, “Designboom ASIA AWARDS” in Tokyo, Kunstzwerg Gallery in Zweibrücken, Germany, Gallery Kawanishi, in Hyogo, Japan.
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Romance
Pittsburgh
Romance is a gallery dedicated to the work, development, and discourse of emerging and contemporary artists from across the U.S. and internationally, alongside cross-generational narratives and underrecognized art historical figures. The gallery was founded in 2023 by writer Margaret Kross in the basement of a Pittsburgh apartment with an ethos of risk-taking and intimacy that continues to shape its exhibitions and critical frameworks.
Sasha Miasnikova
Through compressed architectures and patterns—frequently domestic, decorative, or void-like—Sasha Miasnikova’s microworlds offer partial entry into spaces of interiority. Whether belonging to an unseen observer, a solitary figure, or friend, these scenes remain intentionally open, and portraits appear “as someone you think you might know,” in her words. Often defined by the textiles they wear and objects of desire in their midst (a purse, a bomber jacket, a serving tray), Miasnikova's situational vignettes exist in tension with their own flatness, while relishing in their painterly surface. In skewed perspectives somewhere between bird’s-eye and worm’s-eye view, and sweet pop hues set against languid atmospheres, the artist transforms her painting into a keeper of a personal archive: where images are reconfigured just as the self is fashioned, concealed, or made to surface.
Sasha Miasnikova (b. New York, NY, 1999) lives and works in New York. Recent exhibitions include Romance (Pittsburgh, PA, two-person), Iowa (New York, NY, two-person), Gnossienne (London, UK), Jessamine (Dallas, TX, two-person), NADA Miami (Miami, FL), George Adams Gallery (New York, NY), and Sawhorse (Chicago, IL). Miasnikova has a forthcoming solo exhibition at Romance in 2027. She is graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and co-creator of Room Service, stocked at Café Forgot (New York, NY), Lucky Jewel (New York, NY) and Everything Store (Chicago, IL).
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Sheet Cake Gallery
Memphis
Sheet Cake is an art gallery in Memphis, Tennessee focusing on artists based in and connected to the regional South. We intentionally celebrate women, queer artists, and artists of color.
Amelia Briggs
"Working between fiber, painting, and installation - my motivation as an artist is heavily influenced by my training as a figure painter; consequently, the body language and gestures in the work reveal an inner landscape concealed beneath the surface. I draw inspiration from psychology and natural systems, creating three-dimensional wall hangings and paintings that draw from botanical and anatomical forms with almost free-flowing movement and subtle color shifts."
Amelia Briggs’ multidisciplinary practice combines fiber and painting to create works that invoke nostalgia and play. Her three-dimensional wall hangings are influenced by a family quilting tradition and embody botanical and anatomical forms that are both otherworldly and resonant, flirting with function and the figure. The work sometimes takes shape as a life vest or bag, or has vestiges of those items such as handles, but the utility of the objects is abstracted in a similar way as the forms referenced in the images.
Lauren Kennedy, Sheet Cake Gallery
Amelia Briggs is an NYC-based multidisciplinary fiber, painting, and installation artist. She received her BFA from Indiana University in 2009 and her MFA from the University of Memphis in 2015. Briggs has shown with platforms and galleries internationally, including Art Basel with LVMH in Miami, FL; Boston University in Boston, MA; Bowes-Parris Gallery in London, UK; Cohle Gallery in Paris, France; Exhibition A in New York, NY; Glass Rice Rice in San Francisco, CA; The Hole in Los Angeles, CA; Platform in New York, NY; and, most recently, Future Fair in New York, NY. In 2019, Briggs began constructing mirrors from reclaimed materials, using bedsheets, fiber, and thin coats of latex. Incorporating them into her lush installations, Briggs posted images online, which caught the eye of renowned Los Angeles-based designer Kelly Wearstler. This instigated a collaboration that continues today. This partnership has been featured in publications including Vogue, Elle Decor, Architectural Digest, The New York Times, Surface, and Domino.
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Western Exhibitions
Chicago
Western Exhibitions shows thought-provoking and visually innovative artists who work across most media, with an emphasis on personal narratives and cosmologies; LGBTQ and feminist issues; pattern and surface concerns; works on paper; and artist books. The gallery presents unique artist projects, curated group shows and maintains a specific inventory of artist books and multiples, gathered together as a sister entity and store, WesternXeditions.
Nanako Kono
Nanako Kono’s paintings, drawings, prints, comics and collages investigate miscommunication. Kono is inspired by the structure of comic strips, employing intrinsic elements of that format — panels, speech balloons, animated objects, recurring characters, text — in her humorous paintings. The process of learning English as a second language sparked an interest for Kono in translations and semiotics, leading to the realization that the signs, symbols, and words we choose often fail to convey intended meanings to others. Taking visual and material cues from the Chicago Imagist tradition, Kono’s work explores a playful new way of communication.
Kono’s focus on multi-lingual miscommunication lead her to consider other contributing factors of this dynamic such as power imbalances and non-literal language use. Kono uses flatness, transparency, double-sidedness, and thickness of acrylic sheets in her work to convey the multifaceted nature of emotions, perceptions, and the indirect exchange of feelings with others through imaginary borders. She is also interested in the agency of tools themselves, considering language not only as a medium used by humans but as a tool that can act independently. Once released, words are re-shaped by interpretation, context, and circulation, often moving beyond the control or intention of their author. Inspired by the Japanese concepts of “tatemae” (public façade) and “honne” (true feelings), as well as manga speech bubbles, Kono’s paintings explore the dichotomy and ambiguity between the external persona and the inner self, revealing the layers of complexity in human emotions and interactions.
Nanako Kono’s paintings and prints have been included in shows at LaiSun Keane in Boston, and in Chicago at Arts of Life, Patient Info, the Epiphany Center for the Arts, and will be included in “Ground Floor” at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago opening in August. Her solo show at Western Exhibitions in 2025 was reviewed in NewCity. Kono was born in 1999 in Tokyo and moved to Chicago from Las Vegas in 2016. She received her BFA with a minor in Art History at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 2022 and a MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2025. Kono lives and works in Chicagoland.
