Aaron Krach
Alex Gartelmann
Alex Schmidt
Amelia Briggs
Emmy Thelander
Julia Rooney
Kate Klingbeil
Patrick Carlin Mohundro
Essex Flowers
INTERNATIONAL WATERS
Junior. Gallery
P.A.D.
Sheet Cake Gallery
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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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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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_147,h_110,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,blur_2,enc_auto/e414c2_acb386b806cc4fb8bcfafc8a179bbd39~mv2.jpg)
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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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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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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.
