Is Buffalo the Next Berlin? As the capital of Germany, obviously not. But in terms of an art city, rich in cultural associations with a thriving bohemian sensibility, Buffalo can already begin to think of itself as a new Philadelphia: a serious contender, that is, for artists priced out of New York who just need a place to hang their hats and make work.

In a recent trip there, however, Berlin kept coming up. I met more than one young artist who had spent time there before putting down roots in, or reconnecting with, Buffalo.  Nestled on the border with Canada in the western reaches of New York State, and 90 minutes from JFK, Buffalo is a rust belt town that’s closer to Cleveland than Manhattan in more than just miles. But that is not a bad thing in forging an alternative art city. Philly has never shaken the patronizing notion of being “the sixth borough”, unable fully to develop an identity distinct from New York City. Think of Buffalo, instead, as Hudson with warehouses — upstate and then some — and its burgeoning art life might beckon.

Buffalo enjoys a spot on art world maps thanks to significant museums and extraordinary architectural heritage. Frank Lloyd Wright masterpieces attest to the times when the home of a world’s fair and the first city to be fully electrified was a cosmopolitan hub. The SUNY Buffalo art department has enjoyed international attention since producing Pictures Generation luminaries such as Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo. Museum-wise, even a young English critic in 1987 knew to stop here, en route from Toronto to NYC, to catch the superlative holdings of Abstract Expressionism at the Albright-Knox. I was back in Buffalo, a newly minted New Yorker,  fifteen years later for a superb Modigliani exhibit. A massive expansion of the museum is now planned for 2019 with a new pavilion by the architects OMA/Shigematsu. And since that last visit, a new museum has been added to the mix: the Burchfield Penney Art Center, on the Albright-Knox’s doorstep, showcasing Charles Burchfield, Buffalo’s most famous artistic son, with related contemporary exhibitions. This time round, however, what lured me toward Niagara Falls was living art.

The painter Rebecca Allan (a longstanding and valued artcritical contributor) hails from Buffalo but hasn’t exhibited here since 1986. This summer she showed her ecologically-informed lyrical landscape paintings at Anna Kaplan Contemporary, one of several young galleries active in the city. Last fall, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, New York, staged an in-depth exhibition of this series, curated by Cynthia Bronson Altman. Paintings in her Buffalo show, titled “Debris Fields”, derived their toxic beauty from the arbitrary waste and negligence of industrial and mining sites. While abstract in compositional strategies, their paint handling has a lush naturalism that recalls the late Robert Berlind. Burchfield is also clearly an inspiration, with his transcendentalist meditations on the use and abuse of nature. But in the collisions of synthetic and organic palettes and tight painterly negotiations of layers and twists, Allan mostly channels the New Mexico landscapes of Richard Diebenkorn. Her paintings are pervaded by a provocatively gentle sense of foreboding.

Allan was also included in an earlier installation of paintings at the fabled Hotel Henry, the H. H. Richardson-designed former New York State Asylum that lay dormant for decades until being masterfully converted to boutique hotel usage last year by Deborah Berke Associates. Architectural Digest had cited Anna Kaplan Contemporary as part of a Buffalo renaissance in which the reclamation of the landmarked psychiatric hospital plays a central role. Kaplan has joined forces with two other women, Elisabeth Samuels of Indigo Art and Emily Tucker of Benjaman Contemporary, to launch Resource:Art, a consultancy that places contemporary art in institutional and pop-up venues. In the second floor public spaces of the Henry they have established a series of exhibitions of kunsthalle quality, with imaginatively installed, interlinked displays of significant local artists. Richardson and Berke are clearly the curators’ friends: the setting could not be more spectacular, well-lit and generous with wall space. With its Romanesque spires and the sinister decay of its unreclaimed wings, the historic asylum might seem the epitome of the gothic horror loony bin, but in its day Richardson’s hospital was a model of progressive treatment: the sumptuous hallways were designed for inmates to learn socializing skills. These now provide incredible gallery opportunities that put paid to any negative connotations of “hotel art”. Especially prized spots are the semi-circular walkways linking the main body of the hospital to its wings, which are especially well suited to sculpture. The handsomely enigmatic works of Kevin Kegler, for instance, managing to simultaneously recall  Martin Puryear and Louise Bourgeois, exploit a master craftsman’s years as a boat builder. The Light Will Blind You (2017) is a smooth totemic construction, at once face-like and functional, with a suggestively luminous niche-orifice at its golden core.

At the June 8th reception for the latest Resource:Art display I met Kegler and his daughter, Kyla Kegler, recently returned from years of studying and dance performance in Berlin. Kyla Kegler  took me to see her solo exhibition, “Feel Me: How to dwell in daily sensation, a manual for finding feeling” at the BOX Gallery on Main Street in downtown Buffalo. It is an expansion of her recent degree show at the University at Buffalo. In her own words, her work “probes the phenomenon of haptic sensation through visual, audio, text, and performative experiences.” Her installation consists of uninvitingly utilitarian MDF furnishings and accoutrements for various massage therapies. At one end of the gallery, under an orange neon of the word “Feel”, is a textured wall of cast breast-like forms that visitors are invited to interact with as they choose. Accompanying audio, delivered in deadpan, corporate voice-of-god tones, describes physical and spiritual benefits to be derived from the therapies under offer. Kegler’s project, which was also just recently shown at Kunstraum in Brooklyn as “Three Acts, Three Scenes: Your Care, My Care, Careful Care,” recalls Maryam Jafri’s “War on Wellness”, seen earlier this year at Kai Matsumiya, although Kegler’s intentions are more ambivalently poised between earnestness and irony than the aggressively deconstructive Jafri.  

Kegler lives in a sprawling and — to this Manhattanite’s eye — to-die-for loft downtown, on the same block as the 1912 Electric Tower. Buffalo is a city not only of architectural gems — besides Lloyd Wright’s pioneering residences there are the Guaranty Building skyscraper by his mentor Louis Sullivan, the recently landmarked grain elevators of Silo City, the Saarinens’ Kleinhans Music Hall — but also of miles upon miles of warehouses and mills screaming with potential. Inevitably, artists, in their perennial quest for viable places to live, work and exhibit, are leading the way in reclamation, but the problem is an embarrassment of riches. How many kunsthalles can a city of quarter of a million support?

But that’s not any individual artist or entrepreneur’s problem. Ryan Arthurs is another returning native: he received his M.F.A. in photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2012 and had been teaching at Harvard and elsewhere. He held a pop-up exhibition, Liberty, during Buffalo’s pride week at the end of May that, luckily, extended beyond its intended 72 hours for me to catch sight of it. The title of the show recalls the furloughs granted by the military while playing on the sense of the artist taking liberties with his materials, as well as celebrating liberation. Arthurs explores issues of masculinity and sexuality in prints and installations that delicately juggle appropriation and transformation. He has troves of historic family photographs of young servicemen at leisure whose grainy textures he processes through lithography with overlays of geometric shapes, reminiscent of Ellsworth Kelly, in pastel hues. He also presents collages made from vintage gay postcards by the pioneering Bob Mizer that he has collected in depth. He artfully arranges his diverse, variously framed and pinned materials on printed wallpapers, adding a further layer to his installation. Freedom to experiment with what could be prohibitively expensive printing techniques is something crucial to his work, which is where the move to Buffalo adds another dimension of liberty, by providing space and resources beyond his reach in Boston.

Arthurs’ show was staged in a recently renovated store belonging to Frits Abell, the developer behind a burgeoning portfolio in the Five Points neighborhood on the West Side. There’s already a popular wine shop, a cafe, a Pilates studio and other mixed use, commercial and residential projects spreading out from this intersection of avenues. Savoring the upbeat vibe of the Five Points bohemian hub on a cool summer afternoon prompted the thought: to build an arts metropolis, it takes a village.

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“Why Not Judy Chicago?” at CAPC/Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux (March 10 through September 4, 2016)

Most people, when they see smoke, run in the opposite direction. Not so Judy Chicago. This Olympian of feminist art sprints toward fire–that is if she didn’t ignite it herself (literally, in her pyrotechnic works). With hair the color of smoldering embers and a razor-sharp wit, Judy Chicago is entering her 77th year with as much determination to combat prejudice and redress the deficit of women’s work in the art world as when she appeared in boxing drag in a Los Angeles gym. That was back in 1970, when women were still barred by law from the ring.

“Why Not Judy Chicago?” at CAPC in Bordeaux, France examines the artist’s career from her graduate student years in California in the mid-1960s, through her Resolutions series of early 2000. Organized in collaboration with Azkuna Zentroa in Bilbao and curated by Xabier Arakistain, the exhibition traces her multifaceted contributions as an artist, teacher, writer and activist. Arakistain, a longtime advocate for gender parity within museums and cultural institutions, has foregrounded two lines of Chicago’s work: her creation of a feminist iconography that denounces the oppression of women, and her efforts to invest the teaching of art and history with their contributions. It is particularly instructive to see this exhibition in France where the seeds of feminism were sown nearly two hundred years earlier than in the United States.

Presented in the Entrepôt Lainé, a vast warehouse built in 1824 for colonial goods (a story of dominance in itself), the exhibition unfolds through a sequence of arches and stone passageways. The diverse media and historic themes of Chicago’s oeuvre are well served by this cloistering, resonant architecture.

Mother Superette (1963), a work on paper made when Chicago was a graduate student, contains abstract figures that could be Cycladic female bench-pressers, but they also resemble Byzantine patterns from The Grammar of Ornament, Owen Jones’s monumental survey of international decorative design, published in England in 1856. Though situated securely within a tradition of architectural and design history, her work was criticized by male professors at UCLA for imagery that was “too-feminine.” Conflicted by her desire for acceptance while repeatedly being told that “you couldn’t be a woman and an artist too,” she switched gears and began to employ abstraction in a more subversive way. Her goal was to use color, surface texture, and form to develop a vocabulary of embedded meanings relating to women’s knowledge, sexual independence, and agency. She had by then changed her name (matching the city she grew up in) and enrolled in an auto body painting class — the only woman out of 250 students. There, she mastered lacquer and spray-painting techniques — de rigueur in LA’s car and surfboard culture — that became an aesthetic foundation for her work for the next several decades.

Pasadena Life Savers Yellow Series #2 (1969-70), rendered in airbrushed mists of blue/green, yellow, and violet on reflective acrylic panels, represents a crucial turn in Chicago’s investigation of the perceptual and emotional impact of color, geometric diagrams, and spatial systems. But these are not just intellectual Op-Art exercises. The iconography of the Life Savers paintings is a visual code that plays out on all quadrants of a complicated field. Circles and hexagons stood for the cunt in both word and image, challenging its socially constructed, demeaning connotation. At the same time, Chicago employed her brand of abstraction in the macho arena of Finish Fetish, the West Coast version of Minimalism. Finish Fetish artists were inspired by California’s surf culture, light, air, and smog, making slickly perfect sculpture in glass, polished metal, plastic, and resin. Chicago’s art reflected these prevailing ideas yet denounced the phallocentrism of a culture in which women artists were essentially absent from major gallery exhibitions, museum collections, and university professorships. Only recently have the women who worked in this milieu, such as Helen Pashgian and Mary Corse, been “rediscovered” in important museum exhibitions.

Chicago’s pyrotechnic works addressed another set of concerns about war, the environment, and women’s rituals. In Immolation IV (1971) Faith Wilding is engulfed by orange smoke from burning flares that encircle her grey-tinted seated figure. This was one of Chicago’s Atmospheres (Duration Performances with Fireworks) of 1968-74, staged throughout California, sometimes with her students as participants. Utilizing colored smoke to soften and feminize the landscape, these ephemeral performances also called attention to the bombing campaigns in Vietnam, and the self-immolation of monks in protest of the war. Haunting documentary footage of the Atmospheres (accompanied by the music of Miriam Cutler) combines Impressionist fascination with the obscuring effects of smoke and fog and a contemporary artist’s outcry against violence in its many forms.

The revolutionary, pedagogical experiment of the Feminist Art Program at Cal Arts is displayed in a series of documents from Womanhouse (1972) and never-before exhibited works by students of Chicago and co-founder Miriam Schapiro. Their inclusion in the exhibition is important in signaling the impact of the other women students who were part of the program. Collaborators Dori Atlantis, Nancy Youdelman and Karen LeCocq, for instance, were staging cheeky photographs that skewered gender stereotypes several years before Cindy Sherman began making photographs of constructed feminine identities in her Untitled Film Stills.

Rarely seen test plates portraying the physician Elizabeth Blackwell and the astronomer Caroline Herschel represent Chicago’s best known work, The Dinner Party (1974-79), her epic tribute to 1038 women who shaped the history of Western civilization. Vintage exhibition posters tell the story of the artwork’s international impact, the hundreds of volunteers and skilled artisans who contributed to its production, and its reverberating power as a cultural monument, now permanently housed at the Brooklyn Museum.

But beyond The Dinner Party, Chicago has yet to be fully assessed in relation to the socio-political history of narrative and mural painting in America. In Cartoon for the Fall (1987) images of labor, violence, and religion are delineated in the model for a monumental tapestry (woven by Audrey Cowan) for The Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light (1985-93). The project was the outcome of extensive research into Chicago’s Jewish heritage and created in collaboration with her husband, the photographer Donald Woodman, together with skilled artisans. I see the Cartoon as philosophically and visually linked to Thomas Hart Benton’s mural America Today (1930-31), and Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series (1940-41). Benton’s mural represents the utopian dream of a new society but it also warns of the dangers of overconsumption. Lawrence’s narrative cycle (although more intimate in scale) confronts the harrowing journey of African Americans seeking economic and social equality during the interwar years.

The 18th-century French playwright Olympia de Gouze was a self-educated butcher’s daughter who in 1791 wrote The Declaration of the Rights of Women. “The purpose of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of woman and man,” she argued. “These rights are liberty, property, security, and especially resistance to oppression.” Judy Chicago, the daughter of a medical secretary and post office employee who embraced civil rights, still runs with a torch that illuminates the achievements of women, and resists oppression in all its forms. If only there were a way to bring this exhibition to America.

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Paper Louise Tiny Fishman Rock at the Institute of Contemporary Art
April 29 to August 14, 2016
118 South 36th Street (at Sansom Street)
Philadelphia, 215 898 7108

Entering “Louise Fishman: A Retrospective,” at the Neuberger Museum in Purchase, NY, feels like balancing on a raft that is inadequate to cross the ocean it is floating on. The exhibition, organized by chief curator Helaine Posner, comprises more than 50 paintings and drawings created between 1968 and the present, and demonstrates the achievement of an artist whose work has invigorated the language of abstract painting. A concurrent exhibition, “Paper Louise Tiny Fishman Rock,” at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, offers an instructive companion to this long-overdue survey. That show, curated by Ingrid Shaffner, explores a selection of small sculptures, leporellos (folded artist’s books), and five large paintings that reveal the breadth and scale of Fishman’s oeuvre.

My respect for Fishman’s work did not come automatically, as I initially perceived a bluntness in the work; it resisted entry. Over time, and with experience in the thicket of artmaking, her paintings have worked me over, and the Neuberger retrospective’s tight selection facilitates this effort. Posner’s mindful arrangement within the museum’s galleries gives Fishman’s work plenty of room to breathe, explicating the artist’s conceptual and spiritual concerns and revealing her creative trajectory. Smaller works on paper, arranged on freestanding walls in the center of the main gallery are less effectively supported. In the cavernous space of this gallery, they may have resonated more powerfully if positioned in tighter clusters. Seen in its entirety, however, the retrospective inspires a sense of awe, and finally, situates Louise Fishman within the tradition of American painting rooted in Abstract Expressionism and furthered through her singular vision and endeavor.

The earliest work in the exhibition, In and Out (1968), contains four wing-like shapes, flatly painted in pinks and black that open in an irregular symmetry from an implied vertical line at the canvas’s center. Graphite lines visible through the white ground reveal subtle adjustments to the hard-edged shapes as color creates a strong spatial pulse. To my eye, the painting speaks to the central core imagery that was being developed by feminist artists such as Judy Chicago, though Fishman attributes it more directly a response to Al Held’s black-and-white abstractions of 1967–69.

During the 1970s, in the crucible of New York’s emerging feminist movement, Fishman became acutely aware of gender discrimination and acknowledged her own isolation as a lesbian. As if to destroy the influence of the male-artist power structure, Fishman cut apart her canvases, reworking them into small sculptures oriented along a grid. Confronting her disdain for traditionally feminine work, she employed stitching, dying, and weaving. Untitled (1971), reminiscent of an abacus, is made of rubber, graphite, string, and staples on tracing paper. Transversed by a twisted thread, the amber hue of the rubber resembles skin knitting itself together or the ruled lines of an illuminated manuscript, influenced by Fishman’s childhood exposure to Hebrew texts. Fishman knew Eva Hesse, but her encounter with the 1971 memorial exhibition of Hesse’s work at the School of Visual Arts was the catalyst for her decision to work with that material.

The Angry Paintings of 1973 came out of Fishman’s deepening self-awareness in the consciousness-raising gatherings she attended. Her pain and rage were unleashed in a series of 30 text-based paintings identifying the artist’s contemporaries and predecessors. Ti-Grace Atkinson and Djuna Barnes were among those whose names were inscribed in bold letters obscured by slashes and drips. While they are the least formally interesting of Fishman’s works to me, these protestations are nevertheless unique documents of the living history of feminism, even today, when women who express anger still risk stigma.

Life has been drained from the tempered grays, ashen blacks, and steel blues of Fishman’s Remembrance and Renewal series. Inspired by a 1988 visit to the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Terezín, Fishman made a group of paintings that were given Hebrew titles from Passover. Into her colors, Fishman mixed silt collected from the Pond of Ashes at Auschwitz, creating the granular surface of Haggadah (1988). Dybbuk (1990) comprises a reddish-black grid, like prison bars enclosing a sequence of dimly lit windows — the result of swiping brushstrokes dragged through the oily pigments. In Jewish folklore, a dybbuk is the earthbound soul of someone who has died, unable to be released. These elegiac works reflect Fishman’s concern with painting’s capacity to reflect psychological and physical states of imprisonment, just as they became a medium for transforming her grief upon witnessing the Holocaust sites.

Seven monochromatic paintings from the early 1990s represent an exponential leap in subject matter, scale, and surging physical gesture. Iron Sharpens Iron (1993) contains three charcoal-black bands on a white ground that stretch 10 feet up the canvas, then diverge. Fishman’s use of drywall knives and trowels yields a textural vocabulary of scraped and crusted surfaces, absorbing and reflecting light like hammered or rusted metal. The title, from a passage in the Book of Proverbs, means that through interaction and conflict we sharpen one another. Her history as a competitive athlete is also embedded within the aesthetic concerns of this work. Fishman relates her command of the boundaries of the canvas, gestural velocity, and physical confidence to pitching hardball and playing basketball as a teenager.

For There She Was is a magnificent, darkly luminous painting of 1998, whose title is appropriated from the last sentence in Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925). The relationship between two characters who metaphorically merge into one comes to mind, as every color is turning into another. With interlocking passages of blue, gray-violet and black shot through with cadmium red-orange and burnt sienna, Fishman has created a vibrating field that reminds me of a Chinese garden at dusk. A collector of Chinese scholar’s rocks, Fishman also acknowledges that the landscape surrounding her old farmhouse upstate, as well as the practice of Buddhism has given her the ability to better understand her work as an artist.

Using paint’s viscosity as a metaphor for the power of water to buoy, submerge, and destroy, Fishman’s arm makes rapid swipes, cuts, and scrapes throughout her Raft of the Medusa (2011) and The Salty-Wavy Tumult (2012). J.M.W. Turner’s gory whaling pictures, with their allover facture, were not far from the artist’s mind as she smeared and twisted her reds around spumes of white in Margate (2015). Kreisleriana, (2015), divides the canvas into vertical bands of fiery yellows, reds, and blues that suggest the emotional contrasts of Robert Schumann’s work for solo piano. Because music is the most abstract art form, paintings in response to it can often be lame (illustrative) equivalents. That doesn’t happen here.

I see Fishman’s paintings in this domain as a reflection of her deep intellect and nuanced understanding of spatial and rhythmic structure. They are influenced by the focus and attention of a deep listener, but they are independent objects. At the top of her game, Louise Fishman translates aural, physical, and visual experiences into radiant and muscular works of art whose tension is maintained by the grid that anchors her fierce gesture. Her hard-won joie de vivre, born of new travels, immersion in music, and a contented relationship, underscore this substantive, if belated retrospective.

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Jane Wilson, who died January 13 aged 90, will be remembered for majestic, multilayered, shimmering paintings of land, sea and sky inspired by the coastal topography and weather of the East End of Long Island.

Her paintings are a testament to a lifelong engagement with the history and substance of painting, with its potential to simultaneously reflect the world and make a universe entirely of its own. Every inch of her canvases is oxygenated and alive, evoking the experience of sensing undercurrents beneath the surface of a still pond. In Time Change (2011), for instance, Wilson’s characteristic low horizon line anchors the canvas, and we can perceive what she described as “looking for the color behind the color.” Suffused with horizontal bands of peach and pink of varying widths and delicate facture, the painting rewards us for attentive looking, revealing a range of overtones of scumbled color that pulsates and recedes. In paintings that “aim for moments of strong sensation,” as she put it, Wilson belongs to a tradition of transcendental American landscape that includes Albert Pinkham Ryder, Martin Johnson Heade, and Joan Mitchell.

Born in 1924 on a family farm in Iowa, Wilson knew the sequences and consolations of a life lived close to the land. “Growing up on a farm…you lived at the bottom of a sea of weather,” she told landscape historian Elizabeth Barlow Rogers. She attended the University of Iowa just as visiting artists such as Philip Guston were transforming the art department with the energy of the New York art world. In 1948, with an M.A. in painting, she married fellow student John Gruen, the writer and composer, and they moved to New York. Their daughter, Julia, was born 10 years later.

In 1952 Wilson became a founding member of the Hansa Gallery, one of several artist-run art galleries that opened in the early 1950s in New York City. Endowed with a striking, natural beauty that evoked Modigliani, and that endured to the end of her life, she supported herself as an artist by working as a fashion model. When a dealer told her that she wasn’t handling her career properly by modeling, she responded, “Well, tell people about my years in academia.”

Over the next several years she moved away from an early abstract style influenced by Gorky and others. “I found myself in one of those lucid moments that occurs every twenty years and I realized I wasn’t a second generation Abstract Expressionist,” she told writer Mimi Thompson. “I looked at the ingredients of what I was painting and felt an uncontrollable allegiance to subject matter, and to landscape in particular.”

In 1960, when she joined Tibor de Nagy, the Museum of Modern Art acquired her painting The Open Scene. She and John bought an old carriage house with a hayloft in Water Mill, Long Island, where they found themselves at the fulcrum of a community of artists, composers, and writers. The mercurial ocean light and expansive terrain that had drawn such predecessors as Thomas Moran gave Wilson a mutable subject that she would address for the next forty years. The Water Mill house became a Long Island Rue de Fleurus — a spirited gathering place for some the most important artists and intellectuals of the mid-20th century. A white wicker couch on the patio served as the set for Gruen’s group portraits, whose lively subjects remind me of the civic officers in Frans Hals’ banquet portraits — only tanned and happier — in their Lilly Pulitzer print sundresses and Ban-Lon polo shirts, holding cigarettes and iced beverages. John’s photographs document the halcyon days of camaraderie among creative friends, lovers (and rivals) including Jane Freilicher and Joe Hazan, Leonard and Felicia Bernstein, Stella Adler, Fairfield and Anne Porter, Frank O’Hara, Cornelia and Lukas Foss, Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale, Miriam Shapiro, and Paul Brach. For a while the two Janes painted together — facing each other, each doing her own work — in a bedroom in a rented house on Flying Point Road. Also born in 1924, Freilicher died the month prior to Wilson.

I love Wilson’s deceptively simple titles; they are saturated with meaning, and never contain more than they need to. The titles have a sonic/rhythmic pulse as they play with figures of speech. Call it a Day, Electric Midnight, and Torrid Day signal movement, and sum up twenty-four hours of weather or demanding work in a few choice words.

I worked with Jane Wilson at the National Academy where she served as president from 1992-94 (she was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters). In 2011, at her first exhibition at DC Moore’s downtown space (she had joined the gallery in 1999) I asked her how she felt about seeing her paintings in the bright halogen light of a Chelsea venue. Straightening her back at this question she said, “Well, Rebecca, your paintings have to stand up in any light!” Jane was genuinely interested in my own work and we talked about the challenge of painting things that were fleeting — atmosphere, for example. Now, whenever I pass the Pine Barrens on the Long Island Expressway and turn off at Manorville toward the Montauk Highway, it is forever a Jane Wilson sky.

Rebecca Allan is a painter. She will be the subject of a solo exhibition, Fjord/Mountain/River, at the Herron School of Art at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis, April 3–29, 2015. She is represented by Patricia McGrath in Bridgehampton.

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