Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2025/No. 239 i American Art Collector

Welcome to the September issue of American Art Collector! This issue brings you our Collector’s Focus: Landscapes and the Art Lovers Guide to Washington, D.C., and the Mid-Atlantic States. Focusing on a genre and a region each month allows us to take a deep dive into a specific genre and the soul of a region for your collecting pleasure. Recently, I gave a talk in Laguna Beach for the American Association of Interior Designers which has a membership of 13,500 professionals. For collectors, such as yourself, it is second nature to know art isn’t just decorative. In my talk, I said, “Original contemporary realism provides additional depth and character, giving the designer of the room more to build around, enhancing the emotional tone of the space.” That’s why we want…

Esteemed portrait artist Amy Sherald recently canceled a major solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. amid concerns about the censorship of a certain Sherald painting. The piece in question, Trans Forming Liberty, depicts a trans woman in a blue dress and pink hair (the colors of the transgender pride flag), holding a torch of flowers. The National Gallery allegedly proposed replacing the painting with a video of people reacting to the painting and discussing transgender issues. Sherald—best known for her commissioned portrait of Michelle Obama as well as her bold portrayals of Black and other minority figures—rejected the idea on the grounds that it would have included anti-trans views. Sherald and famed portraitist Kehinde Wiley are the first Black artists to have received presidential portrait…

The Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, Wisconsin, celebrates a milestone 50th anniversary of its Birds in Art exhibition, which takes place each fall the weekend after Labor Day. For five decades now, the annual exhibition has celebrated avian art with an exceptional collection of original paintings, sculpture and graphics by bird and wildlife artists across the world. The 50th annual exhibition will feature artworks by 102 artists selected by a panel of jurors, including international artists representing 16 countries, as well as 41 who have earned the museum’s Master Wildlife Artist status. Each artist has a passion for avian life and the ways in which these winged creatures connect us to the natural world. Participating artist Mary Cornish is known for her portrayals of “ugly” birds. “I think…

Judy’s in Bangor, Maine, is “home of the best omelet in town.” It’s been around long enough that one patron posted that Judy’s had been his father’s favorite restaurant when he was growing up, and he was wondering if maybe he was sitting on the same bar stool his father had sat on. Matthew Cornell “grew up on the road,” moving often when his Air Force father was reassigned and taking road trips in the family station wagon. Gazing out of the car window he observed the weather, the changing landscape and the roadside houses and businesses. “The constant moving has greatly influenced my new work,” he says. “I am searching for that elusive notion of where I come from and where I belong.” There’s a car passing Judy’s in…

In an exhibition opening in early fall, Principle Gallery will explore the concept of reality and imagination in visual arts, taking a closer look at the blurred borders between these ideas. Opening September 19, the show will feature a wide range of subjects by some of the foremost artists working today, including Anna Wypych, J Louis, Jeremy Mann, Geoffrey Johnson, Joseph Zbukvic, Scott Christensen and more. Mixed Realities will take place at Principle Gallery’s Alexandria, Virginia, location. “Realism is a broad term encompassing artistic approaches that emphasize the faithful representation of the visible world,” says gallery director Clint Mansell. “In contrast to pure abstraction, where forms are entirely divorced from recognizable subjects, realism remains rooted in the observable, even as it takes on many stylistic forms.” Mansell has invited artists…

For 20 years now, California artist Mitchell Johnson has been traveling to the East Coast to paint the idyllic island of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. (He’s been traveling abroad to Europe for far longer than that.) There have been two particularly important events in Johnson’s art career: his trips to France from 1989 to 1991, and his painting expedition to Cape Cod in 2005, which became an annual staple in the artist’s life. “The first time I painted at Truro on the Cape, I had just seen the 2005 Giorgio Morandi/Josef Albers exhibition in Bologna, Italy, and my work was changing from being somewhat impressionistic to being far more concerned with distinct areas of flat color,” Johnson reflects. “Morandi and Albers have long inspired me to make paintings about the mysteries…

Chelsie Nicole Contemporary has partnered with well-known realist painters David Kassan and Shana Levenson for the gallery’s first national juried art exhibition. As the jurors of the show, Kassan and Levenson selected a broad variety of paintings that best embodied show’s theme and title Unwavering Resolve. “We [were] looking for technical and conceptual balance,” explain Kassan and Levenson. “Great technique doesn’t always make a great painting…and concept doesn’t always come through without technique.” Among the featured artists is Annie Murphy Robinson, who will be showing her charcoal The Parlor, which captures in great detail the nuances of a young girl’s expression and dress in gradients of light and shadow. Robinson employs a rare process that uses sandpaper as a medium to embed dry material (charcoal and occasionally pastel) into heavy…

A realist painter based in Monterrey, Mexico, Jeannine Zambrano works primarily in oil and watercolor. Her work is inspired by the quiet beauty of everyday life. “The poetry in objects we often overlook,” she says. With a background in graphic design and years of study and mentorship in fine art, Zambrano has developed a practice rooted in observation, emotion and intention. Within her artwork, she explores themes of nature, resilience and the stories that exist beneath familiar things. “Painting is my way of connecting with myself. For me, realism is not just technical, it’s a way to honor and share the beauty I see in the world,” says the artist. Among her recent paintings is Sugar Crush, depicting two smashed Coca-Cola cans in front of a glass of soda. “The…

Every issue of American Art Collector is a showcase of the foremost contemporary realism being created today, but I was particularly impressed and inspired by the level of talent, skill and vision of the artists inside the September magazine. Our features alone are testament to this, and encapsulate the diverse expressions of creativity that can be found across the magazine in its entirety. We have Randall Rosenthal who creates hyper-realistic sculptures out of a single block of pine that make you shake your head in disbelief, which, like a magician, is exactly his intent. He makes wood look so much like paper, he’s overheard people surmise that it’s the other way around, that he’s made paper look like wood. His creativity extends beyond the works themselves. Out of necessity, he…

On view through October 26, the Customs House Museum & Cultural Center in Clarksville, Tennessee, presents The Forever House, an exhibition showcasing the works of award-winning watercolorist Arline Mann. The show highlights paintings by Mann that shed light on “a magical place—Elder Mountain (near Chattanooga), and the stone house built on the mountain around 1923 by George Elder with materials from that mountain—the first home erected there after the Cherokee were marched out in the 1840s on the Trail of Tears.” Mann’s paintings are displayed among historic photographs of Elder House and Elder Mountain, with text relating the history of both.…

Jeremy Bradshaw has long understood how his fascination with wildlife was forged and fostered over the course of his life and career. As a boy in rural California, he passed the time chasing frogs, snakes and other critters, and tending the chickens, rabbits and cows on his grandparents’ farm, which led him to working, exploring and flyfishing in the Sierra Nevada mountains as a young adult. His ever-deepening connection to the creatures of the natural world turned his attention to falconry, an art form he has practicing for the past three decades. When Bradshaw picked up another art form, sculpture, roughly eight years ago, it was no surprise that his bronzes would take the shape of wildlife, from the tiniest of birds to the biggest of beasts, and everything in…

The Gallery at Tree’s Place in Orleans, Massachusetts, prepares for a mighty celebration of the still life genre in the show Beauty in Stillness, highlighting five of the gallery’s most accomplished still life painters. Collectors will have a chance to see fresh work by Yun Wei, Leah Lopez, Maryann Lucas, Barbara Efchak, as well as available pieces by the late painter Robert Douglas Hunter. “Although each is unique in style and approach, they do share a similar thread,” says gallery director Hannah Conway. “Each artist is memorializing a single moment in time to be everlasting. In this fast-track whirlwind time we live in, still-life allows us to take pause and be present. They enable us to appreciate what is directly in front of us, when time stands still. That in…

Tula Telfair has always been fascinated by “the concept that we as humans have to label everything. Nature doesn’t label itself.” The Portuguese Nobel Prize-winning writer José Saramago observed, “It seems you don’t understand that words are the labels we stick on things, not the things themselves, you’ll never know what the things are really like, nor even what their real names are, because the names you gave them are just that, the names you gave them…” The Morris Museum in Morristown, New Jersey, is hosting the exhibition TULA TELFAIR: NATURE Does Not Locate Itself through October 5. The exhibition features 33 canvases from 2014 to the present, including the monumental 72-by-119-inch Wilderness Does Not Locate Itself. Telfair locates herself on the faculty of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, where…

This fall the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) presents a solo exhibition of richly layered, photography-based works by Tawny Chatmon. In Tawny Chatmon: Sanctuaries of Truth, Dissolution of Lies, the artist uses stylistic languages drawn from historical decorative motifs and potent African American cultural markers to create lush and strikingly powerful portraits that challenge racism and erasure. The exhibition features more than 25 large-scale photographs from recent series dating from 2019 to the present. This is the artist’s first museum exhibition in Washington, D.C. and will be on view from October 15, 2025, to March 8, 2026.…

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Secrets to the bright cheer of Chad Little’s paintings are hidden in the light choreography of their composition as a slow dance of colors and nuclear age nostalgia. Beautiful women are posed against stripes, spots and candied patterns, or under floating shadows cast by the midday sun in the golden 50s. Many of them are pleasant, gently erotic fantasies of female figures isolated against simple, photo-studio cycloramas or patterned backgrounds, never naked, but always sensual. These artificial spaces create a mood of simplicity and safe confinement, a mood of swimsuits, sex and sedatives. Until recently, Little has limited his subject to vintage photos, preferring pictures of a slim model’s body, often wrapped in a skintight costume and set in empty space, sometimes decorated in the polka dots and patterns of…

While Sean Diediker’s upcoming solo show is in line with the artist’s style of combining a traditional approach with an impressionistic application, he has implemented a new approach that leaves more up to chance. The aptly titled show, New Directions, featuring dream-like landscapes and figurative scenes, marks a shift for the artist as he overhauls his process and techniques for larger format paintings. “The overall theme of the show, in a way, is about scale, not just physical, but internal—testing the boundaries of what a familiar process can become when pushed in a new direction,” Diediker explains. “One of the most important elements in this new body of work is the role of chance—specifically in the underpainting stage. I’ve deliberately let go of many academic conventions during this phase, allowing…

Jivan Lee did not set out to be an artist. Though he studied painting at Bard College, he first pursued a career in environmental policy. He was coordinating educational intitiatives with the University of New Mexico in Taos when he started to feel a pull back to the arts. “Art landed with students in a way that didn’t require arm-twisting,” he remembers. “That’s when I started thinking, what if the artistic process could help us relate to complex social and environmental issues?” Lee recommitted himself to painting, and eventually left his environmental policy work behind. His latest show is Uplift at Altamira Fine Art in Jackson, Wyoming, and it takes a close look at New Mexico’s monsoon season. “Usually it takes me a long time to come up with a…

The golden hour, that beloved time at dawn and dusk when the sun’s warm, diffuse light transforms the world into a place of breathtaking beauty, is the inspiration behind Kathleen Hudson’s latest series of paintings, which she will be showing this month at FoR Fine Art in Whitefish, Montana. “It’s my favorite time to paint,” says Hudson. “I really like the contrast between dark and light, and how the long shadows make interesting shapes. There is a lot more warmth in the light, and then these blues and purples in the shadows that contrast with the yellows. It sets up a natural drama between the warm sunlight versus the cooler values of the shadows.” This new body of work marks something of a departure for Hudson, a distinguish plein air…

Watercolorist Carmella Tuliszewski started out working for Hallmark as a greeting card illustrator, working primarily in gouache and acrylic. Years later, she discovered the medium of watercolor and decided to sharpen her skills as a fine artist working with a challenging (and often underappreciated) medium. Since then she’s received numerous accolades, including signature status with the National Watercolor Society and the Watercolor Honor Society. In addition, her work has been published in Splash: The Best of Watercolor, issues 18, 20, 21, 24, 25 and 26. Featuring bright and vivid colors, Tuliszewski’s florals and still lifes capture the clarity and transparency for which the watercolor medium is best known. Her recent piece Oculus is a top down view of red, orange and magenta dahlias in a glass vase. “The complexities of…

“The inspiration for my work has been rooted in the same essential concept since the start of my career,” says artist Blair Atherholt. “I believe still life is an immensely powerful and moving genre by which, if they approach their subject correctly, an artist is able to elevate commonplace objects to a new echelon of drama and distinction.” Atherholt sees the subjects of his paintings—common pieces of fruit, translucent bunches of grapes, battered metal vessels, and dusty, forgotten glass bottles—as objects of great significance. “As often-overlooked bastions of a distant time and place, each with their own story to tell,” he says. Atherholt received classical atelier training at the Schuler School of Fine Arts in Baltimore, Maryland, where he gained an appreciation for the works of the Old Masters. “This…

1&2 Bruce Lurie Gallery sells Geoffrey 1&2 Gersten painting at Hamptons Fine Art Fair “A client based in the Hamptons expressed interest in Geoffrey Gersten’s Vogue Beach after receiving our preview [of works we were bringing to the July show],” shares Bruce Lurie. “He later viewed the piece in person at the Hamptons Fine Art Fair and was immediately taken with it, though initially unsure about its placement within his space. After creating a series of mockups to explore potential settings, he felt confident in the fit and ultimately acquired the work.” In another exciting recent sale, a client’s interest was piqued by Michael Gorman’s mixed media paintings, “which sparked a thoughtful dialogue about the most suitable subject matter for his collection and his budget,” Lurie explains. “This led to…