more exhibition info coming soon…
WOMEN’S CAUCUS FOR ART PRESENTS PAIN POINTS: Bearing Witness in the Present Tense
WOMEN’S CAUCUS FOR ART PRESENTS
PAIN POINTS:
Bearing Witness in the Present Tense
April 15 – June 15, 2025
Virtual Opening Reception: Sunday, May 18
4:00 PM EST (via Zoom)
What happens when artists speak from the wound?
Curated by Allicette Torres and Amanda Banks
Installed by Amanda Banks
Exhibition Statement:
What emerged was not a scream but a frequency.
When we issued the open call for Pain Points, we anticipated an emotional wave. What we received was a controlled burn - deliberate, dimensional, and resonant.
These responses organized themselves, almost organically, into constellations. Some works pressed into the politicized body: anatomy, autonomy, grief, and resistance. Others mapped landscapes scarred by extraction, loss, or quiet reverence. Still others turned inward, offering reflections on disability, identity, and survival. What bound them was not the subject alone but the insistence to bear witness, not in fear but in firm presence.
The submissions revealed a chorus of urgent interiority, each one a node in the collective nervous system of our time. The artists did not scatter into abstraction or recoil in fear. They rooted themselves. Not chaos but clarity, grounded responses to grief, fracture, and longing emerged. Their works held the weight of personal testimony while echoing wider ruptures, inequity, erosion, and survival, tethering the intimate to the political without losing either.
We are living through a moment of dislocation, a hinge in time. There is a collective unease, less apocalypse than entropy, a sense that we are standing at the end of one order and the uncertain beginning of another. There is casual talk of Rome, declining empires, and strongmen and salutes resembling old terrors. What rises in the vacuum is something newer and colder: techno-feudalism, in which power is networked, opaque, and indifferent. It is in this air that artists are speaking.
Audre Lorde reminds us: “Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.” The works in Pain Points trace every contour of that cycle. They neither romanticize pain nor neutralize it. They allow it to speak, to clarify, to mark what matters.
María Lugones's theory of the coloniality of gender reminds us that systems of oppression are never siloed but braided. Likewise, Sara Ahmed’s work on the cultural politics of emotion tells us that pain is not simply personal. It circulates, attaches, moves, and sticks. The art in this exhibition enacts both of these truths: pain as structure and pain as motion.
What we witnessed in this collection of work was not fear but the metabolization of crisis, not a collapse but a recalibration. The artist’s role, still and always, is to transmute what feels impossible to carry. And they did.
These are our pain points. And also our coordinates forward.
Bibliography:
Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. https://pratiquesdhospitalite.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/245435211-sara-ahmed-the-cultural-politics-of-emotion.pdf
Lorde, Audre. Conversations with Audre Lorde. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004.
Lugones, María. “The Coloniality of Gender.” In Feminisms in Movement: Theories and Practices from the Americas, edited by Lívia De Souza Lima, Edith Otero Quezada, and Julia Roth. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2023. https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783839461020-002/html
***This exhibition contains images and themes that may disturb sensitive audiences. Viewer discretion is encouraged. ***
New Collage @ M Street Coffee
Original college work by Constance Culpepper will be on exhibition at M Street Coffee January to March 30, 2025.
Hours
Weekdays 7AM - 5PM
Weekends 8Am - 5PM
AHA Underground @ Jim Kempner Fine Art Presents City, Country, People
Opening Reception: Thursday June 27th, 6-8pm
Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10am-6pm & selected Sundays: 12-5pm
AHA Fine Art is pleased to present City, Country, People: a diverse exhibition featuring cityscapes, seascapes, landscapes, street scenes and the characters who inhabit them. Featured artists are Queen Andrea, Vincent Arcilesi, Rasoul Akhmatov, John Breiner, Constance Culpepper, Karl Helmholz, Gwyneth Leech, Roger Nelson, Nola Romano, Clio Smith, Mel Smothers, and Natalie Steigman-Gall. On view from June 20th to July 20th, 2024 at 501 W 23rd St. (lower level of Jim Kempner Fine Art, New York, NY) - this exhibition speaks to our yearning to find some balance between city and country life.
As Author Edmund White notes, “The observer is a prince who, wearing a disguise, takes pleasure everywhere”. The pleasures found in observation are key components of the work included in City, Country, People. Composed of paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, collage, and mixed media works, artists on view interpret and capture the far-reaching energy, tranquility and incandescent nature of the built and natural environments from the urban to the rural. The role that we take inhabiting and exploring the environments around us serve as a central theme of the exhibition.
Painted from his rooftop on Bowery Street, aka New York City’s iconic “the Bowery” - once home to many renowned and instrumental artists of the 20th and 21st centuries - Roger Nelson’s cityscape, Sunrise combines radiant and vibrant light entering the city and highlighting the Lower East Side's geometric and cylindrical architecture. The calm of the day’s beginning juxtaposes with the rising energy of the city itself, eliciting the frenetic spirit just emerging from the streets below.
In Hit me Now Bro’s on the Slip Stream, for the Playah Smokin’ the Weed, Karl Helmhoz combines art historical periods such as Abstraction, Surrealism, Fauvism and Expressionism, with street art and handwritten text. The composition includes text that reads, “...it’s been a minute since I’ve been in New York. Tall buildings and every thang., but that’s... Surrounded by steel, expensive stores, take out, E-Bikes, ...obsessed with tech...!” Helmhoz depicts a New York City dweller cavalierly smoking, poking fun at the hipster, while referencing the heat of the pavement, New York City bustle, the chess hustlers in Washington Square Park, and the murmurs and colorful sounds of people on stoops and street corners, conjuring the grit and vibrancy of the city while evoking the syncopated rhythms and lifestyles of the village’s iconic Beat poets.
Meanwhile, using color as her vehicle to explore nature, Clio Smith blends pastels, incandescent orange and yellows with bright kelly green and muted browns in Bodega Bay, California. With a nod to Impressionism, Smith’s plein air paintings take the viewer back and forth between tranquility and anticipation. The dried and stiff weeds sway against lush grass, evoking placid and tempestuous waters and the sensory textures of aromatic salt air and the mossy cushions present within the Earth’s bucolic landscapes. The jarring effects of encountering steaming urban potholes to languishing in the mesmerizing sunsets that beam down wide and narrow city sidewalks bring the contrasts of city life into high relief. Meanwhile the hazy pale afternoons of open fields recall times spent out in the open scenes of nature. Artworks on view actively invite the viewer to embark on a journey to interpret their own personal meanings found throughout City, County and People.
For more information and visuals, please contact Francesca Arcilesi, Norma Homberg and the AHA team at info@ahafineart.com.