August 03, 2021, 3:19pm

ARTIST SPOTLIGHT: Kimberly Brooks

Written by Michael Wilson

The sky fades from a deep red-brown down to a dusty pink above an indistinct horizon. Mountains slope down to a valley, their surfaces muted shades of orange and ochre marked by patches of more strident mustard yellow and wine red. Areas of dirty blue-green denote a river flowing between them—or perhaps this is nothing more than a mirage, a side effect of the crepuscular light. In the center of the scene, a broad, diagonal stroke in shades of vegetal green sweeps up and to the right before coming to an abrupt halt. Occupied by its own distinct scene, it suggests a portal into another landscape altogether—or perhaps the same site at a different point in time. The mysterious interruption pulls the rug from under the onlooker’s feet, disrupting the comfortable illusion of a single, unified subject and reminding us of the confusions and conflations that painting necessarily entails. We’re looking at something that is at once modest and expansive, materially real and an absolute illusion, figurative and abstract.

Kimberly Brooks, Red Canyon, 2021, oil on panel, 20 x 16 inches

March 31, 2020, 2:02pm

NAP on View: COVID-19 Affected Exhibitions

The COVID-19 crisis is changing all of our lives in ways that we could not have imagined even a month ago. The art world, which is always a fragile ecosystem, is already feeling the strain as museums, art fairs, galleries and myriad other organizations have been forced to close, or cancel upcoming events. This is, unfortunately, only the beginning. Once the economic dusts settles, artists, and those who spend their lives supporting their efforts, are in for a bumpy ride. 

Over the coming weeks, we at New American Paintings will be using our creativity and platform to help promote the work and efforts of artists around the country. Artists can spend months, and sometimes years, preparing for exhibitions, and the galleries that support them dedicate vast amounts of time and resources to making those exhibitions happen. Here is a sampling of exhibitions by New American Paintings alumni that are being impacted by the COVID-19 crisis.

-- Steven Zevitas, Founder and Editor in Chief 

1. Britton Tolliver (Pacific Coast #139): Luis de Jesus Los Angeles

installation view, courtesy of the artist and Luis de Jesus Los Angeles

December 17, 2019, 6:09pm

NAP TAKE OVER: Art Basel Miami Beach

As we trade in our bathing suits for winter coats, we take a look back at the 71 NAP alumni that took over Miami Art Week this year.  No matter whether you were strolling down a long aisle at Untitled, turning a corner at NADA, or scooting around celebrities at Art Basel, there were NAP stars at every turn.  To see so many old and new friends making waves warms our hearts more than fuzzy socks and boots could ever warm our toes.  

Congratulations to all of our NAP family! Keep scrolling to see the -we repeat- *71* NAP artists on view: 

ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH:

Devan Shimoyama (NAP #116 and #105)
Courtesy of Kavi Gupta.

March 15, 2019, 4:37pm

Personal Stars: Maia Cruz Palileo at Monique Meloche Gallery

She has finally come, born across centuries and oceans and the yawning gaps of the pied world hewn for us and by us from the flesh and bone of the Earth, across the ragged expanse—flesh hanging like foliage, necrotic, mycological and un-healing as the hearts of men (men especially, here, not “men” as the priapic stand-in for all humankind, which is a fucked up way to think and really truly indicative of the kind of men we are being dealt with here, men who happen upon a glorious verdant chain drawn across the vicious expanse which hides in it the horrors of our world, the planet's calid sacred heart, the shifting red, the immolating ring born on the Jovian finger of the true ruler who we have betrayed, just like we're betraying each other, or more specifically in this case these men are betraying each other), the men whose claret-caked hands have driven the bayonet, twist the aperture far beyond the fibrin, wipe clean the entrails and drive forward again—and she has freed, has excised, has extricated the men's targets, with a deific scalpel, debridement as deliverance, from the burdens of white men, from the alien words which fall hard, knocking teeth over like tombstones—cultural vandalism!, vandalism-cum-conquest, petty and political, in the sense of all structures being re-sorted, the scaffold a literal skeleton—as they drop like a bird kill; has cut them free of the white cloth which is the funeral veil of their own humanity, the very backdrop to the cruel slavery of scare quote science before which they pose dead on and in profile, the twin portraits of prisoners and objects, and placed them instead in the tabula rasa of a sympathetic and empathetic framer …