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While a lot has changed over the years, Boston remains a small town with its own quirky, unflappable way of being. In terms of the arts, the city has always been an extremely strong supporter of the performing arts, while the fine arts have taken somewhat of a back seat, especially when it comes to contemporary art. We are lucky to have a clutch of world class art institutions in Boston and its immediate environs—the Museum of Fine Arts and the Institute of Contemporary Art, among them—yet the most forward thinking and interesting programming tends to happen at smaller institutions and non-profits. I am happy to say that under the curatorial leadership of this issue’s juror, Devon Zimmerman, we have another institution in proximity to Boston that has a lot of exciting things planned: the Ogunquit Museum of American Art (OMAA).

After spending four years at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, Devon joined the OMAA in early 2022 as Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, and he is quickly making his mark. As I write this, he has just opened the first institutional exhibition of much lauded painter Anthony Cudahy.

Devon’s passion for contemporary art was evident when I first met him in 2023, and I am extraordinarily impressed by him and his vision for the OMAA As juror for this issue, Devon did a superlative job of sifting through a bewildering amount of visual information and arriving at a group of artists who each have their distinct practices…

Artists working through and emerging from their graduate studies have been tasked with making sense of a world unmoored. The ongoing recurrences of political quagmires and social violence cloud paths forward in an eternal return of the same. Meanwhile, the climate crisis continues to careen evermore into the present. All these events stream image after image, endlessly, into lived experience, blurring the thin boundaries between the real and the virtual. Artists must navigate and contend with the vertigo of this present moment; art has long been a site where new imaginaries for living are transformed into real praxis.

The talented group of artists in this issue of New American Paintings gestures toward paths of rethinking. Their work expounds upon renewed approaches to engaging with the natural world; to constructing and being in space; and to reflecting on the body as a site of affect, memory, and resilience in the world. These paths all intersect and grapple with the ever-complicating forces of technology, history, and identity.

Painting has a long tradition of marshalling abstraction to channel more direct and affectual relations to the natural world. Among the artists selected, there is a strong impulse toward abstraction as a device to break down barriers between society and the environment. For one, Sabrina Piersol’s compositions undulate between the specificity of the flora and arid topography of Southwestern meadowlands and the billowing, contorting abstract forms that extend from and around them. The poetics of Piersol’s work activate a vital naturalism that is alive on…