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We have essentially been off schedule since the heydays of COVID-19 and fighting to right the ship. I am well aware that this has caused a great deal of confusion with our audience, and although we have done our best to communicate with artists and subscribers over the past three years, the situation has been far from ideal. I am happy to say that we expect to be back on our normal release schedule by year’s end.

Issue #172 was juried by Jennifer Inacio, Associate Curator at the Perez Art Museum in Miami, FL. Her selections are reflective of her own predilections, but also tell us a lot about the history and culture of the South. I have commented on this numerous times over the years, but every time we re-engage with the South, I am struck by the unique character of the work produced there. Even in a time when we are all thinking “globally,” artists based in the South seem to tap into something unique to their region, both in terms of the subjects they choose to address and the ways in which they choose to address them. There is an immediacy and directness to much of the work you will find in the pages herein; put another way, many of the featured artists seem to privilege direct experience above conceptual maneuvering.

We have been fortunate enough to work with independent critic, writer and curator Michael Wilson on numerous occasions over the years. Because of a scheduling conflict,…

The question of scale has always been an important part of the business of both making and viewing paintings and drawings. Beyond straightforward considerations of size, however, ideas about how the isolation and exploration of specific, outwardly modest phenomena might intersect with and inform our perspectives on the wider world also come into play. Critical to the practices of many of the artists represented in this issue of New American Paintings are juxtapositions between personal memory and experiences with larger, overarching conditions and conflicts.

Justin Tyler Bryant, for example, here employs the ideas and aesthetics of cosmology—if cosmology can be said to have aesthetics, that is—to characterize the Black experience. While the paintings themselves, relatively small and possessed of a certain sweetness evocative of children’s book illustrations, appear modest, Bryant’s layering of cultural and historical references over images of the heavens produces a surprisingly expansive, even epic result in which different narratives collapse into one another like supermassive stars imploding into black holes.

For Lindy Cook, it is the small, quiet, often uncommunicated moments of childhood that continue to color the present day and the contemporary world at large. Although few experiences can be characterized as truly universal, the feelings evoked by early encounters with fabric surely come close; and Cook remembers with fondness the blanket forts common to many infancies, the look and homey feel of sheets on a washing line. In addition to drapery’s formal qualities—i.e. the ways in which it acts as a vessel for endlessly mutable…