Contents
184
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Issue

184

South - Jun 2026

Editor's Note

For Issue #184, juror Angelica Arbelaez, Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the High Museum of Art, selected a group of artists whose work reflects the wide-ranging and dynamic nature of contemporary painting today. 

Her choices highlight a diverse spectrum of aesthetic approaches, emphasizing the many ways artists are expanding and redefining the possibilities of the medium.

Since 1994, New American Paintings has pursued a clear mission: to provide artists with meaningful opportunities to present their work to a wider audience. In an art world often focused on a narrow range of voices, we believe there is a vast landscape of talent still waiting to be discovered. Today, I am proud to introduce our new website, the result of three years of development. The new newamericanpaintings.com serves both as an archive of the publication’s history and as a foundation for our growing digital future.

Artists have always been at the center of New American Paintings, and this site reflects that commitment. It stands as a tribute to the thousands of artists we’ve had the privilege to work with over the years. Since our founding, more than 6,000 artists have been featured in the publication, and each now has a dedicated page on the site. For the first time, alumni can manage their own profiles—updating biographical information and, importantly, adding new work whenever they choose—allowing them to keep our audience engaged with their evolving practice.

We’re also excited to introduce two major new features. The first is our Digital Magazine. Rather than simply replicating the print edition online, we’ve created a more immersive and dynamic reading experience. To celebrate its launch, the two most recent issues, #182 and #183, will be available free for…

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Finzi

Jurors Comments

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Angelica Arbelaez

Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art

High Museum of Art, Atlanta

The featured artists in this issue of New American Paintings collectively reflect the expansive possibilities of contemporary painting through varied aesthetic approaches and conceptual interests. Figurative painting remains a prominent genre in the work of artists such as Connor Dolan, María Korol, and Ayana Ross, among others, while novel explorations of abstraction are seen in paintings by Angie Jennings, Wayson R. Jones, and Alexandra McGowan. Elsewhere, Ernesto Gutiérrez Moya and Jonathan "Radbwa Faroush" Mayers draw on mythology to conjure surreal landscapes, and artists like Harrison Haynes and Laura Tanner expand the language of painting using collage techniques. Together, these 35 painters demonstrate an exceptional breadth of artistic practices that underscores the iterative nature of painting. Yet despite these wide-ranging bodies of work, a more focused thread emerges among several artists through their engagement with the uncanny.

In his essay The Uncanny (1919), Sigmund Freud notes that “the ‘uncanny’ is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.” Simply put, this framework describes the experience of something seemingly ordinary becoming strange and unfamiliar. It offers a means through which to consider how these painters destabilize recognition and memory. Across their respective practices, domestic spaces are altered and unsettled; shifts in perspective cause everyday objects to take on a peculiar quality; vernacular and found photographs serve as points of departure to evoke unease; and post-internet strategies further amplify pictorial estrangement by reflecting on the mediated nature of contemporary visual culture.

Domestic spaces, shaped…

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Ross

Juror Selections

Blythe Armstrong

Woman with curly hair and scarf looking to the side, in black and white.

b. 2005 Coral Springs, FL
lives in Boynton Beach, FL

People in historical costumes gathered under trees, with a grand building in the background.
Historian as Ghostoil on canvas, 72 x 60 inches
Woman in a white dress speaks to a crowd from a stage, with a boy standing beside her.
Joseph Warren’s Speech on the Boston Massacreoil on canvas, 24 x 16 inches

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