CLOSING RECEPTION: Tuesday, September 6, 6-8 p.m.

Poets and painters strive to express the ineffable through color, gesture, beat, and meter. Li Young Lee’s poem, From Blossoms, unfolds the experiential to expose the sublime nature of a singular encounter with a dusty fruit of summer. So too can abstract painting reach deep within us, asking for more than what is physically there — not only the skin, but the shade, not only the sugar, but the days.

Painting is an impossible blossom, sometimes rising like smoke from a chimney, sometimes dropped at the doorstep like a mouse afterthe cat’s nighttime prowl—either way mysterious,life-affirming, and referential. It is cyclical like the seasons, declared dead, only to be reawakened by a new generation of seers wanting to live as if death were nowhere in the background.

This group of paintings from The New School Art Collection has no particular perspective, nor does it serve to illustrate a point other than the sheer possibility/impossibility of it all. Taken as a whole, however, they reveal the orchard we carry within us and collectively find sweet fellowship in the bin.

This exhibition features the work of: Rosemary Castoro, Moira Dryer, Cleve Gray, Emilio Rodriguez-Larrain, Shinro Ohtake, Roxy Paine, Jack Youngerman, and Kestutis Zapkus.

Curated by Eric Stark, Silvia Rocciolo, and Macushla Robinson