Sara Nightingale Gallery

Born in the Philippines and forced to emigrate due to political unrest in her early teens, Rose Cameron is now a full-time artist based in New York City and Sag Harbor, NY. She earned a bachelor’s degree in Art History and Fine Arts from Rutgers University and worked in advertising, marketing, and fashion prior to re-discovering her love of fine art. The mixed media works in Cameron’s ongoing “Interwoven States” series, inspired by memories of her early years in the Philippines, harness the tension between what she is compelled to reveal and what she chooses to conceal. As a displaced person, she was pressured to deny her identity to prevent discrimination in her new world. In this series, the artist’s journey to reconnect with her lost past draws on the rituals, people, language, and colors of her native land.

Perry Burns received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1988. Since then he has been making paintings that merge the traditions of Middle Eastern patterns and European tapestries with abstract expressionism. Burns' focus is on color, shape, line, mark, texture and pattern. “I do not want to reproduce the visible; I want to create an experience of perception.” Burns has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Islip Art Museum, as well as the Parrish Art Museum. His work is held in numerous private collections.

Robin Koffler is a New York based artist and designer. Her artistic roots trace back to a career in graphic design, illustration, and jewelry design.

Her paintings blend abstract realism with an Impressionist color palette. Robin’s technique of breaking down forms into shapes, color, and light allows her to experiment within her landscapes, colorful florals, and expressive figures.

Robin studied at the The University of Michigan, The School of Visual Arts, National Academy, and The Art Students League.

My paintings capture the energy of our seagrass habitats within our oceans. I paint the atmosphere, light , beauty, life and loss of these delicate ecosystems. My paintings are a type of “documentation” of these fast declining habitats. My hope is to bring about a greater awareness and appreciation for the protection of these fragile meadows. My gestural abstractions fuse bold marks and unusual color combinations, with drawn elements. I love working with charcoal line as it’s own entity and we’ve it throughout the painting process. I like to leave traces of previous marks and colors to show through. I begin each painting with thin washes of diluted oil colors, I let them dry, and like water color, I layer the next set of colors. Lines are drawn and erased as new shapes emerge. These initial washes inform the direction of the painting. The layers also remind me of how I experience our ever changing oceans.

As a process painter, I respond to relationships. It could be the relationship of one group of colors next to another. Or the relationship of a bold painted mark next to a thinly drawn charcoal line. These contrasts are akin to how I experience our seagrass habitats; full of diversity. The oceans are a sacred place for me, filled with beauty. Helping restore seagrass ecosystems has allowed me to slow down and observe the intricate patterns in nature. For example, I’m mesmerized by the swirling patterns the seagrass makes on the surface of the water, every time it is different. It’s exciting to watch the patterns tiny minos make as they swim by. I love the richness of diversity of life in seagrass meadows. Each time I help with restoration efforts, I see so many delicate relationships all happening simultaneously. It is amazing how a green crab can shuffle across the sand, while tiny shrimp dart across and pipe fish hide between the seagrass blades. The contrast of marine animals, large and small shapes, colors and lines that exist in these meadows all inform my paintings through memory and lived experience. Volunteering with ecologists has awakened a deeper understanding of our oceans for me. The tactile experiences of replanting seagrass also comes back into my paintings as textural marks. My paintings have contrasting surfaces sometimes glazed flat areas are contrasted with raised impasto areas similar to how I experience these habitat.

We are losing two football fields of eelgrass every hour. This means less oxygen for us, less shoreline protection, less food for the marine animals, and less protein for us. The future of our seagrass habitats depends on how we protect and take care of our oceans. Seagrass brings with it so many ecosystem benefits; sequestering CO2, coastal flood protection, and being home to many marine animals. I’m interested in the interconnectedness between plant, animal and human life. My work explores the richness and beauty found in seagrass meadows.

Connecticut based Allison Meyler holds a BA in Studio Art + Art History from Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA and attended the Tyler School of Art Study Abroad Program in Rome, Italy. Her work focuses on the female figure and, more recently, on a series of flower paintings.

Lois Bender’s paintings of nature-based abstractions combine the French traditional art of stenciling, pochoir, with printmaking techniques. Employing other mediums as well, such as drawing, watercolor, and photography, Bender’s work expresses her love of nature and desire to advocate on its behalf.

Bender holds a BA from Hunter College and an MFA from Boston University. She has attended residencies in France, Skowhegan, and the Women’s Studio Workshop. She is an Adjunct Art Professor at Essex County College in Newark, NJ.

Monica Banks’ sculptures of miniature porcelain figures depict organic forms on the threshold between life and death or replicas of the deceased. Her “domestic monuments” to suffering and lifeless creatures suggest narratives addressing the mass graves of major disaster sites, both natural and man-made, in which human forms are numerous and anonymous.

Banks’ figures are presented on porcelain cakes and cake stands, which serve as tributes to the “victims” and stem from her empathy for her subjects. The cakes also explore themes of consumption, ephemerality and craft, as well as gender roles in the home. Banks’ assemblages of tiny “abject pottery” serve as humble artifacts of domesticity - archeological remnants of family, food and love.

Monica Banks lives and works in East Hampton, NY. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Parrish Art Museum, The Islip Art Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art at U Mass, Amherst, and The Catherine Konner Sculpture Park. She has exhibited at White Box, the Center for Architecture in NYC, The Carriage House at the Islip Art Museum, the Heckscher Art Museum, among other venues. She created “ Faces: Times Square,” a block-long sculpture which stood in Times Square from 1996-2009, for which she won an award from the NYC Public Design Commission. Her permanent public works are located in the Bronx, Binghamton NY, and Charlotte NC. She has been exhibiting sculpture and creating site-specific installations since 1989.

Stephanie Brody-Lederman is a New York based painter, book artist and sculptor whose mixed media works combine visual imagery with words.

Brody-Lederman has had solo exhibitions at Guild Hall Museum in East Hampton, NY, Islip Art Museum, East Islip, NY and Musée Bourdelle in Paris. Public collections include the Museum of Modern Art, NY and the Cooper-Hewitt Museum. Among the grants and awards Brody-Lederman has received are: New York Foundation for the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Center, Artist’s Space, Percent for Art, SOS Grant, Hassam ad Speicher Award, The National Academy of Art Purchase Award, NYFA/ NEA LINE Grant, Ariana Foundation for the Arts Grant, and an E.D. Founding Grant. In 2015 she was a semi-finalist for the Basil H. Alkazzi Award for Excellence in painting. In 2017, she won first place in Guild Hall's 70th Anniversary members show. She continues to make and exhibit work both nationally and internationally.

Darlene Charneco is a mixed media artist whose three-dimensional mappings, “memorypalaces”, and tactile “weaves” explore ways of seeing our dwellings, our communities, and our evolving sensory perceptions as part of a larger organism’s growth state. Charneco is the current William Steeple Davis Trust Artist-in-Residence. She was awarded top honors at the 2020 Guild Hall Museum Members Exhibition, and will be presenting a Parrish Road Show site specific solo exhibition in 2020 (date and location TBD). She was a 2019 Artist-in-Residence at the Southampton Art Center’s Takeover exhibition.

Charneco’s interest lies in the history and future of communication - how messages and memories are shared through time. Braille, cuneiform and other types of alphabets informed her early work, and she has since been hammering nails into wood panels to create “manuscripts, grids, maps and microcosms” that explore the subtle layers of language and information surrounding us.

Nuala Clarke's multi-media practice includes painting and drawing as well as video and installation. Her work "concerns the organization of space and how it is intrinsically connected to time." An abiding fascination with the sea, wave action, sea gods and mariners informs her work, as does her relationship with the coast of Ireland. Humor and loss also figure into her work.

Clarke was born in Dublin and received a BA in Fine Art Painting from the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. She moved to New York City in 1993 and in September 2007 received a fellowship to the Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Mayo. She began returning to Ireland to work every year, until In 2013 she moved back full time to the West of Ireland.

Clarke has exhibited at SFMoMa, San Francisco, Hamilton Gallery, Sligo, The National Museum Of Ireland, the Royal Hibernian Academy, and Linenhall Arts Centre, among other venues.

Rose Marie Cromwell is a photographic and video artist whose work explores the effects of globalization on human interaction and social politics. She is interested in the tenuous space between the political and the spiritual.

Cromwell’s series, El Libro Supremo de la Suerte (The Supreme Book of Luck), shot while she lived and worked in Havana, is evidence of the artist’s intimacy with the city, its people and their rituals, but it's also a documentation of her own coming of age. In Cromwell’s photographs, the city of Havana we think we recognize is difficult to find, iconic vistas foregone in favor of an exploration of complex subjectivity. With the photogenic capital tucked behind corners or used only as backdrop, it’s the Cubans with whom Cromwell established relationships who take center stage. Or rather, Cubans and their luck, as the series title refers to a book that inventories everyday objects and experiences - 83 is “daily problems,” 93 stands for “revolution,” 1 corresponds to “horse”—which can be applied to a local under-the-radar lottery system. In exploring the visual connections between numbers—exact and absolute units of measurements—and the mystical, wayward ways of luck, as embodied by locals performing for her camera, Cromwell offers a lyric homage to Cuba, the place that’s shaped her practice and that continues defying expectations and interpretations.

Cromwell has been awarded a number of residencies and awards including a Fulbright Fellowship and a Lightwork Residency.  She was named one of "25 under 25 Up and Coming American Photographers" by PowerHouse Books and The Center for Documentary Studies in 2008, and named one of “15 Photographers to Watch” by the Telegraph in 2014, and "25 Captivating Photographers" by the FADER in 2016 . Her first solo show was at the Diablo Rosso gallery in Panama City, and she participated in the 1st Bienale del Sur in Panama City. Cromwell will have a solo show at Antithesis in Panama City this summer. "El Libro Supremo de la Suerte" was recently shortlisted for the MACK First Book Award.

Cromwell’s work has been published online and in print in a variety of international magazines, including the 2014, 2015, 2016 Vice Photography Issues, Camera Austria, Time Lightbox, ARC Magazine, Musee Magazine, The Oxford American, and The New Yorker's Instagram. Cromwell is a founder of Cambio Creativo, an alternative arts education initiative based in Panama; and a member of Estudio Nuboso. She has taught at the International Center of Photography, Syracuse University, and at the Aperture Foundation.

Cara Enteles’ paintings explore the impossibility of symmetry, order and exactness in nature. Drawing from Shakespeare’s line in Hamlet, “art holds a mirror up to nature”, she seeks to illustrate the dichotomy between organic, natural growth and the human gardener's attempt to control it. An avid gardener herself, Enteles splits her time between New York City and the Catskills, where access to the surrounding wilderness informs her work.

Enteles has long addressed environmental issues that plague our natural world: oil spills, colony collapse disorder, and fracking are some examples. Her paintings allude to circumstances in which human activity threatens nature, yet the work is neither sententious nor moralistic. In fact, the casual observer will find a collection of beautiful paintings of plants and animals, albeit with an unusual sheen in the surrounding water or an emphasis on “alternative pollinators” should the honey bees become extinct.

Because she paints on industrial supports, aluminum panels or layers of plexiglas often bolted to the wall, Enteles’ works contain an inherent tension between the organic subject matter depicted and the materials with which they are constructed. Birds, butterflies, bees and flowers set against a backdrop of reflective material literally hold a mirror to nature, while gold-toned plexiglas backings on her pollination paintings evoke pollen. The transparency that plexiglas affords provides a means for three-dimensional representation - Enteles paints on both sides of the plexiglas - further reinforcing the realistic and imperative nature of her concerns.

Enteles received her BFA from Parsons School of Design. She exhibits internationally and her work is held in private and public collections including Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Microsoft and WilmerHale. She has exhibited at Wave Hill, The HVCCA and The Islip Art Museum.

Margaret Garrett's abstract paintings capture the elusive qualities of rhythm and movement. Born in North Carolina and raised in Pennsylvania, she grew up training to be a dancer and, at the age of sixteen, left home to join the Pennsylvania Ballet. She later danced with the Cleveland Ballet as a soloist. In her early twenties she discovered painting, finding something spiritually akin to dance in the movement of line and color.

"When I begin work on a new piece, I see the paper or canvas as an empty stage and the line as movement. Texture, form, the way colors interact are all different manifestations of motion, rhythm, and energy."

Garrett often works in ongoing series, developing a language and following it as it morphs and evolves. Her Tuning Fields series, now numbering over 300, uses line-driven layers of color to create loose, yet formal, fields of motion that are abstract but also reference shapes and patterns found in nature. In her Choros series of paintings, collages and woodblock prints, the central preoccupation is with an interplay of shapes that have a solid, even muscular, form to convey a sense of motion and choreography. Journal is ongoing series of paintings that use gesture and layers of acrylic wash to reflect the season and place of each painting.

Margaret Garrett's work has been exhibited across the United States and is held in several museum collections including Guild Hall Museum and the Parrish Art Museum. Her work is also held in numerous private and corporate collections. She lives and works in Shelter Island, NY.

Melora Griffis weaves a female voice through multi-media narratives that depict the dramatic and mine the psychological. Her background in theater and performance art, alongside her fine art studio practice, allows for an "intuitive occupancy of interior worlds." Form is found and destroyed in a process of transformation. Chaos is often the main event, but Griffis employs her delicate, yet also rugged, sensibility to resolve her compositions, while delivering open-ended perspectives of her subjects.

Griffis received a BFA from The Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has received fellowships from Le Moulin à Nef, Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus, the Constance Saltonstall Foundation, Schloss Pluschow, The Edward Albee Foundation, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She has written, designed, choreographed/directed, and performed in, over a dozen performance art works in New York City and abroad.

Steven Kinder's recent work reveals his fascination with dynamic tension and movement found in nature. Tornadoes, tidal pools, sunbursts, black holes, combustion, organic symmetry and fractals are among the sources of these deeply saturated and mostly large-scale works. Kinder’s drawings/ paintings - there are elements of both mediums in each work - employ raw pigment, acrylic, pencil and crayon to express the radiant vitality of the natural forces that inspire him.

In his series, the burden, Kinder explores the survival systems and symbols of the homeless. Invisibility, fear, abandonment, levels of despair and street survival are brought to light by recurring motifs such as a woman's hunched body, a cross, a cup, a cardboard sign and a stained glass window. Taken individually, each has its own powerful resonance, but together they describe a narrative of transcendence, pain, systems of commodity and exchange, institutional abandonment, and redemption.

Steven Kinder is a multi-media artist who lives and works in NYC. He attended Cooper Union, and has been making paintings, sculpture, works on paper and “tarps" for over 40 years.

Yuliya Lanina is a Russian- born American multimedia artist who lives and works in Austin, TX. She aspires to transform the traditional medium of painting into a multi-dimensional and interactive experience for the viewer. Employing surreal imagery to elicit feelings of uneasiness and empathy, Lanina paints and collages bizarre characters that come to life through mechanization, animation, and music. These fantastical creatures are by definition otherworldly, yet they often feel personal and familiar. Greek mythology, with its half-human and half-animal demigods, informs her work, as do Russian fairy tales. Fantastic beings deeply rooted in paganism, mysticism, and symbolism populate her often illogical narratives.

Christian Little’s acrylic paintings on wood panel examine a voyeur culture preoccupied with sex, drama and the lives of others. The works are simultaneously voyeuristic and participatory, erotic and sterile, stiff and fluid, analytic and absurd.

Little’s Exhibitionists paintings, which depict human “sculptures” on top of pedestals, reference shunga, Japanese erotic prints from the 18th Century. But while most shunga contain sexually explicit imagery, Little’s Exhibitionists create sexual innuendo through the use of abstraction and an elaborate combination of painting styles.

The "look at me" culture’s addiction to oversharing is intimated in the format of the paintings; their square shapes mimic Instagram posts and profile images. 

Little challenges the dimensional limitations of traditional painting with his use of trompe l’oeil and decorative painting techniques, using paint self-consciously to address painting’s history. Faux finishing techniques and simulated textures act as visual anchors, alluding to the material world as well as the virtual and imagined.

Christian Little lives and works in Kingston, NY. He earned his BFA ('05) and MFA ('15) in Painting/Drawing from SUNY New Paltz. He has exhibited at Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Projects in Long Island City and The Kingston Museum of Contemporary Art in Kingston, NY. Recent solo shows include The Silent Barn in Brooklyn, NY and The Hewn Arts Center in Jersey City, NJ.

Christa Maiwald earned an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1973 and moved to New York shortly thereafter, establishing herself as a video artist with solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Anthology Film Archives, Holly Solomon Gallery and Franklin Furnace, among others. In 1979 Maiwald was included in the Whitney Biennial.

After a detour into screenwriting, she resumed her career as a fine artist with paintings, sculpture, installations, and since 2000, embroidery and photography. Recent bodies of work include “Cake Performances”, in which she feeds gallery attendees freshly baked confections, while exhibiting photographs of the cakes taken outdoors in natural settings. Her embroideries, mostly narrative portraits, juxtapose the dainty, feminine “craft” of sewing with politically charged and often difficult subject matter. Dictators and heads of state, for example, who have become notorious for their brutality, are rendered in bright hues on little girl’s party dresses.

Maiwald works in conceptually integrated series that explore human interactions and relationships. Each iteration of a particular theme reinforces the repetitive nature of that human behavior, and more often than not, it is bad behavior being referenced. Wordplay and verbal puns allow Maiwald to spotlight social injustice and human folly. She sews obsessively by hand, documenting the transgressions of public figures, celebrities and ordinary people who are flawed, vulnerable and human.

Maiwald had a solo exhibition at Guild Hall in East Hampton, NY in 2013. Her embroideries and photographs have been shown internationally, including at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City, Galerie Houg in Lyon, France, the Parrish Art Museum, the Heckscher Museum of Art, and the Florence Lynch Gallery. Her work, “The Cake and I”, is held in the permanent collection of the Parrish Art Museum.

Alexis Martino’s photographs read easily as film stills. Working with young adult “collaborators”, she creates narrative tension between past occurrences and future ones, reality and fiction, horror and delight. Her storytelling often reveals a sense of unease, longing or anticipation. The works comprise a collective coming of age story gone rogue.  

Martino lives and works in Shelter Island, NY.

Kim Romero’s abstract paintings grow out of her personal visual experiences, many of which are memories and adventures associated with coastal living. Waves and waterfronts, as well as hydrangeas - the plant most often associated with summer on the Northeast Coast - serve as her inspiration. Using a large brush and a palette knife, Romero alternates between thick pigmented and thin watery textures, layering as the paintings take form. The shapes created take on the structure and “bones” of the piece.

Romero’s work is tactile and painterly, eliciting emotional triggers that bring joy, promote thought and calm the mind. In each final composition she hopes to evoke the feelings and awareness specific to a viewer’s personal memory or reflection.

Daina Mattis creates large works on paper with the undulating pressure of thousands of vertical and horizontal graphite lines. Discernible as tally marks, the vibrating lines echo the x and y axis of the picture plane, allowing her to juxtapose overlapping representations of distinct objects. The hatched precision of each mark defines a force of visibility, yet the subtle palette is akin to the color and concept of "battleship grey", a neutral tone typically used by warships to reduce visibility.

For Mattis, the activity of drawing relies on repetition and pattern; it is slow, habitual, calculated and multi-sensory. In her work, time is materialized into line, and process becomes visible.

Daina Mattis (b. 1984, Los Angeles, CA) is a Brooklyn based visual artist. She is the youngest of four children born to Lithuanian immigrants. Her experience of growing up in a bilingual, culturally rich home in Los Angeles has influenced her work and exploration of visual language.

"Somewhere between the forest and the mill...someone made a mistake. This wood was not meant to be a floor. This wood knew from its first days in the sun it was meant to travel, to ferry, to break waves and explore. We witness this wood's quiet, determined rejection of its assigned flatness. In this moment of rebellion and self-determination, finding oceans, and becoming seas, this wood is declaring itself what it was always meant to be..."

David McQueen is a sculptor/ installation artist/ poet who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He received an MFA in sculpture from Virginia Commonwealth University and a BA from Oberlin College. He is 2011 NYFA Fellow in sculpture. His work has been exhibited at Socrates Sculpture Park, Wayfarers, The Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, The Bronx Museum of Art, The Dumbo Arts Center and Kim Foster Gallery.

Steve Miller has been examining the Oxygen/ CO2 exchange of the Amazon region since 2005. For his Health of the Planet (HOP) series, Miller traveled to Brazil to work with local hospitals, where he took X-rays of indigenous plants and animals. Science and technology have always factored in Miller’s art, technology being “the language of our times” and the means through which we all communicate. Like a scientist, Miller investigates and explores in his artistic practice. The paintings in the Health of the Planet series examine relationships between organic forms and technical ones, the macro and the micro, photography and painting, representation and abstraction.

Steve Miller has an extensive international exhibition history including participation in museum shows at the Brooklyn Museum, the New Museum, the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York, The National Academy of the Sciences in Washington, DC, the Aldrich Museum, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Rose Museum and the Broad Art Museum in Michigan. In 2017 Glitterati published a 160 page monograph of his work of the last twenty years.

Theo Willis’s work engages both literally and physically with uncontrollable environmental factors, such as temperature, humidity, wind, and sunlight. The mysterious organic physicality of his paintings, created using humble materials such as house paint and spray paint, reveal themselves rather than submit to the artist’s whims. In many of his paintings, Willis shares his process with collaborators, including some of his artist friends, which brings unpredictability and vulnerability to the work.