I'm Still Jenny from the Color Block


Steven Husby | Omair Hussain | Van Maltese | Emily Mueller
Alex Paik | James Schenck | Anne White | Paige Williams | Tony Williams Jr.


RUSCHWOMAN
March 16 — May 4, 2025
Opening Reception: Sunday, March 16, from 3–6PM


Outside of the Opening, gallery hours are available by appointment only.

Please contact thewaves@ruschwoman.blue to make arrangements to visit RUSCHWOMAN during the run of the exhibition.



Tony Williams Jr., Subtle Sounds for Shaking, 2025, Oil on canvas, 22h x 20w in.




Lately the dancey croons of Jennifer Lopez have been playing in the back of my mind: “Used to have a little, now I have a lot.” In a period when it seems quite easy to feel like we only have a little (or, at least, less than we used to), the debated more or less of painterly abstraction once again offers itself as a means of addressing the heavenly high highs and tyrannical lowly lows of everyday living—not from a vantage apart from those circumstances, but instead drawing very close to sample from, concentrate on, and permute its minutiae into a practice of gently ecstatic looking.

Modes like geometric abstraction, the monochrome, color field, and post-minimalist painting have preoccupied many eras of my curating and gallery-ing, perhaps because it was initially so riddlesome to the meat-and-potatoes literalism of the midwestern middle class culture in which I was reared. But consistently over a couple of decades, I’ve been assured of its potency. For all the critics who would call these tactics of distillation and simplification an evacuation of responsibility to the material dimensions of identity and class struggle, there are just as many politically fired up aesthetes who act with the conviction that an orientation to some of the basic building blocks of perception and form—not to say also society and civilization, taste, fashion, and ideology—offers some capacity for resistance, refusal, and a hard reset in relation to dominant power.

For me, color is as dangerous and provocative as it is cheerful and pleasurable. Attending to the underlying shape of things, their contours, their interrelatedness usually reveals more than what is presented at the level of surface optics, illusion, image, or an intricacy of rhetoric. As I set about putting this exhibition together, there was a quality of fun that veered toward the anarchic, proposing another world tracking toward pluralistic utopia, as world building as sci-fi or erotic fantasy. I have been thinking about some of these artists’ practices for a really, really long time. Others, I’m grateful to have been recently introduced to. All of them have thrown in their lots with the ongoing development of a shared language that extends for a century and a half of the western canon, fueling Constructivism and Bauhaus, Hilma af Klint’s glossolalia, Carmen’s Herrera’s incisive insights into angular composition, Ellsworth Kelly’s sexy arcs and planes, Marsden Hartley’s encoded queer love letters, Truitt’s paeans to associative memory, Tuttle’s and Martin’s desert meditations, Sam Gilliam’s soaked and draped spatial interventions, and mentors of mine like Paige Williams who brought me into the lively interplay of abstract painting. I’m thinking of those legacies and the ways this group of artists add to those collective pursuits.

In a cultural moment when so many ways of living are under duress, I made this exhibition to remind myself as much as the rest of you that we persist. Our dreams persist. Not only that we have been Jenny from the [color] block, but as J-Lo assures, “I’m still, I’m still Jenny from the [color] block.”