JENNIFER BAAHNG - Key Persons
Brandon Ballengée, an artist, biologist, and environmental advocate, utilizes a myriad of mediums and artistic expressions to mirror the current ecological predicament.
Eric Brown received a B.A. in Studio Art from Vassar College. In 2020, he received a Master of Divinity from the Union Theological Seminary. He is a painter and a chaplain. He is the recipient of the MacDowell Fellowship (2016) and was the Visiting Artist and Scholar at the American Academy in Rome (2015). He has had numerous solo exhibitions, including at Isle Arts, Crush Curatorial, James W. Palmer Gallery, Theodore: Art, The Art Center at Duck Creek, and Jennifer Baahng Gallery. His works have been featured in Artcritical, ARTnews, The New Criterion, The New York Observer, and The New York Times. He lives and works in New York and Sag Harbor.
Job Titles:
- Artist
- Traveling Museum Exhibitions
Janet Taylor Pickett (b. 1948) earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Michigan School of Art in 1970, followed by a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Michigan School of Architecture and Design in 1972. She pioneered a groundbreaking visual language to explore themes of Blackness, identity, and the complexities of lived experience. She furthered her education at Parsons School of Design, the Fashion Institute of Technology, and the Vermont Studio School, where she had the honor of collaborating with Sam Gilliam. She devoted over thirty years to teaching and developing curricula focused on the History of African American Art at Essex County College and Bloomfield College. Additionally, she was a founding member of Montclair University's African American Studies program. Her academic and artistic distinctions include grants and fellowships from the New Jersey Council of the Arts, the Ford Foundation, and the Mid-Atlantic States Art Council. Taylor Pickett previously served as Chair of the African American Cultural Committee at the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey. Her artist residencies include the Pilchuck Glass School, the Valparaiso Foundation in Majorca, Spain, and the University of Eastern New Mexico. She has also been a Visiting Artist at the University of Wisconsin and Lafayette College. Moreover, Janet Taylor Pickett delivered the keynote address for the Penny W. Stamps Commencement 2024 at the University of Michigan.
Through the development of an innovative visual vocabulary, AKIMBO EXOTICA, coined by JENNIFER BAAHNG, Janet Taylor Pickett has established herself as a prominent figure in contemporary painting. She is widely recognized as a pioneering female painter whose work is inspired by Romare Bearden, Bette Saar, Sam Gilliam, and Henri Matisse. Her work has been exhibited in both solo and group shows across the country and internationally, and is part of many public and private art collections. Her works have been displayed at esteemed institutions such as The Studio Museum in Harlem, Howard University, and Telfair Museums, among others. Her notable work, "And She Was Born" (2020), was prominently featured on the cover of the exhibition catalog for Seeing Differently: The Phillips Collects for a New Century (2021) at The Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. Important museum exhibitions include Progressions: A Cultural Legacy at MoMA/PS1, African American Women Artists and the Power of Their Gaze at the David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, The Matisse Series at the Montclair Art Museum, The Atlantic World-Layered Histories at the Harvard Art Museums, Hagar's Dress at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, as well as exhibitions organized by African Friends of Museums in Israel, Western Washington University Museum, SUNY Old Westbury, The Studio Museum of Harlem, Howard University, Telfair Museums, a Smithsonian affiliate The Morris Museum, Denver Art Museum, Oceanside Museum of Art, Fairfield University Art Museum, Hammonds House Museum, Northern Illinois University Museum, and Brandywine Workshop & Archive. Janet Taylor Pickett is represented by Jennifer Baahng Gallery.
Janet Taylor Pickett is included in Century: 100 Years of Black Art at MAM
Job Titles:
- ARTnews President and Editorial Director
Sue McNally (b. 1967) is a painter based in Newport, Rhode Island, with a creative practice spanning locations in Rhode Island and southeastern Utah. Raised in New England, she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Rhode Island in 1990 and a Master of Fine Arts from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 1995. McNally has held prestigious residencies including the Edward E. Elson Artist-in-Residence position at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts. Her work has also been supported by residencies at Carrizozo AIR (New Mexico), McCanna House/North Dakota Museum of Art, Tamarind Institute, Crater Lake National Park, Ucross Foundation, Yaddo, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her artwork is in prominent public and private collections, such as the Addison Gallery of American Art, North Dakota Museum of Art, Tamarind Institute Archive, Worcester Art Museum, RISD Museum, and Newport Art Museum.
Sue McNally has painted landscapes for over 30 years. Through decades of travel and expeditions across the United States, she has developed a deep personal connection to the American landscape. Her work reflects a passionate intensity, vibrant expression, and luminous quality, all skillfully balanced with realism. Depicting mountains, wind, and water, with a delicate ferocity and a sense of playful disorder, she investigates the inherent shapes and proportions of the natural world.
In 2010, Sue McNally embarked on an artistic endeavor, "This Land is My Land," later named the States paintings. Reflecting her experiences and observations of the American landscape, this journey has produced over forty large-scale paintings and murals. It is ongoing, with each piece representing one of the fifty states. The works, incorporating specific and locatable on-site photographs, exemplify her meticulous attention to detail. They convey a sense of grandeur and the enduring beauty of the terrain, replicating impressions as if viewers are standing in her place. Aiming to further explore abstraction, around 2016 and 2017, these works rely on memory as their reference point. Distorted forms, measured shapes, and pictorial harmony express the internal structure of the landscape, showcasing an abstract and elusive quality. The State paintings encapsulate McNally's aspiration to transform viewed vistas into landscape paintings through the interplay of forms and colors while appropriately scaling nature.
Sue McNally is a painter of the scenic and a poet of visual prose. Her landscapes are hallucinatory, cryptic, and mesmerizing. Ghostly turquoise, magenta curtains, and phantasmal yellows in magnified natural forms evoke a striking sense of monumentality. Each mystical and transcendental palette is carefully chosen to meet the specific demands of the structures in the picture planes. They are the invented landscapes and the enduring myths of the terrain - embodiments of the American sublime immortalized in paint. They emphasize that the fleeting beauty of the American land, as it lives on in our minds, is worthy of our reverence. The most essential form of cultural literacy is to read our environment.