Painters Talking: What We Talk About When We Talk About Abstraction

Jill Nathanson is an abstract painter working with a focus on color, exploring dynamic color relations and energies in her paintings. She is keenly interested in the visual and affective range of abstract painting. Her paintings are made by pouring translucent acrylic polymers on panel. Nathanson's atelier at the Art Students League is "Abstract Painting: Past, Future, Personal". Her work is represented by Berry Campbell Gallery, New York, where her next solo show will open in late June 2024. Public collections include the Museum of FineArts, Houston, TX; The Telfair Museum, Savannah, GA; the Sheldon Museum, Lincoln, NE; and the Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia SC. She holds a BA from Bennington College and an MFA from Hunter College.

James Little holds a BFA from the Memphis Academy of Art and an MFA from Syracuse University. He is a 2009 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award for Painting. In addition to being featured prominently in the 2022 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, NY, his work has been exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions around the world. His paintings are represented in the collections of numerous public and private collections, including the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; The Menil Collection, Houston; Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Maatschappij Arti Et Amicitiae, Amsterdam, Holland; Saint Louis Art Museum; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse; New Jersey State Museum, Trenton; Tennessee State Museum, Nashville; Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock; Newark Museum; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Carl E. Hazlewood was born in Guyana, South America. His BFA (with honors) is from Pratt Institute and his MA from Hunter College. A visual artist, curator, and writer, he co-founded Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art in Newark, NJ (1983-2018). Fellowships and residencies include the 2023-24 Sharpe-Walentas residency, two MacDowell Fellowships; The Brown Foundation Fellows Program at the Dora Maar House, Ménerbes, France; The Bogliasco Foundation, Genoa, Italy; The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, Yaddo, and Art Cake Residency, NYC. A Tree of Life award grantee in 2017, his fifty-two feet mural, TRAVELER, was commissioned, also 2017, by the Knockdown Center, Queens. His most recent solo projects were with the Dia Art Foundation, Chelsea (2023); the Charlotte & Philip Hanes Art Gallery - Wake Forest University (2023); and the Welancora Gallery at ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH, (2022). He has exhibited at Volta, and Scope Art Fairs, and was written about for the New Yorker Magazine, BOMB Magazine, the NY Times, the Huffington Post, among others.

Harriet Korman, born in 1947, works and resides in New York City. Her work can be described as a simple geometric approach to the picture plane, searching for an understanding of the resonant and multifaceted qualities of the flat surface. She attended Queens College of the City University of New York, and was a full scholarship student at The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1968. Her paintings and drawings have been exhibited since 1970 in the United States and Europe, in such venues as the Guggenheim Museum NYC, The Whitney Museum NYC, MoMA P.S.1, the Willard Gallery NYC, Galerie Ricke Cologne, Lennon Weinberg Gallery NYC, and the Thomas Erben Gallery NYC. Numerous grants and awards have been from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Public collections include the Guggenheim Museum NYC, The Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, The Blanton Museum of Art Austin, and The Kienzle Art Foundation, Berlin.

John Mendelsohn has shown his paintings in solo and two-person exhibitions at Artists Space, New York; 57W57 Arts, New York; Kook Projects, NY; Sideshow Gallery, Brooklyn; Cheryl Pelavin Fine Art, New York; Michael Walls Gallery, New York; Hal Bromm Gallery, New York; Rupert Ravens Contemporary, Newark; University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI, and Fairfield University, Fairfield, CT. Group exhibitions include the Venice Biennale, Nordiska Kompanient, Stockholm, Sweden; MoMA P.S.1, New York; 490 Atlantic, Brooklyn; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis; Hallwalls, Buffalo; and Wellesley College Museum, Wellesley, MA. He has received grants from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Tree of Life Foundation. His exhibitions have been reviewed in the New York Times, Art in America, The Huffington Post, The New Criterion, Arts Magazine, Artnet, and dArt International Magazine. He has written on contemporary art for many publications. He received a BA from Columbia University in 1971, an MFA from Rutgers University in 1974, and participated in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. He is an Adjunct Professor at Fairfield University in the Studio Art Program.

Mario Naves teaches at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn College and Hofstra University. He has been the recipient of grants from The City University of New York, Hofstra University, The National Endowment for the Arts, The E.D. Foundation, The Sugarman Foundation and The Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Naves’ paintings and works-on-paper are represented by the Elizabeth Harris Gallery in Chelsea and have been covered by The New York Times, The New York Sun, The Village Voice, ArtCritical.Com, ArtNet, The New Criterion and other publications. Naves’ criticism has been published in The New York Observer, Slate, The New Criterion, New Art Examiner, The Spectator World, The Wall Street Journal and City Arts. He is currently a film critic for The New York Sun. Naves lives and works in New York City.