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    The labor-intensive, process-oriented works of artist and educator Stephen Hamilton aim to address the persistent lack of positive, multidimensional representations of Black life in American culture. Hamilton makes connections between historical and contemporary cultures by incorporating both Black American and West African traditions, combining figurative painting and drawing with techniques such as resist dyeing, weaving, and woodcarving.

    Growing out of the artist’s research and interest in developing a program on West African cultural continuities in the African diaspora, The Founders Project is a series of nine multimedia paintings that reimagine Boston public high school students as the storied founders of West and West-Central African ethnic groups. Each life-size work combines painting with weaving and sculptural traditions specific to the ethnic group whose story is depicted. In Jahnae Wyatt as Queen Poku, Jahnae Wyatt, one of Hamilton’s former students is portrayed as Poku, legendary queen of the Baule people of modern day Ivory Coast. According to legend, when her people were fleeing the violent expansionist wars of the Ashanti people, they came upon a river too deep and wide to cross. Queen Poku offered her infant son to the river spirit in exchange for her people’s safe passage. After this sacrifice, hippopotamuses emerged from the river’s depths and her people were able to walk across the animals’ backs to safety. Wyatt is portrayed as Queen Poku at the decisive moment just before her sacrifice, flanked on either side by hippos emerging from the river. Painted on hand-dyed cloth and framed on either side by hand-carved wooden sculptures (all recalling elements of Baule culture), Queen Poku’s dress is a hand-woven passage of fabric. Hamilton weaves together past and present, creating a bridge between the ancient and modern worlds.

    David Antonio Cruz explores the visibility and intersections of Black, brown, and queer subjects through painting, sculpture, and performance. Focusing on queer, trans, and gender-fluid communities of color, Cruz examines both the violence perpetrated against these individuals as well as their dignity and beauty. His portraits, rendered in lush colors with dramatic compositions and within elaborate environments, evoke the cycles of exaltation and suffering experienced by queer people of color.

    Cruz’s thosebutterflyboys is part of the series returnofthedirtyboys/girls, begun in 2016 during the artist’s residency at Project for Empty Space in New York. In this series, Cruz portrays queer activists and members of the artist’s social circle in compositions that playfully engage art history and notions of desire, intimacy, role-play, and the gaze. Cruz created this painting in response to Rigoberto González’s memoir, Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa, which describes the author’s coming-of-age in relation to race, class, and sexuality. Used within Latinx communities, the term “mariposa” (Spanish for butterfly) is a derogatory term for men who are perceived to deviate from heteronormative and stereotypical masculine roles. Cruz follows González’s reclamation of the term by including the word “butterfly” in the title of this painting. In so doing, the artist plays with the stereotype invoked by the term, as González describes, that gay men are “light on their feet.” In thosebutterflyboys, the likeness of the artist’s longtime friend Richard appears to have slipped from a velvet ottoman and fallen onto the side of his face. As in other paintings in the series, Cruz situates the figure on a stage in an ambiguous space populated with markers of domestic luxury. The figures from this series are also accompanied by organic, phallic forms, as visible under the ottoman in this painting and which the artist understands as duendes (mischievous spirits, goblins, and sprites of folklore) and as materializations of the cismale gaze. Embracing the sensual through the figures’ graceful and contorted poses, and their exposed flesh, Cruz brings together pleasure and precariousness to express the dynamic complexities of life as experienced by queer people of color.

    London-based Issy Wood straddles realism and surrealism in her paintings of everyday objects with tightly cropped compositions and evocative details. She is also an electronic-pop musician, featuring her own paintings on the covers of her EPs and singles, as well as her debut album My Body Your Choice (2022). In Go Daddy! (Out to get you), Wood paints two bucket seats of a car’s interior from a peculiar angle. The car interior is a recurring subject in Wood’s paintings. She considers it a masculine space, presented through advertising as a kind of escape and frequently populated by men. Painted with great detail, this interior is cast with an eerie green color that, when combined with the perspective, renders the mundane scene as surprising and perhaps disquieting. Except for a glint of white light, Wood eliminates any context, segregating the scene from the outside world and highlighting it as a private space. This interplay between a common object and a sinister psychology recurs in Wood’s work, producing a sense of detachment and humor. Her distinctive treatment of banal subjects as well as her painting on clothing and furniture has distinguished her work in the field of contemporary painting, confirming her as part of the conversation around reinvigorating the traditions of portraiture and still life.

    For more than a decade, Deborah Roberts has explored constructions of race and gender, as well as popular depictions of Black childhood in the United States. She combines found and manipulated images with hand-drawn and painted areas to create large-scale, emotionally charged paintings that explore the real and the possible forms of representations of Black children. Roberts employs found media to contend with dominant portrayals and narratives of Black youth, narratives that she often subverts through her use of collage. “Wading through my work,” Roberts explains, “you must look through multiple layers, double meanings, and symbols.”

    For many years, Roberts has focused on depicting young Black girls (a decision she connects to her personal experience), producing a body of work that addresses ideas of vulnerability and strength. A signature work by the artist, Becoming, which Roberts has described as a self-portrait, presents a single figure against a white background, her face composed of three black-and-white photographs and the rest of her body and clothing rendered in paint and oil crayon. The girl, appearing somewhat timid, is set off to the right side, knees knocking together, her raised arms crossing over her body. The relationship of the girl to her body, as the title suggests, is in a state of becoming, juxtaposed between the photographic and the painted, the known and the unknown, the girl and the woman. “The girls who populate my work, while subject to societal pressures and projected images, are still unfixed in their identity,” says Roberts. Through the dimensionality of her characters, Roberts critiques the narrow beauty standards and the prevalent and persistent emotional, physical, and sexual stereotyping of Black girls and women. By bringing small moments of Black girlhood to large-scale paintings, Roberts offers an important correction to the history of art and gives visual form to the rich terrain of childhood.

    A prominent voice among a new generation of figurative painters, New York-based Doron Langberg has gained a reputation for vivid, luminous paintings that foreground intimacy and touch. Depicting himself, family, friends, and lovers, Langberg’s paintings center on lived experiences and the ways that painting amplifies the physical and emotional resonances of living.

    Langberg’s process begins with small, observational studies made of graphite, oil paint, and colored pencil, which he translates into large-scale paintings. Rich with texture and color, the finished canvases evoke atmospheric moods that often privilege private, domestic moments and intimate gestures. Bather depicts a man immersed in a bathtub filled with water. Details such as various bottles and the rumpled clothes on the floor complete this everyday scene. A common subject in the history of art, the bather has appeared in the works of many artists, from Titian to Paul Cézanne, who frequently portray women bathers in idyllic landscapes or classical scenes. In this case, Langberg specifically references the French artist Pierre Bonnard’s painting Bather (1935), but importantly replaces Bonnard’s woman figure with an equally intimate portrait of a man—a continuation of Langberg’s centering of queer experiences and his commitment to expand the representation of queer sexualities. Speaking about his work the artist says: “Queerness for me is not just a sexual experience, but a way of being in the world which affects every aspect of my life. Using intense colors and different paint textures and marks to create these everyday scenes, I want to connect with a viewer by speaking to our most basic commonalities—our bodies, our relationships, our interiority—rather than the social categories that may separate us. In creating this connection, I want to make queer pleasure, friendship, and intimacy feel expansive and generative, embodying the full range of human experiences.”

    Celeste Rapone is a Chicago-based, abstract figurative painter known for depicting her subjects (who are often women, and usually the artist herself), in outlandish, impossible, and even humorous compositions. Her style exceeds the traditional expectations and perspectival grounds of the canvas, drawing attention to the dynamic movements, colors, and details layered into her paintings. The artist relates her compositional choices to sub-narratives about anxiety, vulnerability, and freedom, especially in the lives of women: “There’s something about the idea of the women contained, occupying these impossible positions anatomically, but also in terms of expectations, ambition, defeat, and self-awareness.”

    Rapone began Pack Animals with a specific color: the bright, rose pink that was her grandmother’s favorite color. From there, the artist drew from memories and individual experiences, working out the composition, patterns, and figures on the canvas without preparatory drawings. In this work, three nearly identical female-presenting figures—who appear to be wearing the same masked expression and hairstyle—gather on matching plaid blankets on a brilliant autumn day, a time of year the artist associates with the start of school and new beginnings. The three figures stretch and twist their bodies beyond realistic proportions and standard perspectives to give the painting a distinctive composition and sense of humor. The painting is populated with a remarkable range of objects (such as a football, a tote bag from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, a drone in flight, crocodile skin patterned boots, a pair of cleats, and a deflated soccer ball), which serve to inform viewers about Rapone’s subjects and her picnic scene. The individual attire and styling of each figure is cast against a fascination with fashion and trends. In both form and content, the painting displays the drama between the individual and group, or pack, as in the title. While the figures appear individually consumed in their own activities, they almost interlock with one another and the surrounding scene, which makes discerning their individual forms visually challenging.

    Louis Fratino is a New York–based painter whose work fuses personal memories with art historical references to explore queerness, intimacy, and love in gestures and scenes of everyday life. The oil painting Large Flowers foregrounds a bouquet of flowers arranged in a glass vase on a tabletop, behind which the artist himself appears in a small self-portrait. Presented at larger-than-life scale, the floral arrangement is an alluring and colorfully vibrant assortment of violets, carnations, poppies, and roses, each signifying ideas of beauty, sensuality, affection, and passion. Fratino typically begins his work from drawings that recall a particular mood or moment, and then expands upon these compositions in scale, form, and color during the painting process. While his color rich paintings are often likened to cubism (as well as other modernist styles), their tactile surfaces—finely scored and textured through the use of palette knives and scraping—convey a sense of touch, rawness, and labor. For Fratino, who experiences red-green color blindness, the dynamic tension in his compositions allows him to search for ways to represent the emotions and expressions of what he calls the “mysticism around painting, where you can manifest something through it, [whether] it’s something as simple as doing the dishes, or being in love with someone, or feeling close to your family.” Large Flowers invokes notions of intimacy and love through the sensual language of flowers, referencing the artist’s distinctive style and subject matter.

    Based in Cape Town, South Africa, Cinga Samson is a self-taught figurative painter, whose works on canvas evoke a haunting playfulness at the boundary between the real and the imaginary. Samson’s subject matter ranges from still lifes to portraits of young men, who often sport postures of luxury, confidence, and desire that are nonetheless infused with an otherworldly spirituality. The color, tone, and lighting in his canvases further this dynamic, creating a charged, enigmatic atmosphere within which his subjects linger, as though between states of reality and with a sense of quiet self-possession.

    Samson’s subjects often appear to exist within their own worlds, holding themselves at a distance from the viewer while still open to the engagement of looking and being perceived. To emphasize this notion of distance and withholding, Samson deploys careful attention to the thickness and density of paint over his canvases, which create shifting registers of luminosity that transform the finished scenes into uncanny windows into another worldview. Okwe Nkunzana 2 is one in a group of paintings Samson made responding to feelings of loss, aggression, violence, and grief following the Covid-19 pandemic and the death of his father, among other personal events. According to the artist, the series title translates to “devil’s thorn,” a type of thorny plant common to South Africa, that also doubles as an Xhosa idiom for someone who is bothersome (i.e., a thorn in one’s side). In making this series, Samson turned to portraits of young men in haunting, discomforting scenes that suggest an eerie stillness or unresolved spirituality. In this painting, the subject emerges between two grounds—a gated domestic exterior in the background, and a garden tree rendered in silver in the foreground. Between the tree limbs stands a lone figure, dressed in a luxury jacket and peering back at the viewer with Samson’s signature all-white blank eyes, suggestive of a specter or a spiritual avatar. For Samson, the figure’s return of the gaze is an important aspect to the subversive tone of his portraits: “They’re present, they are there. You are starting to move toward them, and they are aware of your presence… . They seem to be saying that you need to be cautious, don’t get any closer.”

    The precisely painted domestic interiors at the center of Philadelphia-based artist Becky Suss’s work ascribe meaningful value to historically undervalued spaces. Suss understands these spaces to be associated historically with women and children, and thus overlooked or deemed unimportant. The artist carefully attends to these spaces, painting them largely from memory in her sharp, flat, signature style, with exaggerated proportions to amplify the tension between fact and fiction that playfully animates these works.

    8 Greenwood Place (1985–88) is from a series of painted portraits of Suss’s various childhood bedrooms. Though the interiors are devoid of figures, signs of the room’s dwellers abound: here, a Hula-Hoop, an origami fortune teller, polka-dot sneakers, and a magic eight ball indicate a child subject. At the center of the painting is a dollhouse perched on a table in front of a colorful, wall-mounted quilt patterned with tulips. In each of the house’s windows, Suss depicts interiors pulled from children’s books, such as Miss Rumphius (a slightly altered copy of which appears open and on the room’s floor), Where the Wild Things Are, and the series The Berenstain Bears. Children’s books have been a consistent source of inspiration for Suss, especially after becoming a parent herself and returning to the literature of her childhood. The series, then, looks back at childhood through an autobiographical lens, marking its many turns through Suss’s lived experiences and memories, and the objects that speak to growing up in a particular time and place. With 8 Greenwood Place (1985–88), Suss explores the intimate relationships that exist with a child’s bedroom and children’s literature, as spaces of imagination, possibility, and world building.

    Boston-based Joe Wardwell draws on the rich resources of music, landscape, and American culture in his colorful paintings. Combining layers of painted acrylic images and texts in vivid, chromatic hues, his work highlights counterculture narratives in American cultural memory and their relationship to nationalism, history, identity, and place. If You Got the Money Honey is from a cycle of paintings made by Wardwell in 2020 and 2021 in response to multiple intersecting crises of health, race, economics, and politics, and displays his signature layering of landscape and text. The artist’s first cityscape, this painting presents a view toward downtown Boston from Wardwell’s studio, located in Humphreys Street Studios in Dorchester’s Upham’s Corner. At the time, the studio building was threatened to be demolished by developers until Wardwell and other residents joined together to campaign against the sale of the building, ultimately reaching a unique partnership with the City of Boston and funders. Over this colorful skyline, the artist layers a series of texts. The largest text—lyrics from a Guns N’ Roses song—gives the work its title and points to the relationship between wealth and access, mounting an ironic charge against Boston’s increasingly unaffordable housing. For the smaller texts, Wardwell sourced quotations from cultural figures with ties to Massachusetts, including Malcolm X, Buckminster Fuller, and Donna Summer, screen printing these striking lines (“Integrity is the essence of everything successful,” and “Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it”) onto the painting. Through this matrix of text and landscape, Wardwell embeds multiple histories and evokes the collective and polyphonic voice of an urban environment.