Matt Saunders: On an Overgrown Path

Victoria Sambunaris: Fall Line, presented at Yancey Richardson from May 29 through July 2, 2026, examines the fragile geography of the American West through a series of monumental landscape photographs focused on the Colorado River system and its diminishing waterways. Known for her long-term exploration of the American landscape, Sambunaris continues her investigation into how infrastructure, industry, and environmental change reshape territories historically associated with wilderness and expansion. The exhibition follows years of travel across the Southwest, where the photographer traced the intersections between water scarcity, human intervention, and the enduring mythology of the West. Working with a five-by-seven wooden field camera, Sambunaris creates highly detailed images that balance grandeur with quiet tension. The photographs move from the drought-stricken edges of the Colorado River to the temporary lake that formed at Death Valley’s Badwater Basin after Hurricane Hilary. Roads, pipelines, electrical lines, and housing developments appear almost imperceptibly within vast desert panoramas, suggesting the steady but relentless imprint of civilization on landscapes often imagined as untouched. The title Fall Line refers both to the movement of water across terrain and to invisible boundaries shaped by geology, settlement, and power. Sambunaris has spent more than twenty-five years crossing the United States on extended road trips, documenting how natural environments become sites of extraction, recreation, and economic ambition. Her photographs echo the visual traditions of 19th-century survey photographers who helped define perceptions of the American frontier, yet her work introduces a contemporary awareness of environmental precarity and climate instability. The images remain patient and observational, often requiring hours of waiting for precise light conditions before exposure. Born in Pennsylvania and based in New York, Sambunaris studied at Yale University School of Art and has exhibited widely at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Art. Her recent monograph, Transformation of a Landscape, expands upon the themes explored in Fall Line, combining photographs with maps, journals, and archival material gathered during her travels. The exhibition presents the American West not as a fixed symbol of permanence, but as a landscape increasingly defined by fragility, adaptation, and uncertainty. Image: Victoria Sambunaris, Untitled, (Wahweap marina), Lake Powell, Page, Arizona, 2023. Archival pigment print, 39 x 55 inches.

Mary Ellen Bartley: Color Anthology, on view at Yancey Richardson from May 29 through July 2, 2026, continues the artist’s longstanding investigation into the quiet emotional and sculptural potential of books. For nearly two decades, Bartley has transformed found printed materials into meditative photographic studies that move beyond literature itself, focusing instead on texture, color, balance, and form. In this latest exhibition, the New York-based artist draws from her series Reading November, produced between 2013 and 2021, where aging hardcover books become carefully arranged abstractions shaped by light and atmosphere. The photographs center on books selected for their “top-stain,” the colored treatment applied to the upper edge of pages that became popular in mid-century publishing. Gathered from secondhand shops, bargain bins, and libraries, these forgotten volumes are stacked into compositions that feel at once orderly and fragile. Bartley photographs them during dusk using long exposures and soft, flat light, creating images steeped in stillness and restraint. Muted blues, deep reds, faded greens, and charcoal tones emerge slowly from shadow, recalling both minimalist painting and classical still-life traditions. Rather than emphasizing narrative content, Bartley treats books as physical artifacts carrying traces of time and use. Their worn surfaces, faded cloth covers, and subtle tonal variations become the true subject of the work. The resulting photographs balance precision with intimacy, allowing ordinary objects to assume an almost architectural presence. The images also evoke the slower rhythms of reading and contemplation at a moment increasingly dominated by digital consumption and fleeting visual culture. Born in New York City and educated at Purchase College, SUNY, Bartley has exhibited internationally at institutions including the Walker Art Center, the Morgan Library and Museum, and Museo Morandi in Bologna. Her photographs belong to major public collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum. In Color Anthology, Bartley once again demonstrates how photography can transform the overlooked and familiar into something lyrical, tactile, and profoundly reflective. Image: Mary Ellen Bartley. Reading November #13. 2021. © Mary Ellen Bartley. Courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson. New York.

Nobuyoshi Araki and Roe Ethridge, on view at Anton Kern Gallery from May 12 through July 2, 2026, brings together two photographers whose practices, while separated by geography and generation, share a fascination with artifice, intimacy, and the unstable nature of photographic meaning. Selected and sequenced by Roe Ethridge himself, the exhibition unfolds less as a conventional dialogue than as a fluid visual conversation built through association, repetition, and contrast. At the center of the presentation are new prints from Ethridge’s Floral Arrangements series, originally produced in the mid-1990s and revisited for this exhibition. Using a pinhole camera, Ethridge photographs bouquets staged against heavily patterned floral fabrics that he alters by hand with acrylic paint before each composition is assembled. The resulting images occupy a curious space between still life, painting, and commercial photography. Soft focus and flattened perspective lend the works a dreamlike quality, while their carefully manipulated surfaces foreground photography as a constructed image rather than a transparent document. Ethridge places these works in conversation with several series drawn from Nobuyoshi Araki’s vast archive, including Flower Cemetery and Tokyo Nude. In Araki’s photographs, flowers become psychologically charged objects, often interrupted by plastic figurines, toys, or traces of decay. Elsewhere, nude bodies appear beside unremarkable Tokyo streets, collapsing the boundaries between the private and public spheres. Throughout his career, Araki has approached photography diaristically, treating the camera as an extension of daily existence, desire, and memory. The exhibition also includes more recent works by Ethridge inspired by luxury fashion commissions, studio interiors, and spontaneous snapshots taken during his travels in Japan. These images extend the exhibition’s broader preoccupation with objects as carriers of emotional and cultural residue. Shelves, flowers, clouds, fabrics, and fragments of architecture become linked through visual rhythm rather than narrative logic. Together, the works reveal how both artists continually blur distinctions between documentation and invention. Whether through Araki’s intensely personal “I-photography” or Ethridge’s layered manipulations of surface and form, the exhibition suggests that photographs never merely record the world—they remake it through memory, desire, and association. Image: Untitled (Flower Cemetery), 2017 © Nobuyoshi Araki, courtesy of Anton Kern Gallery

Ali LeRoi: Everybody Hates Exhibitions offers an intimate and unexpected return to a cultural landmark that reshaped television history. Rather than revisiting the finished episodes of Everybody Hates Chris, this exhibition turns inward, revealing a deeply personal archive of photographs made quietly behind the scenes. Captured with a single-lens reflex camera, these images sit between memory and invention, exposing moments that existed beyond the frame of performance and comedy. Marking two decades since the series first aired, the exhibition reflects on how popular culture, personal history, and representation intertwine. LeRoi’s photographs are not polished publicity stills; they are fragments of lived experience—pauses between takes, shared glances, exhaustion, laughter, and tenderness. In these intervals, the illusion of television dissolves, replaced by a temporary family assembled through creative labor. The images document not only a production, but the emotional architecture that sustained it. Central to the exhibition is LeRoi’s meditation on memory and visibility. Photography becomes both a tool for preservation and a reminder of absence. The paradox of the SLR camera—blind at the moment of exposure—mirrors the artist’s relationship to his own past. What is captured is understood later, filtered through distance, loss, and reflection. These photographs become acts of recovery, resurrecting moments that were felt but not fully seen. The title, Everybody Hates Exhibitions, gestures toward vulnerability rather than spectacle. The discomfort lies not in showing images, but in revealing the self that has long remained behind the camera. LeRoi’s work speaks to grief, healing, and the quiet necessity of breaking silence. The family portrayed on screen, inspired by Chris Rock’s memories, became a surrogate space where belonging briefly felt possible. Ultimately, this exhibition reframes a beloved sitcom as a site of emotional truth. It honors the fragile, fleeting communities formed through collaboration and care, reminding us that sometimes the families that shape us most are those we encounter unexpectedly, in the unguarded moments when performance falls away and life, briefly, takes over. Image: Photo by Ali LeRoi, Scene Not Heard

At Haines Gallery, Once the Ocean Floor brings together four distinct photographic practices that place the natural world at the center of image-making. On view from May 8 to July 3, 2026, the group exhibition features works by John Chiara, Linda Connor, David Maisel, and Meghann Riepenhoff. Rather than treating landscape as a passive subject, the exhibition presents nature as collaborator, witness, and force, reshaping the very conditions of photographic production. Chiara’s large-scale Ilfochrome prints, created using hand-built camera obscuras, reveal an approach where process remains visibly embedded in the final image. Light leaks, chemical drips, and physical marks are left intact, emphasizing photography as a material object rather than a seamless illusion. His new works, developed during a 2025 residency in Georgia, move between wooded thickets and open skies, balancing clarity and mystery. These images feel both intimate and monumental, shaped as much by atmosphere as by composition. The exhibition takes its title from Connor’s long-standing series documenting the rocky landscapes of Ladakh in northern India, terrain that once lay beneath an ancient ocean. Her photographs of limestone formations and fossil-rich surfaces evoke geological time on an almost unimaginable scale. Alongside them, Maisel’s aerial views of the Great Salt Lake confront a more urgent environmental reality. His Spiraling series transforms evaporation ponds and industrial sites into abstract fields of color and geometry, where beauty and ecological devastation exist in uneasy tension. Through these images, environmental crisis becomes both visually seductive and deeply unsettling. Riepenhoff extends this dialogue by allowing the landscape to physically inscribe itself onto her cyanotypes. Exposed directly to water, wind, and freezing temperatures, her works carry the marks of environmental contact rather than simple representation. In her State Shift series, crystalline forms and sweeping textures reflect the fragility of ecosystems under pressure. Together, the four artists propose a broader understanding of photography—one in which authorship is shared with the world itself. At Haines Gallery, Once the Ocean Floor becomes not only an exhibition of images, but an invitation to reconsider how art can register our changing relationship with the planet. Image: David Maisel, Spiraling 6, 2024 © David Maisel, courtesy of the Haines Gallery

Holding Blue, on view at Regen Projects from May 28 to July 3, 2026, brings together a new body of work by Catherine Opie that reflects a sustained engagement with landscape, memory, and the material possibilities of photography. Marking the artist’s twelfth exhibition with the gallery, the presentation unfolds as both a visual and sensory meditation on the Norwegian environment, shaped by extended periods of observation and a deliberate attention to light and atmosphere. At the center of the exhibition is a series of large-scale photographs capturing the mountains of Norway during the elusive “blue hour,” a fleeting moment in polar winter when the landscape is bathed in a deep, saturated hue. Produced during a road trip in early 2024, these images emphasize duration and presence, with Opie approaching each mountain as if it were a portrait subject. The resulting photographs carry a quiet intensity, balancing formal precision with an emotional undercurrent tied to environmental fragility and the passage of time. Complementing the photographic works are ceramic sculptures that translate these landscapes into tactile form. Developed both before and after the journey, the sculptures reflect a process of anticipation and recollection, offering a physical counterpart to the photographic image. Their surfaces and contours suggest a more intimate, almost haptic engagement with place, reinforcing the exhibition’s broader dialogue between perception and memory. Additional photographic series expand this inquiry, juxtaposing natural vistas with elements of the built environment. Images of vernacular architecture and remote settlements situate human presence within a vast and often overwhelming terrain. Throughout the exhibition, Opie draws on a long tradition of landscape representation while quietly reworking its conventions, favoring sustained looking over spectacle. Together, the works in Holding Blue form a cohesive exploration of how photography can register both the physical reality of a place and the internal experience of encountering it. Image: Catherine Opie. Untitled #12 (Norway Mountain), 2024. © Catherine Opie

Christopher Payne’s 16 Tons turns industrial photography into a study of structure, scale and repetition. On view at Benrubi Gallery from May 28 through July 2, 2026, the exhibition presents nine large-format photographs drawn from Payne’s wider body of work on American manufacturing, alongside new images shaped by the same long-term interest in how things are made. The photographs move through factory interiors, production lines and highly specialized workspaces where the human figure is often reduced to a partial presence. In some images, hands appear only as points of reference, handling materials such as artificial flowers or guiding processes that are otherwise dominated by machinery. In others, people disappear almost entirely, leaving robots, lifting devices and industrial systems to define the frame. Payne’s attention stays fixed on the visual logic of these spaces: the geometry of repeated forms, the weight of materials, the rhythm of assembly. What gives the exhibition its shape is the way the photographs speak to one another. Rather than standing as isolated records, they are arranged as visual pairs, linked by correspondence rather than explanation. An image of one process echoes another in color, scale or composition, suggesting that different industries can share a similar structure even when their materials and purposes differ. This approach gives the exhibition a quiet coherence and shifts the emphasis from subject matter to formal relationship. The title 16 Tons points back to the 1955 coal-mining song made famous by Tennessee Ernie Ford, a reference that brings labor, debt and physical strain into view. Payne’s photographs do not dwell on nostalgia or critique alone. Instead, they register the conditions behind production: the systems that shape work, the machinery that replaces it, and the patterns left behind when labor becomes part of a larger industrial process. With more than two decades spent documenting American industrial and institutional spaces, Payne has developed a clear visual language built on patience and precision. 16 Tons reflects that method in a distilled form, presenting industry not as spectacle but as a set of enduring forms. Image: Christopher Payne, Untitled (CP130378), 2025 © Christopher Payne

The Community Gallery at CPW opens with Gestures of Care, Resilience, and Connection, a group exhibition by the Women Photographers Collective of the Mid-Hudson Valley that brings together sixteen artists working across different photographic approaches. On view from May 30 to July 5, 2026, the show frames photography as a way to register support, attention and shared experience at a time when many people feel isolated or divided. The exhibition focuses on ordinary but revealing moments: family life, local surroundings, small acts of solidarity and collective action. Rather than presenting a single theme or visual style, it brings together distinct voices that speak to one another through common concerns. The result is a portrait of community as something active and unfinished, built through relationships rather than fixed identity. The participating artists include Joan Barker, Ana Bergen, Shari Diamond, Jill Enfield, Judit German-Heins, Karen Ghostlaw, Lori Grinker, Morgan Gwenwald, Maria Fernanda Hubeaut, Kay Kenny, Dana Matthews, Meryl Meisler, Adina Scherer, Carla Shapiro, Kate Warren and Ruth Wetzel. Their work reflects a range of perspectives and subjects, from intimate domestic scenes to broader social observations. Some images are rooted in personal life, while others look outward toward shared spaces and public gestures. The exhibition also marks an important step for CPW’s Community Gallery, a new space dedicated to local groups, artist collectives and nonprofit projects. The gallery is designed as a rotating venue for short-run exhibitions, giving room to voices from different parts of the region. That structure fits the spirit of the show, which places emphasis on exchange, visibility and the value of making work together. By gathering these photographs under one roof, Gestures of Care, Resilience, and Connection presents community not as a slogan, but as a set of everyday actions and relationships that continue to hold shape under pressure. Image: © Kate Warren, courtesy of the Center for Photography at Woodstock

Beyond Boundaries: Three Decades of Contemporary Chinese Art at the Smart traces a layered history of artistic experimentation and critical inquiry at the Smart Museum of Art from March 29 to July 5, 2026. Rooted in the University of Chicago’s longstanding engagement with contemporary Chinese art, the exhibition reflects a sustained effort to position these practices within a global conversation. Since the late 1990s, curatorial initiatives led by Wu Hung have reshaped how such work is studied and understood, opening new perspectives on transnational artistic exchange. Drawing from the museum’s collection as well as archival material and recent acquisitions, the exhibition unfolds as both a retrospective and a living archive. Early moments of experimentation resonate alongside more recent works, revealing an ongoing negotiation between continuity and change. The reference to Transience, the influential 1999 exhibition, lingers throughout, emphasizing the importance of ephemerality, process, and conceptual risk in shaping the field. What emerges is not a fixed narrative but a constellation of practices that resist singular definition. The artists gathered here engage with boundaries in multiple forms—geographical, political, and material. Figures such as Ai Weiwei and Xu Bing interrogate systems of authority and language, while others like Song Dong and Xing Danwen turn toward personal memory and urban transformation. Across media ranging from installation to photography and video, these works explore how individuals move through rapidly shifting environments. Their approaches often embrace fragmentation, repetition, and displacement, reflecting broader conditions of uncertainty and adaptation. Rather than presenting contemporary Chinese art as a unified category, Beyond Boundaries highlights its internal diversity and its capacity for reinvention. The exhibition invites viewers to consider how artistic practices respond to constraint not only by resisting it, but by transforming it into new forms of expression. In this space, boundaries appear less as limits than as sites of tension and possibility, where meaning remains in flux and history continues to unfold. Image: Wang Wei, 1/30th of a Second Underwater, 1999, chromogenic transparencies on translucent polyester base. Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, Purchase, Gift of Carl Rungius, by exchange, 2001.121d ©Wang Wei

The Museum of the Old Colony: An Art Installation by Pablo Delano, on view at the New Britain Museum of American Art from March 14 to July 5, 2026, is an ambitious, immersive work that challenges how history is constructed, displayed, and absorbed. Conceived as a fictional yet unsettlingly familiar institution, the installation invites visitors to step inside a museum that mirrors the authoritative language of official archives while quietly unraveling their assumptions. Through this layered environment, Delano confronts the enduring realities of colonial power and cultural memory as they relate to Puerto Rico and its complex relationship with the United States. Rather than presenting discrete artworks, Delano assembles a dense constellation of archival photographs, printed matter, moving images, and found objects that function together as a single evolving artwork. Drawing on the visual strategies of ethnographic and historical museums, the installation reveals how narratives are framed, legitimized, and preserved. Humor and irony play a crucial role, softening the surface while sharpening the critique, as familiar museological devices become tools for questioning authority rather than reinforcing it. The title’s double meaning underscores the work’s conceptual depth, referencing both Puerto Rico’s political status as a long-standing colony and a locally produced soft drink embedded in everyday life. This blend of the personal and the political reflects Delano’s own biography and lived experience, grounding broader historical analysis in individual memory. At the New Britain Museum of American Art, the project expands to include materials connected to Connecticut’s Puerto Rican diaspora, weaving regional stories into a global history of displacement, resistance, and cultural persistence. As the largest presentation of the project to date, this installation transforms multiple galleries into a space for reflection and dialogue. It resists closure, encouraging viewers to linger with ambiguity and reconsider what museums choose to show, and what they omit. In doing so, Delano positions art as an active form of historical inquiry—one that does not merely document the past, but interrogates how it continues to shape the present. Image: Previous Installation of 'The Museum of the Old Colony: An Art Installation by Pablo Delano'

Hyphen American: Intersections of Identity, on view from January 24 through July 5, 2026, examines how artists navigate the layered meanings of belonging in the United States. Timed to coincide with the nation’s 250th anniversary, the exhibition resists a singular definition of “Americanness,” instead foregrounding the lived realities of identities shaped by migration, memory, language, and cultural inheritance. Through works drawn from the museum’s collection, the exhibition proposes that the hyphen is not a division, but a generative space of connection and negotiation. The artists featured in Hyphen American explore how personal histories intersect with broader social narratives. Portraiture, abstraction, documentary strategies, and symbolic forms become tools for articulating experiences of displacement, resilience, and community-building. These works reveal Americanness as something continually formed—through rituals, shared struggles, and acts of self-definition—rather than a fixed or unified ideal. By emphasizing multiplicity over assimilation, the exhibition highlights how difference itself has long been central to the American story. A distinctive feature of the project is its multilingual approach. For the first time, the Sheldon presents both the exhibition and its accompanying publication in four languages: English, Spanish, Vietnamese, and Arabic. This decision reflects the linguistic landscape of Lincoln, Nebraska, and underscores the exhibition’s commitment to accessibility and representation. Language here is more than translation; it becomes a curatorial gesture that acknowledges how meaning shifts across communities and how cultural participation expands when barriers are lowered. Curated by Christian Wurst, Hyphen American extends beyond the gallery walls through a series of public programs developed in collaboration with local community members. Their voices are woven into the exhibition and catalogue, reinforcing the idea that identity is collective as well as individual. Together, the artworks and programs position the museum as a space of dialogue—one that honors complexity, embraces contradiction, and invites viewers to reconsider what it means to see themselves, and others, as American. Image: Binh Danh. Vivian Nguyen, Environmental Studies, UNL, Class of 2014 Archival pigmented print, 2011 40 × 30 inches University of Nebraska–Lincoln, gift of the artist, U-5663.2012

Moments in Time: Defining Moments in the History of Photography invites viewers to explore the evolution of photography through highlights from the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville’s permanent collection. This rotating exhibition reveals the depth and diversity of MOCA’s photographic holdings, which now encompass more than 250 works. Tracing key shifts across more than a century, the exhibition celebrates how photography has continually redefined itself—moving from documentary tool to expressive art form, and ultimately to a dynamic language of image-making that reflects our digital age. The exhibition begins in the early twentieth century, when visionaries such as Imogen Cunningham, Edward Curtis, André Kertész, and Edward Weston expanded the possibilities of the medium. Their experiments with light, form, and subject matter helped establish photography as a fine art, bridging realism and abstraction. Their work captures both the texture of daily life and the timeless beauty of composition, marking photography’s first great turning point. The journey continues through the 1970s, a decade of profound transformation when artists embraced photography as a conceptual practice. This period witnessed bold experimentation, challenging the idea of what a photograph could be and how it might communicate. The camera became not just an instrument of observation but a means of personal and political expression. The narrative then extends to the present, where digital technologies, manipulated imagery, and stylistic plurality dominate contemporary practice, reflecting the boundless visual culture of the 21st century. Complementing the museum’s collection are works on loan from local collectors and from the distinguished Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez-Falla Collection. Together, these pieces form a vibrant dialogue across generations, revealing how photography continues to shape—and be shaped by—the ever-changing ways we see, remember, and define our world. Image: Lauren Jack, 'The Colonial Era (the Age of Plastic Series)', 2008, Digital C print, ed. of 20. Gift of Michael and Michele Cavendish, 2013.04.02 © Lauren Jack