best and brightest

Exhibition Dates: february 1 - 26, 2022

Reception: Thursday, february 3, 5pm - 8pm

The Painting Center is pleased to present the exhibition, Best and Brightest curated by JoAnne McFarland, a Golden Paint Fellow at The Painting Center from 2020–2021. The exhibition features the work of Laura Petrovich–Cheney, Mary Sweeney, Kit Warren, and JoAnne McFarland on view from February 1–26, 2022 in the Project Room.

Climate change reflects centuries of humans’ escalating domination of planet Earth. The current period of extreme political polarization throughout many societies, characterized by extraordinary disparity in living conditions and health outcomes, mirrors the devastation inherent in climate change.

For the exhibition Best and Brightest, JoAnne McFarland shows the latest paintings from her Extinctions Series, and has invited artists Laura Petrovich–Cheney, Mary Sweeney, and Kit Warren to exhibit works that allude to the ravages wrought by catastrophic weather systems, widespread extinctions, and the destruction of habitats.

All four artists’ methodologies reveal an obsession of one kind or another, with a particular material, a way of working, or a way of thinking. The theme that undergirds Best and Brightest is McFarland’s belief that hierarchical cultures that reward the ‘best and brightest’ while neglecting everyone else have proven ruinous across time and space.

McFarland, who is Artistic Director of Artpoetica Project Space in Gowanus, Brooklyn, has chosen pieces for Best and Brightest that directly address aesthetic issues of color, form, scale, and/or medium pushed to extremes. These works ask provocative questions about resource distribution and preservation, gender assumptions, and the fragility of global landscapes as we move into the third decade of the 21st Century.

View Catalogue: Best and Brightest.pdf