Tenderest Tangencies

I Wish I Had A Window, March 14 - April 19, 2025, organized by Greg Roberts, in collaboration with Creative Growth, Creativity Explored, NIAD Art Center (Bay Area); ECF Art Centers (Los Angeles); Fountain House Gallery & Studio, Pure Vision Arts (New York); and Project Onward (Chicago).]

Always lean on Fairfield Porter who, in a 1956 review, described the “tenderest tangencies” between a plate and a cup on a Bonnard breakfast table. While Bonnard’s intimiste caress intuited by Porter may be worlds away from the abundance of “I Wish I Had A Window,” featuring 535 works by over 200 artists, all of whom work for seven progressive art studios around the country, those tender tangencies between the works hold them together. (Opening March 14, but this critic had a preview.)

Perhaps the smallest work on the walls is the title-holder: I Wish I Had a Window, by Frederick Nitsch (that name!), measuring 9” by 12”, north wall, dead center. Aqueous yellow acrylic sways behind a rectangular purple screen. Is this a window into the show and its themes? It’s a guide: look closely, then around. Nitsch, who works out of Chicago’s Project Onward, normally dresses thin washes of paint over found photographs. The aforementioned piece is surrounded by five other, similarly-sized works of the same medium, a jewel cluster that, though aligned with the entrance at 590 Second Street (weirdly, in the middle of the block, between 560 and 580, but anyway…), might risk getting overshadowed by larger works were it not so centrally-placed. Another piece by Nitsch, a large, red, biomorphic ghost, crisply sandwiched between green ground and floating blue bean, adjacent to perfectly-poised yellow ropes ringed with red, is on the same wall to the left, a world away, surrounded by its own consonant neighbors, snug in another nodal network altogether.

If art-making is to strike harmonious order from reality’s harsh chaos, then the curator must re-order each piece against the myriad pitfalls of proximity. As the works sell, for example, buyers are encouraged to remove their works from the walls, and new pieces will go in their place, incrementally morphing the exhibit over time. Roberts, who has been collecting, dealing, and filling his own home with the work of these visionary artists of these centers for decades, makes it look natural. And so it is: we intuit shared themes that emerge through proximity: spirituality and carnality, chromatic density or astringent pattern, litanies that could be prayers or curses in our fraught moment. Fans of neurodivergent artists and their studios will recognize the familiar names and faces: William Scott from Creative Growth in Oakland, John Patrick McKenzie from Creativity Explored in San Francisco, and Christine Albane, but supernovas will also emerge, like Michelle Livingston and John Benke (both Project Onward, Chicago), and Dennis Yee (New York’s Pure Vision). All stars shine alone, but the constellation matters most.

To wit, on the western wall of the gallery, one pairing stopped me dead. Alyson Vega’s Twenty Questions, a catalogue of small, precious shells and sticks behind a threaded grid of gauze atop worked textiles, bounces off Alba Somoza’s gorgeous Black and Gold, a golden ball of haptic dents floating in a black field. Though so different, the two seem fused in a tango of diametric antinomies. I wrote that sentence before I checked my installation photo. Turns out NIAD’s Janay Futch was between the two works, so harmoniously placed as to be almost invisible, the glue that glazes these cozy contingencies.