Johnson Lowe Gallery Fall Exhibits (wednesdays)

From the venue:

2025: In Review

A Year of Exhibitions at Johnson Lowe Gallery
30 November 2025 - 6 January 2026

In 2025, Johnson Lowe Gallery hosted a series of exhibitions that traced significant developments across painting, sculpture, installation, and mixed media practices. Rather than constructing a single thematic arc, the year’s program highlighted distinct approaches to material inquiry, narrative construction, and formal experimentation.

The year opened with Jimmy O’Neal: Spittin’ Image, which introduced new works that extend his investigations of reflection, mirroring, and perceptual instability. Concurrently, Herbert Creecy: Made in Space (1992–2001) reexamined a pivotal period in Creecy’s late career, foregrounding works rarely seen in public and clarifying his relationship to gesture and structure.

Mid-year exhibitions emphasized process-driven and research-based practices. Jodi Hays: To Harden and Heal explored the intersections of architecture, labor, and memory through a vocabulary of distilled forms. Phuong Nguyen: She is an Object of Beauty expanded the gallery’s engagement with figurative discourse, presenting paintings that merge personal narrative with broader questions of inheritance, gender, and representation.

Paula Henderson: Structure and Stricture, a two-decade survey, brought forward a body of work that examines spatial tension, concealment, and the emotional architecture of lived experience. The exhibition clarified Henderson’s sustained engagement with material density, palette, and compressed forms.

Later in the year, Voyager, the gallery’s presentation of works by Todd Murphy, continued the ongoing reassessment of the artist’s late oeuvre, underscoring his preoccupation with myth, anonymity, and the construction of symbolic imagery.

The fall exhibition Encounters assembled a broad selection of artists whose works engage with mapping, ritual, abstraction, identity formation, and the poetics of surface. Rather than functioning as a thematic survey, the exhibition illustrated the range of practices shaping the gallery’s roster and contemporary discourse more broadly.

Collectively, the 2025 program emphasized clarity of vision across varied studio methodologies and foregrounded artists who are expanding the vocabulary of contemporary art through material rigor, conceptual focus, and an acute sense of visual intelligence