People Are Flowers

Open Studio is pleased to present People are Flowers, the debut solo exhibition of Queens, NY based painter Paula Brooks. The exhibition, like a hothouse garden in January, pulses with Brooks’ riotously colorful and tenderly rendered paintings of flora, swirling with compassion and life force. In paintings large and small, Brooks presents sweetly intimate domestic floral bouquets as well as complexly imagined arrangements of vines, butterflies, and human faces floating together atop the smooth surface of Brooks’ illustrative and placid compositions. Brooks began her practice painting real and imagined cartoon heroines, and her style stems from animation with sharply outlined shapes and flat swaths of complicated colors. Brooks views flowers as a metaphor for humanity. Each flower is unique; simultaneously male and female, beautiful, tragic, fragile and powerful. A flower communicates and expands beyond itself; it grows in both beautiful cultivation and with robust freedom. As a flower propagates itself with its pollen on the back of a bee, the act of giving another person flowers spreads love and joy. The largest painting on view, The Beast, is an extended metaphor for Brooks’ own physical and psychological journey. A dizzyingly array of floral vines grows from every direction towards the central form comprised of two floating faces encompassed in a hidden butterfly form. A black and white infinity line crosses the canvas horizontally. Brooks began the painting when confined to a wheelchair, flipping the canvas on her easel to work from all angles, even signing the painting at both ends, seeing it as viewable in both orientations. As she poured herself into the composition she regained strength and mobility. Whatever it may represent to each person, The Beast is meant to be conquered, and for Brooks the painting is a record of triumph over adversity. Paula Brooks (b. 1979, Queens, NY) lives and works in Queens, NY. She maintains her studio at The Living Museum, a studio facility dedicated to presenting art produced by patients at the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center, the largest state psychiatric care center in New York City. It is the first working studio and museum of its kind and holds the largest collection of outsider art in the United States. Today over 70 artists work at the museum on a regular basis. Open Studio, established in 2025, is a gallery dedicated to artists with disabilities working in non-profit studio facilities.