Open Studio

Exhibitions

• On view

  Flat Out: 400+ Unframed Works by Artists With Disabilities

  Jun 12 – Jul 25

  Open Studio is pleased to preset Flat Out, an exhibition of several hundred unframed works by artists from progressive studios across the United States. Flat Out is designed to feel less like a traditional gallery show and more like a great find waiting to happen. Works are priced from under $100 to $1,000, presented unframed, and sold cash and carry — meaning you can walk out with something under your arm the same day you fall in love with it. Loose, stackable, and made to be flipped through. Think print racks, discovery, and that particular pleasure of pulling something out and thinking: this one. The exhibition brings together work from NIAD, Fountainhouse, Pure Visions, Cedars, Community Access Art Collective, and Slingshot, among others — a wide network of progressive studios from around the country whose artists work across every scale, style, and sensibility. Painting, drawing, works on paper — the breadth is the point. There is something here for everyone, and part of the joy of Flat Out is not knowing what you'll find until you're already holding it. Open Studio was founded by David Fierman and Ross McCalla to showcase the work of artists with disabilities and to build careers — with openness, transparency, and the dismantling of outmoded hierarchies as its guiding principles. Flat Out reflects that mission in its most accessible form: great art, no barriers, no frames required.

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• Past

  All Done by Karen May

  May 1 – Jun 7

  Open Studio is pleased to present All Done by Karen May, a solo exhibition by multidisciplinary artist Karen May (b. 1950), in collaboration with NIAD Art Center. Bringing together works across fiber, collage, works on paper, and artist-made books, the exhibition presents a focused view of May’s expansive practice and marks her first solo presentation in New York. May refers to her work as a “memory tool,” using image and text to register people, places, and moments. Her compositions develop through accumulation and response, with recurring motifs—triangles, grids, and hand-drawn symbols—forming a highly personal visual system. These shapes can suggest initials, family members, cat ears, or shifting symbolic meanings, evolving across works as part of an internal logic. Central to May’s practice is her collaboration with entities she refers to as Kitty and Lynn, sisters who take the shape of cats. They help May direct the work in a dialogue, guiding the placement of words, shapes, and forms. This call-and-response structure informs the development of each composition, resulting in a process that is both intuitive and deliberate. May’s visual language is closely tied to her daily life, where observations—such as shifts from day to night, the rhythm of travel between home and studio, or familiar domestic surroundings—are translated into pattern, color, and form. These references, often abstracted, produce a coded system that carries through her work. Her detournements—works made from found Artforum advertisements—extend this approach, as May reworks existing images through drawing and text, transforming commercial material into compositions that are at once referential to pop culture and autonomous interventions. Across mediums, her practice resists fixed interpretation, instead presenting a self-contained logic shaped through repetition, variation, and internal dialogue. Karen May has worked at NIAD Art Center in Richmond, California since 2011. Her work has been widely exhibited in the Bay Area, including at the Oakland Museum of California, Minnesota Street Project, Kala Art Institute, and Personal Space Gallery. In 2024, her two-part exhibition Karen May: ArtForum Interventions was presented at the Arts Center at Duck Creek in East Hampton, New York. In 2023, a group of her mixed-media works was acquired by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. NIAD Art Center (Nurturing Independence Through Artistic Development), based in Richmond, California, is a progressive art studio dedicated to supporting artists with developmental disabilities. Since its founding in 1982, NIAD has provided a space for artists to develop their practices and gain recognition within the contemporary art field.

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• Past

  Great Expectations

  Victor Van

  Mar 19 – Apr 26

  Open Studio is pleased to present Great Expectations, the first solo exhibition of painter and bookmaker Victor Van. Drawing from images and language gathered from the internet, radio, and American popular culture, the exhibition brings together paintings that reflect the America Victor Van sees—expansive, saturated, and emotionally charged. Visions of triumph and excess sit alongside moments of familiarity, longing, and unease, forming a body of work that feels both overwhelming and intimate. In the studio and in his work, Van is driven by acts of observation and gathering. Sifting through screenshots of movies, food, art history, and current events, he translates fragments of the digital world into acrylic paintings marked by loose brushwork and saturated color. Beginning each piece with a graphite grid, Van resizes and paraphrases his source material, allowing meaning to shift through the process of translation. In the artist's words, images become both “excruciating” and “exhilarating,” altered just enough to feel newly alive. Across the exhibition, Van’s paintings form a cumulative portrait shaped by excess and contradiction. Hollywood fantasy, visions of home and belonging, cloying sweetness, spectacle, and the domestication of the wild coexist within compositions that oscillate between critique and affection. Rather than resolving these tensions, Van sustains them—allowing humor, intensity, and ambiguity to remain fully present. Together, the works read as a compressed and deeply personal view of contemporary America, as filtered through Van’s singular eye. Victor Van (b. 1993) has practiced at Interact Center for the Visual and Performing Arts since 2016. Interact, located in Saint Paul, Minnesota, is a progressive, studio for artists with disabilities, fostering progressional, high-quality, and collaborative art creation. He has presented work in exhibitions throughout Minnesota and beyond, including at the Minnesota Museum of American Art, The White Page, Make Studio, the Cargill Gallery at Minneapolis Central Library, and the Institute on Community Integration at the University of Minnesota. In 2025, Van was featured in Interact’s booth at Open Invitational Miami, and his work is featured in Interact's booth at the Outsider Art Fair New York this year. Two of Van's artist books were recently acquired by the Walker Art Center. Great Expectations marks his first solo exhibition. Open Studio, established in 2025, is a gallery dedicated to artists with disabilities working in non-profit studio facilities. The gallery is located at 127 Henry Street, NY, NY 10002 and is open to the public Thursday - Saturday, 12:00 - 6:00.

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• Past

  People Are Flowers

  Paula Brooks

  Jan 10 – Mar 8

  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.

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