Artist’s Statement

At the core of Amy Pleasant’s work is her drawing practice. With ink and gouache, and a quickness of pace, Pleasant’s repetitive and calligraphic drawing process documents essential, universal motions and human behaviors. This process allows the figurative gestures to unfold across the surface, each one informing the next, developing a visual language, similar to an alphabet. These forms of the body ultimately transition into large scale paintings, wall drawings and sculpture, moving between the intimate and the monumental. Pleasant crops, fragments and flattens out the figure, re-envisioning archetypes of human representation, while speaking to the collective human experience.

Within the edges of the canvas and paper, figures perform like actors on a stage, their gestures contained and activated by their painted borders. Figures from her series Fold, close in on themselves while the central shape in Lift, presses upwards into a precarious balancing act.

Color plays an important role in this exhibition. The earthy, red of Untitled (Hands 4), is reminiscent of Alabama red clay or terracotta. Pleasant uses this dry, matte color to reveal the hand gestures that populate this large-scale painting. Painting the negative space to reveal positive shapes touches on her interest in archeology and the slow unearthing of an object, or in her case, the shapes.

Pleasant’s images, graphic in nature, are drawn on carefully considered stained and layered surfaces to create complex, yet nuanced, grounds. Visitors to the gallery will experience these subtle shifts in color, tone and texture, aspects of the work that are often lost in the digital sphere.

Reynolds Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of “Stars and Stripes”, a solo exhibition of work by Nancy Blum. The exhibition opens on Friday, November 14, 2025 with a public reception from 5 – 7 pm. The show runs through December 23.

About the Artists

Hampton Boyer

Born in Pittsburgh and raised in Hampton Roads, Hampton Boyer layers bright, geometric forms to create his figurative paintings and collages. He juxtaposes inspiration pulled from African folklore and literature with his own experience as a contemporary artist. The flow that he achieves through his artistic practice fills his work with reverberating energy and intimate emotion. He has exhibited in numerous group shows and solo exhibitions, including one at Omni Gallery in London (2023). He also had a piece recently acquired by the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, VA.

Carolyn Case 

Carolyn Case uses rich patterning and intense colors to convey a spiritual and psychological experience. Based in Maryland, Case has travelled extensively to Iran and Egypt, incorporating Middle Eastern textiles into invented landscapes. Establishing texture through varied, layered line work, she allows aggravated strokes to form strange plants and ombre urns, collaged against a pointillist sky or indiscernible figure. Her indiscriminate use of color and compiled symbols intentionally muddles distinctions between East and West, Earth and Space, Physical and Spiritual. Recently, Case has begun to incorporate ceramics into her work. The idea came from the need to frame her pastels and not liking how the pastels looked in a conventional frame. The ceramic work has now evolved with the pastels shrinking, the ceramics growing, and the combination morphing together. Case received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from California State University and Master of Fine Arts from Maryland Institute, College of Art (1994, 1997).  She is the recipient of fellowships from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the Maryland Institute of Art and Vermont Studio Center, as well as a residency from the Kanoria Art Center in Ahmedabad, India. She has exhibited at the Katzen Art Center, the Corcoran Gallery, Hemphill Fine Arts in Washington, DC and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California.  She currently lives in Baltimore where she teaches painting and drawing at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Tori Cherry 

Tori Cherry is an artist based in Charlottesville, VA. She is a former Aunspaugh Fellow (2021-22) at the University of Virginia (CLAS’21) where she double majored in Cognitive Science and Studio Art. Her paintings and drawings inspired by her loved ones, her surroundings and herself serve as sites for personal documentation, reflection, and connection. Through figurative and still life work, she highlights the paradoxical uniqueness and universality of quotidian experience. When she is not painting, she works as Welcome Gallery Manager for New City Arts Initiative’s Welcome Gallery space in downtown Charlottesville.

Kevin Ford

Kevin Ford is interested in intense looking. Using a combination of delicate brushwork and loose airbrushing, he blends the languages of Spanish still lifes, cartoons, and color field abstraction to bring a sense of historic urgency to overlooked, everyday objects. Kevin received his BFA in Painting from Boston University and his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale. His work has been included in solo exhibitions at 12.26 Gallery, Dallas, TX, Hesse Flatow, New York, NY, Semiose Galerie, Paris, FR, Kate Werble Gallery, New York, NY, and Tops Gallery, Memphis, TN. Kevin’s work has been exhibited in group exhibitions at The Center for Maine Contemporary Art, ME, Inman Gallery, TX, Reyes Finn, MI, Casey Kaplan, NY, The Islip Art Museum, NY, Tops Gallery, TN, and elsewhere. He has attended residencies at Millay Arts, Austerlitz, NY, Chateau d’Orquevaux, Champagne-Ardenne, France, and the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT. His work has been featured in V Magazine, included in the book Artists II, published by Steidl, and has been reviewed in Artforum, The New York Times, and other publications.

Lou Haney 

Lou Haney creates paintings of domestic spaces that employ nostalgia as a means of temporary escape from the corrupt and chaotic realities of present day life. Using oil, acrylic, fiber art, and mixed media, she explores themes of memory, yearning, and femininity to evoke tension between fantasy and reality. Born in Decatur, Alabama, Haney received her BA from Rhodes College in Memphis and her MFA in Painting from Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, CA. Haney has attended MacDowell as well as the Vermont Studio Center. In 2022, she was a resident at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Amherst, VA.. Haney was the recipient of the Mississippi Art Commission Individual Artist Fellowship in 2008. Her work has been exhibited in solo shows in California, Virginia, Massachusetts, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Kentucky and in over 70 juried group exhibitions. Haney’s work was shown at the Spring/Break Art Fair in New York City in 2022, 2023 and 2025.. In 2024, Haney had solo shows at Second Street Gallery in Charlottesville, VA and Spectrum Fine Arts in Seattle, WA. Most recently, Lou’s work was featured in a solo exhibition at IA&A Hillyer in Washington, DC and One Rivers School of Art and Design in Hartsdale, NY. Haney currently teaches Studio Art and Art History at Piedmont Virginia Community College, Sweet Briar College, and Buford Middle School. The artist lives and works in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Jack Kenna 

Jack Kenna (b. 1994 in Durango, CO, USA) is a visual artist currently based in Brooklyn, NY. Working across painting, drawing, and sculpture, his work often depicts or directly incorporates found images, objects, and text amongst highly considered and unconventional compositions looking at impermanence, perception, and everyday life with humor and playfulness. Kenna is represented by Equinox Gallery in Vancouver, where he will open his second solo show with the gallery in the fall of 2025, and has recently exhibited work in group exhibitions at Harkawik in New York City and Plan X Gallery in Milan. He received a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2019.

Andrew Leventis 

Andrew Leventis makes meticulously detailed oil paintings of contemporary vanitas, a motif popularized in early still life in which food, flowers, and other perishable objects represent the fleeting nature of life and the passing of time. Often he utilizes objects reflecting his queer identity. Leventis received an MFA in Fine Arts from Goldsmiths College, University of London, and an MA in Fine Art from Wimbledon College of Art, University of the Arts London. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Art in Painting from the American Academy of Art, Chicago. He has exhibited internationally at museums and galleries, most recently at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Krakow, Poland (2024); Novilla, Berlin (2023) the Mint Museum Uptown, Charlotte, NC (2022); the Venice Arsenale, Italy (2021); and York Art Gallery, UK (2021). Leventis’ work is represented by SOCO Gallery. He lives and works in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Sylvio Lynch III

Based in Richmond, Virginia, Sylvio Lynch III is a contemporary realist artist.  Including the practice of traditional portraiture, still life drawing, and sketching via graphite, charcoal and colored pencil, Lynch creates hyperrealistic expressions of the ordinary. His influences include the illustrations of Norman Rockwell, the historical legacy of American architecture, popular culture, as well as the legacy of pioneering hyperrealist painters such as: Robert Bechtle and John Salt, and Barkley Hendricks.  In addition, Lynch is ever inspired by the technical discipline of architectural sketching and draftsmanship. Lynch holds a PhD in American Culture Studies from Bowling Green State University and a M.A. in American Studies from the University of Alabama.  From academic rigor in these fields as well as architecture, Lynch creates from his observations of the built environment, and the decadence of otherwise ordinary people, places, things, and forms.

Nick McPhail 

Nick McPhail is a Los Angeles-based painter and sculptor using renaissance techniques to consider the peripheral mundanity of urban life. Born and raised in Laingsburg, Michigan, Nick attended Michigan State University where he studied painting and ceramics, graduating with a BFA in 2006. Since then, he has maintained a consistent practice that has evolved to rely on personal observation and photography as the basis for his intuitive compositions. Recent solo exhibitions include: Reynolds Gallery in Richmond, VA (2023); Massey Klein in New York (2023); Amélie Maison d’Art in Paris (2022); Ochi Projects in Los Angeles (2020); Untitled_1983 in Geneva (2019); and Holiday in Los Angeles (2018). He has completed residencies at Untitled_1983 in Geneva (2019); Ochi Gallery in Ketchum, Idaho (2019); and 100 West Corsicana in Corsicana, Texas (2018). He is a 2023 Hopper Prize Finalist and in 2017 he was awarded a grant to attend a residency at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont. His work is in private collections throughout the United States, Europe, and beyond.

A statement from Isabel Bigelow’s family

Isabel Bigelow (March 25, 1966 – July 7, 2024)

It is hard to capture Isabel’s art in a statement. After all she did not enjoy explaining her own work, so it feels odd for us to try to do so now. But also, it takes too many words. Isabel was a minimalist virtuoso, able to convey the essence and beauty of a thing without excess or waste. The feeling of morning light through a window blind, the pure joy of a satisfying shape, the subtle relief of snow against a grey afternoon sky, the melancholy of a lone rock in the water – these are ephemeral moments, impossible for us to hold onto, yet caught by Isabel’s paintings and prints, lingering and drawing us into her sense of the world. Rarely strictly representational, her art reverberates with the shapes, textures, and palettes that she returned to again and again. Much of her work comes from the places Isabel loved – New York City, the Hudson Valley, and Maine. Spending time with her art draws us into these scenes and the emotions they evoke – the shadow of a tree, the structure of a water tower, the cracks left by a brook in the snow, the furrows of a field. Time expands and contracts. Light shifts and wanes. The familiar becomes abstract.

Isabel was born in New York City. Though she moved not long after to Alexandria, VA, New York was always a homing beacon to her. After graduating from Harvard College in 1989 she returned to the city and continued her fine art training at the Art Student’s League in Manhattan. She later completed an MFA at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. In 1992 Isabel met Luis Castro, an artist from Venezuela who became her life partner. From their walkup in the East Village to her walkup studio on the Lower East Side, Isabel was in perpetual motion. She soaked in the city, absorbing its planes and spaces and angles and light. When their daughter Lucia was born in 2006, they started shifting from the city to the Hudson Valley, eventually moving full time to Ghent, NY. Luis built a spectacular studio where she developed her craft as she began to draw from the landscape around her – the low fences, the rolling hills, and the changing light and seasons. And from childhood, Isabel visited Maine every summer with her family. There she absorbed the constantly shifting tree canopies, shadowed rocks, and evanescent light on the water’s horizon. All these places provided stable, yet ever changing, landmarks for her observant eyes. Isabel distilled and refined what she saw into her paintings and prints through careful, meticulous, and iterative practice as she labored to perfect the delicate textures, pigments, and surfaces that are the signature features of her work.

The Reynolds Gallery has been ever present throughout Isabel’s career. Bev Reynolds (d. 2014), the gallery founder, first met Isabel through her mother Deborah Ellis, an artist whose work the gallery has represented since the 1980s. Bev had a wonderful ability to identify and nurture contemporary artists. As Isabel explored various media, from ink on mylar to oil on panel or paper to monotypes, Bev always championed her art, including Isabel in group exhibitions, promoting her work to museum and private collectors, and holding eight solo shows. Isabel’s family is grateful and honored to be a part of the Reynolds community that Bev built and cultivated over many decades.

It is impossible to express the loss we feel. Isabel was everything – kind, funny, smart, sensitive, thoughtful, and beautiful. To have her art is a gift, allowing us to continue to see the world as she did and to remain in conversation with her.