Reynolds Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Field Studies, a group exhibition showcasing work by Samuel Bjorklund, Hampton Boyer, Nigel Cooke, Ian Donegan, Daniel Heidkamp, Erika Huddleston, Wolf Kahn, Emily Kepulis, Christy Matson, Lily Ramirez, Eleanor Ray, Esther Ruiz, and Yuri Yuan. Field Studies is one of the gallery’s largest group shows to date, and the show will span across both Reynolds Gallery locations. The exhibition opens on Friday, May 15, 2026 with a public reception from 5 – 7 pm at our Main Street Gallery. The show runs through July 24. 

Field Studies features thirteen artists exploring the landscape as more than just a representation of nature, but as a way of seeing, remembering, and making sense of the world around us. Samuel Bjorklund and Wolf Kahn bring a deep connection to traditional landscape painting, using color and light to shape mood and atmosphere. Artists like Erika Huddleston and Christy Matson focus on close observation, translating real places into layered, thoughtful works. Lily Ramírez and Nigel Cooke, take a more abstract approach, using landscape as a starting point for personal or conceptual ideas. Ian Donegan and Yuri Yuan incorporate elements of memory, emotion, and lived experience. Alongside Eleanor Ray, Daniel Heidkamp, Emily Kepulis, Esther Ruiz, and Hampton Boyer, these artists expand what landscape can offer contemporary art; grounded in place, but open to interpretation.

About the Artists

Samuel Bjorklund

Samuel Bjorklund was born in Sheridan, Wyoming in 1938 and grew up in southern California. He received his BA in Comparative Literature and MFA in Graphic Art from the University of Southern California. In 1959, he moved to Aix-en-Provence, where he met master German painter Leo Marchutz and served as his apprentice and associate for 15 years. With Marchutz and artist William Weyman, Bjorklund co-founded the Marchutz School of Vision in 1972 (now the Marchutz School of Fine Art), where he taught until 1984. He was awarded the Oskar Kokoshcka City of Salzburg Prize in 1961 and was honored with Lifetime Achievement in the Arts by the Institute for American Universities in Aix-en-Provence in 2017. He has exhibited across Europe and the U.S at galleries La Muraille in Besancon, France, and Gallery Etienne de Causans, Paris, and at the Grand Prix of Monte Carlo, Biennale Internationale d’Aix-en-Provence. His paintings are included in private and museum collections in Europe and America. Bjorklund resided in France until 2005, and then lived and worked in the Dominican Republic and Florida until his death in 2026.

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 a solo show at the Omni Gallery in London (2023). The Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, VA acquired his monumental painting “Escape Land” in 2024.

Nigel Cooke

Born in Manchester, England in 1973, Nigel Cooke studied at the Royal College of Art and Goldsmiths College. He gained a PhD in Philosophy from Goldsmiths College, writing about non-linear systems in the thought of George Bataille, Michel Serres and others. Making often atypical connections between disparate fields – cave paintings and surrealism, insect mimicry and information physics – his theoretical writings ultimately explored representation as a function of the natural world, and formed the basis of his conception of the value of painting and its possibilities.

Cooke’s paintings are held in several of the world’s major public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Gallery, London; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Astrup Fearnely Museet for Moderne Kunst, Oslo; Milwaukee Art Museum.

Ian Donegan

Ian Donegan (b. 1998) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Cambridge, MA. He received his BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Donegan’s images are created from the inexpressible ideas, thoughts, and feelings gleaned from daily life. Colors are sometimes imagined, details often lifted, but the image is only true if it expresses its source experience. He often paints from dreams, moments in nature, and music.

Daniel Heidkamp

Daniel Heidkamp lives and works in New York. His highly saturated paintings and collaged paper works are based on his travels to locales that have historically been regarded as centers for artistic production. He received his BFA from School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA in 2003. Heidkamp has held solo exhibitions at Half Gallery (New York), Loyal Gallery (Stockholm), Pace Prints (New York), White Columns (New York), and The Journal Gallery (New York). His group exhibitions include Almine Rech (New York), Derek Eller Gallery (New York), Brand New Gallery (Milan), Wilkinson Gallery (London), Marlborough Chelsea (New York), The Journal Gallery (New York), Jack Hanley Gallery (New York). Heidkamp’s work was included in the exhibition Talking Pictures at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2017, and his work from this exhibition is now included in The Met’s permanent collection. Heidkamp is featured in the book Landscape Painting Now published by D.A.P.

Erika Huddleston

Erika Huddleston’s oil paintings record at 1:1 scale in “urban wilderness” locations the temporal natural phenomena that are not easily documented with typical landscape data-collection tactics. “I paint to record what cannot be seen on a static map and which is fleeting and hard to document, but which exists.” Huddleston lives and works in Dallas, Texas. She received a BA in Fine Arts from Vanderbilt University and a Masters in Landscape Architecture from the University of Texas at Austin. She is a contributor to Aether Art Journal and Texas Architect Magazine—writing about the connections of urban design and craftsmanship and public art. She was the Artist-in-Residence with the park non-profit Shoal Creek Conservancy in Austin in 2014. In 2017, her oil paintings and original maps of Waco Creek were shown at the Mayborn Museum at Baylor University with the Art Center of Waco. In addition, the Botanical Research Institute of Texas [BRIT] in Ft. Worth invited Huddleston to paint and exhibit a series of paintings recording the restored Blackland Prairie in Ft. Worth. Texas Monthly named her as part of their list of the “Top Ten Texas Artists to Collect Now” in Spring 2017, and she was selected as a 2015 Hunting Prize finalist. 

Wolf Kahn

Regarded as one of today’s most important representational painters in the nation, Wolf Kahn renders stunning landscapes and abstracted scenes in vibrant hues. Exploring color and light as an aesthetic and emotional field, his oil paintings and pastels exhibit unique color combinations both intriguing and complex. His work serves as a vehicle for expressing tone, energy, and movement. Kahn immigrated from Germany to New York City in 1943, where he studied with artist Hans Hofmann, and later received his Bachelor of Arts from the University of Chicago (1951). His work is held in major collections, including the Whitney Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, all New York, NY; Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. He received major accolades, including the Department of State’s 2017 International Medal of Arts, Fulbright Scholarship, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Award in Art from the Academy of Arts and Letters, among others.

Emily Kepulis

Emily Kepulis created three new paintings for the exhibition. She states, “These paintings explore the pliability of time, its ability to suspend and transform us, and how our perception of it influences our experience of everything. Liminal moments seem to define our perspectives just as much as moments deemed significant, determining our most fundamental experiences of selfhood, home, memory, and relationship. Landscape has been a significant conduit through which I explore this, with initial focus being on the horizon line, a mirage of earth and infinite sky meeting.” 

Kepulis (b. 1989) was raised in a small town outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Shortly after high school, she moved to Portland, Oregon, where she currently lives and works. Kepulis graduated from Portland State University where she studied drawing, painting, printmaking, and creative writing. Her paintings have been exhibited in galleries and art fairs across Portland, San Francisco, Miami, and Vancouver Island. Two recent exhibitions include shows at Chefas Projects in Portland, Oregon and Maybaum Gallery in San Francisco. She has been commissioned for murals and paintings in both residential and commercial spaces, notably at Teton Lunch Counter in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and a ceiling mural at the entrance of Kimpton Hotel Enso in San Francisco. Additionally, she writes for the  online magazine The Gravity of the Thing, and in her first solo printed publication entitled Water Briefed.

Christy Matson

Based in Los Angeles, California, Christy Matson merges the precision of handweaving with the expressive qualities of watercolor painting and oil pastel drawings. Her work often references the land, though her loose interpretation of landscape balances structure and fluidity, capturing a sense of place through woven form. Matson’s process begins with her small works on paper, which she scans to create digital weaving instructions for the final woven composition. As the loom follows her instructions, she improvises with the weft (horizontal rows) with ingenuity and nuance, introducing subtle shifts in color, structure and texture. Matson received her BFA from the University of Washington and her MFA from California College of the Arts. She has since had solo exhibitions at the Milwaukee Art Museum, The Cranbrook Art Museum and the Long Beach Art Museum. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Knoxville Museum of Art, The Asheville Museum of Art and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art’s Renwick Gallery. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Cranbrook Art Museum, The Mint Museum and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art’s Renwick Gallery.

Lily Ramirez

Lily Ramírez (b. 1991, Los Angeles) is a Mexican-American painter known for her distinctive “mark-making” style, transforming abstract lines and vivid color into dynamic aerial maps of landscapes and environments. Beneath the intricate compositions, her work carries deeper personal narratives, subtly encoded in the evocative titles of each piece—titles that poetically intertwine with core memories from her own life.

Raised in South Central Los Angeles, Ramírez developed a keen ability to recognize beauty in often-overlooked spaces, a perspective that informs her artistic practice. Her work serves as a conduit for both aesthetic and emotional honesty. She has exhibited widely, including solo shows at Simchowitz in Los Angeles and group exhibitions at Various Small Fires, Charlie James, and, most recently, Mrs. Gallery in New York. Ramírez continues to live and work in Los Angeles.

Eleanor Ray

Eleanor Ray studied painting at Amherst College and the New York Studio School. Her work has been supported by residencies at the Montello Foundation, Yaddo, Ucross, Jentel, and the BAU Institute, as well as a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in painting and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Prize. Recent solo presentations of her work have taken place at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York, NY (2024, 2021, 2019), and the Wilson Museum at Hollins University, Roanoke, Virginia (2021). Select recent group exhibitions include Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY (2025), Venus Over Manhattan, New York, NY (2022), and Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2022). 

Ray states, “The works in Field Studies reflect my ongoing interest in open landscapes, where awareness of geologic time, and the role of light to shape a space, becomes heightened. The paintings’ large internal scale coexists with the small size of the panels and the brush marks. I like the idea that small paintings address the viewer in a one-on-one relationship, like a book, inviting a personal imaginative engagement with the space of the painting.”

Esther Ruiz

Esther Ruiz’s work examines the relationships between the vastness of the universe, our immediate known world and the intimate details of our interior landscapes. Her sculptures act as relics of these mental excursions and invite viewers to interpret them with their own personal narrative and point of view.

Esther Ruiz (b. Houston, Texas) received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Studio Art from Rhodes College in 2011. She has shown nationally and internationally at various galleries with solo exhibitions at The Aldrich Museum Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut; Chart Gallery in New York; The Schneider Museum of Art in Ashland, Oregon; Reynolds Gallery in Richmond, Virginia, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. She has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions at galleries including Tripoli Gallery, CHART, Monaco, Sobering Galerie, Deslave Tijuana, LVL3, and the Torrance Art Museum. Her work has been featured in The Washington Post, Art News Magazine, Art F City and VICE. She has also been a visiting artist at Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, New York; School of Visual Arts, New York, New York; Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Santa Barbra City College. Ruiz currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Yuri Yuan

Yuan holds a Visual Arts MFA from Columbia University, New York, NY and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL. Yuan was a recipient of the Helen Frankenthaler Scholarship at Columbia University in 2020, and Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant in 2019, 2022, and 2024. She was an artist-in-residence at Silver Art Projects Residency. The artist’s work has been exhibited at Alexander Berggruen, NY; Make Room Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Haverkampf Leistenschneider, Berlin, GE; and Galerie Rolando Anselmi, Rome, IT; among others. Her work is represented in the public collections of Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH and The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA. Yuan’s work has been featured in Forbes Magazine’s “30 Under 30,” The Brooklyn Rail, Sound and Vision Podcast, Galerie Magazine, and Refinery29, to name a few. She lives and works in Jersey City, NJ.

Yuan includes a newer oil on canvas painting, Pale Window, in Field Studies. She shares, “Pale Window is inspired by the view of my parents’ apartment in Harbin, China. Harbin’s winter is brutally cold, and it often has a lot of haze. This combination resulted in this color palette. I think of this painting as a breathing space for the viewer.”

Reynolds Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Puzzles, a solo exhibition of all new work by David Freed, in celebration of his 90th birthday. The exhibition opens on Friday, May 15, 2026 with a public reception from 5 – 7 pm. The show runs through July 24.

David Freed held his first solo exhibition at Reynolds Gallery in 1987, and Freed’s work has been an important part of the gallery program for almost forty years. Freed’s landscapes capture the energy of nature, with all its unpredictability and imperfections. Drawing inspiration from the seasons, atmosphere, and changing weather, he adapts an intimate relationship with his subject, making paintings with a distinct perspective. Layers of etchings and mixed media techniques unite with varying hues and textures to convey an essence as opposed to accuracy. Freed’s touch and eye for color lends to the subtlety and undoubted sincerity present in each piece.

David Freed, Charcoal, 2024, Watercolor and mixed media on paper, 41 x 15.5 inches

The following is a review of David’s practice by longtime friend of the artist, poet Charles Wright:

Improvisations on David Freed

I’ve been looking at David Freed’s work for almost forty years now, ever since a mutual friend of ours, herself an artist, said he was the best printmaker in school. This was in 1962, at the University of Iowa. Better than Lasansky, she added. That would be Mauricio Lasansky, Dave’s teacher and world famous print maker. Whatever the merits of our friend’s convictions, she was on to something. After all these years, he’s still the best printmaker in the school, although the school has gotten appreciably larger and wider. 

There is a modesty in Freed’s work-not of ambition, but of presentation-that is like the spread of light in certain Renaissance paintings. It not only backdrops everything, but tends to suffuse everything as well. One doesn’t know where it comes from, but it is everywhere, enlightening, leaving us, somehow, more room to look in, a seduction of sorts that eschews excess.

His figures have always struck me as figures in a landscape, even if they are portraits, or interiors. Which is to say, something always surrounds them, informing them in their isolation as part of something larger, something we understand and feel, though don’t always comprehend. Whether we see it or not, it’s there. An attitude, perhaps-not one imposed but one revealed, the only attitude that counts. 

Dave published and illustrated the second little book I ever did, back in 1963-64, when we were both Fulbright students, he in England and I in Italy. The poems were largely forgettable, but not so the engravings. Six engravings, six poems. To this day I have one of the prints, a portrait of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, on my wall. Now that’s staying power.

Another piece of Dave’s work I have on my wall, the wall of my school office, is a drawing of me he did fairly recently, a figure, as it happens, in a landscape of sorts, turned and looking out toward the viewer. Hands in pockets. It’s called East of the Blue Ridge. The figure’s face has no features, a face that is smoked and shaded in, peering out at the peerer in. Not one person who has remarked on the drawing – and there have been many over the four or five years it’s been on the wall – has failed to say, That looks just like you. Not one. Now that’s the attitude I alluded to. That’s what I’m talking about. 

Sam Goldwyn or Jack Warner, or one of those early Hollywood moguls, is reported to have said, regarding the criticism of one of his pictures, If they want a message, tell them to send a telegram. Or words to that effect. Well, David’s telegram has arrived, and it says the world is real, figures are real, the line is real, and they are all things of this world. Of course, who helped him compose this message in the midst of making all his pictures, and where he keeps sending it from, and how, is another matter indeed. 

And one more thing. There is a kind of mordant wit that informs all of Dave’s work, a scintillation that often goes, and shouldn’t, unnoticed. He is, by now, his own school, an artist who sees with all three eyes, the guy who walks himself along the banks of the black river. But unlike Orpheus, he doesn’t look back. In fact, as the poet William Carlos Williams said of Pieter Brueghel the Elder, “. . .Brueghel saw it all/ and with his grim/ humor faithfully /recorded / it.” Dave does too.  – Charles Wright

About the Artist

Born in 1936, his career as an artist spans over fifty years. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Miami University of Ohio and his Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa (1962), and went on to found the printmaking department at Virginia Commonwealth University in 1966. He has been awarded numerous grants and prizes over his career, including the Fulbright Grant (1963-64), the World Print Competition (1977), the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship (1983-84), the Theresa Pollak Prize for Excellence in the Arts (2001), and the VCU Award of Distinction from the Southern Graphic Council (2009). The VCUarts Professor Emeritus currently lives in Richmond, VA.