Curating the Conversation: Selecting Work for Moving Deeper into Light
I sat down to meditate this morning, and before I could drop into silence, my brain started firing. The first thing that surfaced was that I need to revisit my plan for the solo show.
I’m hanging at the Grand Opera House on April 28. My solo exhibition, Seeking Spirit in the World at McNichol Gallery, Neumann University, came down in mid-March. That show contained work from 2025, paintings I had made with that exhibition in mind. I had painted for the entire year, making work for that space. Even so, I didn’t show everything. I had to curate, to select work given the constraints of the physical space, and to consider the narrative the exhibition would tell. The title Seeking Spirit in the World encompassed my growing awareness of the Divine moving all around me, found everywhere I looked.
As I selected paintings for Neumann, I thought about flow: how a visitor would move from one painting to the next. That meant balancing visual elements like color and scale. I also considered the audience. I expected an academic audience at Neumann, and that expectation shaped which work I chose to show.
When I began thinking about the Grand Opera House, I made the decision early on that I would not reproduce the Neumann exhibition in a different setting. I did, however, want to bring some of those paintings and show them near work from other series. I think there will be an interesting conversation between them. One comes from the Neumann show, the other from my earlier Breathing series. They are the same size, both the same media, oil glazing on acrylic, and yet they are very different paintings. To me, they both speak of the ocean: the force of it, the depth, the quietness, the strength. I knew I wanted them in the same room, near each other but not adjacent, so they could talk across the space.
That word, conversation, is really at the heart of how I curate.
Take End of Summer
End of Summer 48x 60” Oil glazing on acrylic subpainting
and Breathe/ Wave
Breathe/ Wave 48 x 60” Oil glazing on acrylic subpainting
That pairing became a starting point. From there, I began building the selection around a theme and named the exhibition Moving Deeper into Light. Naming the exhibit gave me a focus.
Two walls filled quickly. Then there was Watching Spring, finished last February, that I wanted to bring over from the Neumann show. I may hang the two newest paintings, Where the Light Lives and Vespers, on the same wall with Watching Spring. That leaves two more walls and a wall above the bar.
Where Light Lives 48 × 48” Oil glazing on acrylic subpainting
Vespers 48 × 48” Oil glazing on acrylic subpainting
Watching Spring 48 × 48” Oil glazing on acrylic subpainting
Now the real puzzle begins. I need flow between one painting and the next and throughout the entire exhibition. That means balancing the size of pieces that hang adjacent to each other and making sure the color creates harmony across the walls. I have a software app that lets me visualize the paintings next to each other as thumbnails, and I’ve already set up two versions of the full exhibition. But I know I want to revisit it, and I’ve started physically moving paintings around.
Curating your own show is a particular kind of challenge. You are both the artist and the curator. You have to step back from the intimacy of making and think about what the work does in a room, as a whole, for someone seeing it for the first time.
I’ll be sharing a viewing room soon so you can get a sneak peek at the selection. Stay tuned for the viewing room, and know that the painting selection may still shift before April 28.
Moving Deeper into Light opens May 1 with a reception from 5–7 PM
at the Grand Opera House,
Baby Grand Gallery,
818 N. Market Street,
Wilmington, DE.
The exhibition runs through May 31.
This exhibition is supported, in part, by a grant from the Delaware Division of the Arts, a state agency, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts. The Division promotes Delaware arts events on DelawareScene.com.