For over five decades, A.I.R. Gallery has stood as a pioneering haven for women and non-binary artists. Founded in 1973 by twenty trailblazing women as the first all women’s cooperative in the United States, the gallery has challenged the systemic barriers of the art world, offering a space where women and non-binary artists could experiment, take risks, and hold space. Even amid recent federal funding cuts that reflect a darker socio-political attitude toward the very founding principles of the institution, along with the pressures of a constantly shifting gallery landscape, A.I.R. remains a vital platform, amplifying the intersections of feminism and creative practice. More than a historic institution, it is a living testament to resilience and a beacon for continuing the fight for recognition, representation, and equity in the New York and global gallery scene.

The ethos that shaped A.I.R. from the beginning—risk, resilience, and reclamation—has been fully woven into its present. On view from August 9th to September 7th, 2025, the three recent solo exhibitions embody this lineage and innovation, though each in different registers: Sehee Kim’s chromatic moments, Diane Kendall’s mythic collages, and Duwenavue Santé Johnson’s tactile meditations. These three artists illuminate new modes of myth making, identity, language, and memory.

Gallery I features Chronomatic Echoes by Sehee Kim which is her first solo exhibition in New York City. The title of the exhibition plays on the fusion of chronos (time) and chromatic (color), exploring how time, memory and emotion can be etched into surfaces and color patterns. The two-part aesthetic-display features earlier works between 2017-2019 with five pieces that are made from concentric, controlled paint drips (Figure 1)(Figure 2).

In these early pieces, paint was released from above onto canvases laid flat, producing gestures that hover in an ambiguous space, yet with acute attention. There is a release of control in the more recent, expansive piece included in the show, On the Edge, 2024-2025 (Figure 3).

Both in method and name, the viewer can identify the departure to a new state of creative process in this most recent work. For example, the work’s title has more narrative than the previous five pieces with coded names: P1028112, P028112, P041273… Though each surface in the show feels digitized through Kim’s unique abstraction of sharp contrasting colors and markings, this later work shows a more organic display of color, with paint settled more freely throughout the canvas (Figure 4).

*FIGURE 4 - Detail of On the Edge, 2024-2025*

Her work carries echoes of several art-historical chronologies, yet the connections it sparks feel distinctly her own. While the exhibition is framed through themes of time and memory, Kim’s paintings also pulse with rhythm, shaped by the physical presence of their making. Gesture becomes both subject and method, underscoring the body’s central role in engaging with elemental materials. In this sense, her practice disrupts the neat chronology of painting: moving past the sublime landscapes of uncharted territories and the Abstract Expressionists’ canvas as a method of conquest by laying the frame down, Kim instead strikes a tension between mastery and release. That friction gives the series its charge, making the canvases feel both deliberate and unpredictable.

In this balance, Kim’s work recalls Pat Steir’s waterfall paintings, where pigment is poured in gestures that seem simultaneously intentional and beyond control. Her bold use of color and immersive scale, meanwhile, nods toward Katharina Grosse’s chromatic interventions, which envelop viewers in fields of paint. Less directly comparable in appearance, the layered, emotional density of Kim’s canvases also brings to mind Julie Mehretu’s abstractions—works that operate as a kind of visual mapping, inviting viewers to navigate, and locate oneself. Kim’s canvases pull viewers into their layered rhythms, letting the physical gestures of paint and color register as both sensation and story.

Gallery II features Diane Kendall’s To Tell Old Tales Anew, showing six large-scale collages that combine printmaking, painting, and drawing, layered with both new imagery, familiar memorabilia, and fragments salvaged from earlier works. These pieces assert a commanding presence not only through their scale but also through their dense, layered surfaces, which invite viewers to dissect the theatrical narratives unfolding within them. Familiar motifs from nursery rhymes, fairytales, and folklore appear, yet Kendall has distorted this imagery, producing an almost eerie retelling (Figure 5).

One could draw dialogue between Wangechi Mutu’s collages and their reimagining of feminine identities and histories, exploring collage itself as a medium of resistance— an opposition to monolithic frameworks. The grotesque element also feels particularly relevant in today’s cultural moment, disrupting restrictive notions of femininity. By recontextualizing and re-mythologizing her figures, Kendall destabilizes singular narratives of womanhood, instead proposing a plural, layered voice that is both reverent and playful.

Works such as Equipoise, 2016, and Myriada, 2019, exemplify her privileging of complexity over clarity (Figures 6 and 7).

The monumental scale of these collages can also be read as a feminist strategy, filling the gallery with stories that demand an almost corporeal attention and investigation.

Arguably one of the most striking works in the show Neith/Neath, 2019, displays a creature bristling with fragments of pattern and imagery that evoke the patchwork of inherited mythologies (Figure 8).

The work seems to mobilize scale and hybridity as feminist strategy by exaggerating and distorting the familiar story tropes, she not only disturbs and confuses our cultural memory of the monstrous but also insists that myth is never neutral. The work positions femininity, strength, and perhaps even burden and survival as layered, contradictory, and in negotiation. To Tell Old Tales Anew is a visually and conceptually rich exhibition. Through large, layered collages that merge history, legend, and personal memory, Kendall reinterprets mythic femininity in ways that feel both in the past and imperatively urgent. Her first New York solo show is a compelling debut—one that demonstrates how narratives can be retold, reimagined, and carried forward in a new light.

A quiet, yet a provocative revolution, Duwenavue Santé Johnson exhibits in Gallery III her Quiet Observations, a series that combines hand embroidery, collage, and painting, utilizing industrial materials like paper and cotton bandanas to anchor her meditation on history, memory, identity, and stillness (Figure 9).

*FIGURE 9 - Detail of Reflection and Understanding, 2023*

The series of work creates a meditative space where history and material unfold stitch by stitch, weaving together diverse histories and techniques while highlighting the meticulous art of hand-stitching. The silence feels deliberate while meditating on the flow of patterns, textures, and colors that seamlessly flow in and out of the surface. While silent, the compositions also feel inherently rhythmic similarly to Kim’s both past and recent presentation. Each thread, each torn scrap, each painted gesture insists that meaning doesn’t always arrive through volume but through accumulation and persistence. The act of viewing and sitting with Johnson’s pieces, intuitively studying their textures, their fragments of cloth, their stitched surfaces, perhaps becomes a parallel to the artist’s own practice of making: repetitive, meditative, and unhurried (Figure 10).

*FIGURE 10 - Reigh, 2023; Being Home in my Memories, 2024; Steadfast, 2025*

In her meditative layering of cloth, paint, and thread, the work seems to be in a dialogue with artists such as Faith Ringgold, Bisa Butler, Louise Bourgeois, and Jordan Nassar, weaving memory, history, and material into each work.

The exhibition reminds us that some of the most radical displays can also be the quietest ones. Within a gallery world that often promotes loud gestures, Johnson’s work is comforting to spend time with for both her colorful palette and materiality.

By dignifying everyday materials, honoring slow processes, and giving form to memory, Johnson’s work challenges the viewer to reconsider where value and power reside in art.

The result is an exhibition that whispers rather than shouts, but leaves a lasting resonance (Figure 11).

*FIGURE 11 - Balanced Sound, 2022; Quiet Observations, 2025*

The three solo exhibitions at A.I.R. Gallery exemplify the institution’s enduring commitment to risk, innovation, and the amplification of women and non-binary voices. Sehee Kim immerses viewers in chromatic temporality, Diane Kendall reimagines mythic narratives with layered complexity, and Duwenavue Santé Johnson transforms everyday materials into meditative archives of memory and craft. Collectively, these displays reinforce the impact of contemporary artistic practice that engages history, material, and identity, reminding us that galleries like A.I.R. are not only spaces for aesthetic-display but incubators for new conversations. In a moment when the art world continues to wrestle with questions of equity, visibility, and representation, these exhibitions demonstrate the enduring power of artists working within feminist methodologies to claim space, challenge expectations, and expand the possibilities of creative practice.

ART & DESIGN | A.I.R. Gallery in review: Sehee Kim, Diane Kendall, and Duwenavue Santé Johnson

BY DRUE HENEGAR

The monumental scale of these collages can also be read as a feminist strategy, filling the gallery with stories that demand an almost corporeal attention and investigation.

By dignifying everyday materials, honoring slow processes, and giving form to memory, Johnson’s work challenges the viewer to reconsider where value and power reside in art.