Kenise Barnes Fine Art is delighted to announce our Best of 2014 exhibition. Every fall, gallery director Kenise Barnes heads out for a fresh round of studio visits. Summer is an extremely fruitful time for many artists: residencies, inspirational travel or coveted intensive time in the studio (when professors can escape their academic year duties and focus on their own work) often launch new ideas. This exhibition features new work hand-selected from our latest studio visits.

This year we are showcasing a group of artists, some who are new to the gallery and some whose work we have endorsed and supported for many years. Cecile Chong has just finished a yearlong Artist-in-Residence at The Center for Book Arts, New York, NY as well as exhibitions in Berlin and Brooklyn. Chong’s contribution to this show is a large diptych employing encaustic, a medium favored by the artist. David Collins is a gallery favorite and has been represented by us for more than a decade. His layered abstraction compositions reference both his dual skills as a painter and a printmaker. New to the Kenise Barnes Fine Art program is Ruth Hiller, an artist who has just returned from Colorado to resume work in her NYC studio. Glass artist, David Licata, finished a major private commission and a body of glass chain maille sculpture this summer in time to begin his new position as an art teacher at Scarsdale High School this September. Joanne Mattera, a well-known artist who has gallery representation nationwide, will contribute work from her new series Chromatic Geometries. Artist and tenured professor, Jill Parisi, who is on a well-deserved sabbatical, has been using this fertile time to create large and complex hand-colored, cut, and pinned etching. Florida artist Kristen Thiele continues her popular Drinks Series with two canvases whose images are gleaned from vintage film stills.

This exhibition runs through the winter holiday season and will be dynamic and changing as work is sold and released to collectors. Come by often to see what we have added to the show.