East City Art Reviews—SOPHIA BELKIN at HEMPHILL
By Claudia Rousseau, Ph.D. on February 19 2025
HEMPHILL is pleased to share the latest review of SOPHIA BELKIN for East City Art by Claudia Rousseau.
It probably took a couple of generations of women needleworkers to sew the magnificent embroidered narrative scroll known as the Bayeux Tapestry in the last quarter of the 11th century. Viewing Sophia Belkin’s first solo show at Hemphill Gallery brought this to mind as her glowing works are pieced together by stem stitching, not made by the hands of nuns, but by an amazing machine that makes it more perfectly and in an instant of the time. The issue of mechanical help in creating works of art is one that has been recently in focus, but there is an enormous difference between enlisting a CNC embroidery machine to carry out your complicated and detailed designs and using AI to originate a work. And the results shown in this exhibit are fascinating...
Sophia Belkin | ARTFORUM
By Andy Martinelli Clark
February 5, 2025
HEMPHILL is pleased to share Andy Martinell Clark's review of SOPHIA BELKIN for ARTFORUM.
As in nature, there are no straight lines to be found in the fourteen kaleidoscopic, textile-based abstractions that populate Sophia Belkin’s first solo exhibition at Hemphill. It is fitting, then, that many of the poetic titles ascribed to these jaunty paintings reference the terrestrial, the aquatic, and the utterly cosmic.
FIBER OPTICS
With sweeping strokes, Sophia Belkin's fabric art flows in unexpected directions
Tina Coplan for Home & Design Magazine
November/December 2024 Issue
Tina Coplan interviewed artist, Sophia Belkin, for FIBER OPTICS in Home & Design Magazine's November / December 2024 Issue.
"My inspiration has always come from nature," says Belkin. Dressed in a white top and verdigris-turquoise jeans that echo the smokey palette of her compositions, she explains the specialized nature of her art: "I like that contrast between the fluidity of the water elements of painting that are unpredictable, and the tight, controlled embroidery parts..."
Sophia Belkin will have a solo exhibition at HEMPHILL in January of 2025. Stay tuned for more information.
Belkin • Caldwell • Shull at Hemphill Artworks
By Louis Jacobson for Washington City Paper
August 14, 2024
A three-artist exhibit is an atypical format for Hemphill Artworks, but you can see how it came to be. Textile artists Sophia Belkin and Randy Shull and digital photographer Colby Caldwell share a large format and an appreciation for abstraction. Of the three, Shull’s work is the most different. He creates hammocks like those typical of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, where he spends much of the year; he then paints the hammocks and lets them “cure” in the sun...
The last day to see BELKIN · CALDWELL · SHULL at HEMPHILL is Saturday, August 24, 2024. Please stop by the gallery to see the exhibition before it closes.
In the galleries: Dynamic art captures the fractured side of nature
by Mark Jenkins for The Washington Post
August 9, 2024
The three-artist show at Hemphill Artworks features several things associated with the decorative arts: flowers, butterflies and embroidery. Another essential element, however, is decay, which makes “Belkin Caldwell Shull” a bit edgier than its nature motifs might suggest.
Sophia Belkin is a Baltimore artist who prints wetlands-inspired compositions on fabric, outlining certain portions with stitching. A former local resident and a longtime Hemphill artist, North Carolina’s Colby Caldwell makes camera-less woodland photographs directly with a digital scanner. Randy Shull, who divides his time between North Carolina and Mexico, hints at butterflies (“mariposa” in his Spanish-language titles) with sections of partly unraveled hammocks painted in vivid hues.
The last day to see BELKIN · CALDWELL · SHULL at HEMPHILL is Saturday, August 24, 2024. Please stop by the gallery to see the exhibition before it closes.