Optimistic Objects

Rush Baker IV, Sophia Belkin, Steven Cushner, Jacob Kainen, John Marin

July 24 – August 31, 2026

Hot neon orange in the sky contrasts the cool water coming from the hose and a lush backyard on a Midwestern summer night. During the Grant Wood Fellowship at the University of Iowa, Rush Baker IV created a series of landscape-like watercolors. Airier than his most recent paintings, possibly a reflection of the open Iowa landscape or simply being free from urban congestion and the political upheaval centered in his hometown of Washington, D.C. Color drifts, overlaps, and settles into unexpected relationships, like those between the land and sky on a searing evening in late August in the suburbs.

Rush Baker IV
Iowa IV, 2025
watercolor on paper
9 x 12 inches

Everything about stretched canvas defies motion: the hard stops at each edge, the fabric’s warp and weft, a fixed field of microscopic vertical and horizontal lines, asserting a near-undeniable grid. All exist before any paint is applied or images conjured. The Western pedagogical progression, with its development of perspective, made a fixed-ness inherent to the drama of the rectilinear presentation of a painting. Even after early 20th-century artists began bucking the grid, their paintings inherently referred to the illusion of time frozen, captured. After all, Cubism is cubistic. How can an artist defy the grid of the stretched canvas?

Sophia Belkin takes a radical approach in an intuitive move against the grid. She is neither a painter nor a fabric artist. Yet her work is fabric-based and presented as painting. She stains, screens, and digitally prints into various fabrics, moving colors fluidly, unconscious of the grid below. Then the artist stitches together the pieces of fabric, asking our fingers to wander the threaded paths as if following a bumblebee tracking a scent. Belkin’s pictures are more concerned with their organic energy than being explainable. One feels as though we are looking through the window frame of a glass-bottomed boat, viewing only a part of a powerful natural world that freely disregards the possibility of being captured by a grid or anything else.

Sophia Belkin
Snow Blink, 2024
digitally printed fabric, screenprint, dye, and embroidery on denim
24 x 22 x 1 1/2 inches

Sitting on the beach, looking up at the sky and imagining shapes within clouds is a universal experience here on earth. White fluffy kangaroos and plump trees for some are cupcakes and seashells for others; there is no right answer. Steven Cushner’s cloud like forms sprawl across the surface of Untitled, 2026. The painting celebrates repetition of billows like those from childhood drawings of our homes, the sun at the corner of the page with 5 rays extending from it. Cushner’s looping lines and perky colors bring us back to that unique feeling, tied to our classmates, staring up at endless possible stories.

Steven Cushner
Untitled, 2026
acrylic on canvas
42 x 38 inches

“He caught a last sight of their vacation view, a dreamy scene, and as he turned away, he knew change lay ahead.” Are We There Yet? R.G. Laurens.

Jacob Kainen began his professional career as a social realist. By the mid-1940s, his street-scene depictions became more compelling for the puzzled-together passages of paint than for the subjects represented. In the latter part of the decade, his work became fully abstract, along with that of a handful of artists spearheading the American Abstract Expressionist movement. After enduring interrogation by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, possessing a philosophical restlessness and fearing being stylistically pigeonholed, Kainen returned to representational painting. This time his focus was upon more personal subjects, portraits of friends and figure studies. By the late 1960’s, it is easy to feel the artist's work flowing back toward abstraction; his palette becoming softer and more passionate. In the “Landscape Near the Bay” (1967), there is a wistful feeling, nostalgic of a last look. Kainen never returns to representational painting. Over the next thirty-plus years, he traveled through a brilliant array of color-dominated non-objective works. It is transitional pieces, like “Landscape Near the Bay”, that possess a sense of both the past and the future that signal an artist’s career forward.

Jacob Kainen
Landscape Near the Bay, 1967
oil wash on paper
18 1/8 x 24 inches
sold

John Marin (1870 – 1953) was a central figure of the American modernist movement. From his robust and fast-moving cityscapes to visions of the confluence of water, sky and land along the Maine Coast, his intensely focused watercolors capture the constant flux of land, sea, and light.

The spirited composition of Sunset Rockland County (1925) breaks the landscape into expressive planes of light and dark, ground and sky. The mountain range backlit by a receding sun seems to compress the passage of an entire day’s time into a single, sweeping visual gesture.

First exhibited at Alfred Stieglitz’s Intimate Gallery in New York in 1926 and later included in the Index of Twentieth Century Artists exhibited in Grand Central Terminal in 1935. A century later, Marin’s exuberance remains as vital and immediate as ever, boldly demonstrating how modern art redefined the American visual landscape.

John Marin
Sunset Rockland County, 1925
watercolor on paper
14 x 16 1/4 inches

It is not a fantasy or the fancy language of an art dealer; empirical research confirms what artists have long understood: aesthetic experiences alter and often benefit human psychology, brain function, and physical well-being. These rewards can be slow to arrive or immediate. Sometimes one goes to art to contemplate. Other times one wishes to be uplifted, carried away by a pattern, or a scene, or a combination of colors. The creation of art is inherently generous; therefore, art is inherently optimistic. For your enjoyment, we have selected five artworks we believe do the trick.