June 25th - September 12th, 2026

Opening Reception: Thursday, June 25th  6 - 8 PM

RUTHANN is pleased to present Party in Hell, a group exhibition of works by Nancy Davidson, Leigh Davis, J Grabowski, Whit Harris, Pol Morton, Elena Sisto and Brian Wood. 

The artists in this exhibition explore the  joys and precarities of being alive alongside the awareness and concept/question of death. Through art making they cultivate ways to understand, cope with, and find humor in mortality. 

The more closely we look, the more we see that life is not a closed system. It is a training ground within a vast architecture of consciousness. We are not merely bodies moving through a material world, but awareness moving through structured realms, shaped by habit and possibility . -Britta Van Dun

Party in Hell brings together painters and mixed media artists who make work about resilience and rapture. Their works claim their moment in time through image, mark, color, and sound on surface and screen. What residue do we leave as people, artists and creators during our relatively brief tenure as this consciousness? The act of art-making is both life and death, a fleeting expression and a finite, drying liquid. 

So when you really have the perfume of this thing, in your breath, in your being; not on some rare occasions but every day, waking and sleeping, then you will see for yourself, without somebody telling you, what an extraordinary thing it is to live, with actuality, not with words and symbols, to live with death and therefore to live every minute in a world in which there is not the known, but there is always the freedom from the known. -Krishnamurti

Curated by Georgia Elrod

Nancy Davidson is a contemporary artist whose practice encompasses sculpture, installation, drawing, and photography. She has focused on exploring the female form, power dynamics, and societal expectations. Davidson's work is characterized by its innovative use of materials, such as inflatable latex sculptures, and she challenges conventional representations of femininity. Her works are imbued with a keen sense of humor and playfulness, while also addressing deeper issues of gender and power. Davidson’s honors include the Guggenheim Fellowship (2014):  Pollock Krasner Foundation (2001, 2015):  Creative Capital (2005): Anonymous Was a Woman Award (1997): Yaddo Residency (1980,2003): Massachusetts Council of Arts, Individual Artists Fellowship (1981), NEA (1979). Davidson’s work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Art in America, Artforum, the Village Voice, the Brooklyn Rail, Der Spiegel and Art/Text.

Leigh Davis creates interdisciplinary work to explore elements of mourning and the spaces we embody in bereavement. Through a combination of artistic inquiry, hands-on engagement, and training in end-of-life practices, Davis’ projects aim to reveal grief as a form of lived knowledge: both deeply personal and profoundly collective. For over a decade, Davis has archived end of life experiences, delving into how loss reshapes identity and belief. Her filmic essay Inquiry into the ELE exhibited at BRIC Contemporary Art (Brooklyn) and Vox Populi (Philadelphia). Davis’ site-based installations, Vigil and Feeling Tones featured at Green-Wood Cemetery (Brooklyn). She has exhibited at Open Source (Brooklyn), EFA Project Space (New York), Oliver Art Center (Oakland), and Grizzly Grizzly (Philadelphia).

J Grabowski is an artist whose practice explores drawing, writing, painting, sculpture, movement, and music. Concrete Drawing is an ongoing series of cement works by J Grabowski that live somewhere between drawing, painting, performance, and sculpture. The title describes the process in which the works are made, drawing directly into the material, while gleaning from 'Concrete Poetry' and ‘Musique Concrète,’ an experimental type of music composition pioneered by Luc Ferrari, that utilizes recorded sounds as raw material. Similarly, these cement works become a record of their own formation, collectively building a visual language over time akin to cuneiform, pictograms, and contemporary signage. His work has been exhibited at Off Paradise Like a Nightingale with a Toothache (2024), Some  Kind of Mind Thing (2022), The Secret Show (2021). Grawobski has exhibited at White Columns, The Drawing Center, Independent Art Fair, The Salon and NADA Paris, The Church of St. Paul the Apostle, The NYPL Jefferson Market Library, Qualia, Underdonk, Adobe Books, Gathering of the Tribes, Museo de la Ciudad de México and Fuse Gallery; published by Two Way Mirror (forthcoming), Lithic Press, Old Gold, Ugly Duckling Presse, Bird & Beckett and the Berkeley Art Museum; held in the collections of The Bunker Artspace, West Palm Beach and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. J cofounded PUSH Press, the Heliopolis Project (2010-2015), POMPEI and Turtle Records.

Whit Harris is a multi-disciplinary artist working across drawing, painting, and ceramic sculpture. Her work depicts fluid, disjointed anatomies—figures that stretch, recline, wriggle, and contort in exaggerated expressions as they navigate spectral, otherworldly environments. These shifting bodies reflect her psychological adaptation to unpredictable and hostile environments shaped by anti-Black social structures, while also embodying the resilience and imagination of Black femme experience. Harris was awarded a 2024 NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship in Painting. Recent highlights include participation in NADA Miami 2024, features in The Boston Review and BAT City Review, and an upcoming solo exhibition at DIMIN, New York, in September 2025. She has exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Seattle, and Munich. Harris holds an MFA from Hunter College and a BA from Stony Brook University. She teaches at Brooklyn College and Borough of Manhattan Community College, and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Pol Morton is a chronically ill non-binary artist making assemblage paintings about queerness, transness, and disability. In Morton’s diaristic paintings, oil paint surrounds and encrusts collaged materials such as medical debris and resin-coated sequins, playing with the beauty in the experiences of injury, infection, and recovery. Their work takes on intimate, quotidian moments—lying in bed, taking a bath, walking around the city of New York with a cane, and staring at doves having sex through the window. Born in Palo Alto, California, they received their BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore (2009) and their MFA from Hunter College in New York City (2022). Their work has been exhibited in NYC at Olympia, White Columns, Klaus von Nichtssagend, Swivel Gallery, Storage Gallery, Trestle Gallery, Latitude Gallery, Tappeto Volante, and Field Projects; in Jersey City at Mana Contemporary; in China at The Beijing American Center and the Luxun Academy of Fine Art; among others. Morton was a recent resident at the Monira Foundation Residency at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City.

Elena Sisto is known for her figurative paintings that frequently focus on the experiences of being a woman.  She received her BA in Art from Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design. In addition, she studied at the New York Studio School, the Skowhegan School and Yale Norfolk. She was awarded a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Grant in 2022. She is a 2013 recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist’s Fellowships (1983-48 and 1989-90), the Inglis Griswold Nelson Prize from the National Academy of Design (2008) and is a Fellow of the National Academy. Sisto has been the subject of numerous solo shows including those at the Maier Museum, the Greenville County Museum of Art, the American University Museum at the Katzen Center, and the Miami-Dade Museum of Art + Design. She was also included in the 43rd Corcoran Biennial. The artist lives and works in New York City and Milan, NY.

Brian Wood is a contemporary artist working in New York. Critic Holland Cotter, in his New York Times review of Brian Wood’s exhibition Enceinte writes: “… Wood creates a kind of Symbolist world in which emerging into life and being devoured by it are part of the same inexorable process. As in the early work by Georgia O’Keeffe and Arthur Dove, the erotic and the spiritual are of a piece.” Brian Wood’s paintings, drawings, photographs, prints, films, and books are exhibited internationally. Wood is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, National Gallery of Art in DC, Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Museum of Modern Art in Prague, National Gallery of Canada, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Asheville Art Museum, Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, Blanton Museum of Art, and many others. Wood has had 50 solo exhibitions in international galleries and museums and has exhibited in more than 200 group shows including at the Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, Walker Art Center, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, LA County Museum of Art, Museum of American Art in DC, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Seibu Museum in Tokyo, Documenta in Kassel, Germany, American Academy of Arts & Letters, NYC, and many others. Brian Wood's awards include the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, and the 2020 American Academy of Arts & Letters Purchase Award. Wood was a 2019 Rome Prize finalist.

10% of the RUTHANN’s portion of art sales will go directly to support the Columbia County Sanctuary Movement. Columbia County Sanctuary Movement organizes with immigrants and allies to collectively support, empower, and defend our communities. CCSM was founded in rural NY so we could build a base, create direct service infrastructure, and support a political home for immigrants.

Upstate Art Weekend
Extended Hours:

Friday, June 26th 1 - 5 PM

Saturday,  June 27th 1 - 5PM

Sunday, June 28th 1 - 5PM