Jen P. Harris | Tomboy
Press Release
JEN P. HARRIS – TOMBOY
EXHIBITION DATES: January 10 – February 14, 2026
RECEPTION: Saturday, January 10 from 3pm through 5:30pm
IN CONVERSATION: Saturday, January 10th at 2pm
Artist Jen P. Harris & Kim Manfredi will be in conversation with Patricia Sweetow
PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY is pleased to present the loom-paintings of Jen P. Harris in their first exhibition with the gallery. Harris lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio. Exhibition dates are January 10th through February 14th. An artist conversation begins at 2pm. The reception follows from 3pm through 5:30pm.
Jen P. Harris repositions the relationship between painting and weaving in their one-person exhibition, Tomboy. Harris’ paintings pose an intersection of ambiguity, where neither painting nor weaving resolves without the slippage between both. Suspending expectations, Harris obscures their paintings by animating the painting as a loom, stretching a warp of yarn from the top profile of the painting to the bottom of the stretcher, whereupon they needle weave the weft in response to the newly camouflaged composition. Harris’ unique approach electrifies the dance between media, each transgressing the space and story held by the other. Their paintings become a queer metaphor where concrete morphs and dissolves into a river of nonlinear multiplicity.
“This departure from the material hierarchy of paint over canvas, this repositioning of cloth, conventionally rendered invisible and inert by paint, as an agent with a presence all its own, is quite possibly the thing I was searching for all those years. It lets me stir things up. Working with the thread has become the method by which I can make visible that which I sense in the painting but cannot reach with paint alone.” – Jen P. Harris
Jen P. Harris, (b. 1977) received a BA in Studio Art from Yale University, and an MFA in Painting from Queens College CUNY. She was awarded a Fellowship in Painting from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2012 and a Pollock-Krasner Grant in 2025. Her works are in numerous public and private collections and are featured in the upcoming book TEXTILES x ART, published by Thames and Hudson, 2025. Recent group exhibitions include Jane Lombard Gallery, New York, NY, and Essex Flowers, New York, NY. Harris will be included in Abattoir Gallery’s presentation at NADA 2025 in Miami.
Kim Manfredi
Press Release
KIM MANFREDI: BLOOM
EXHIBITION DATES: January 10 – February 14, 2026
RECEPTION: Saturday, January 10 from 3pm through 5:30pm
IN CONVERSATION: Saturday, January 10th at 2pm
Artist Kim Manfredi & Jen P. Harris will be in conversation with Patricia Sweetow
PATRICIA SWEETOW GALLERY is pleased to present the paintings of Kim Manfredi in the exhibition Bloom, a unique perspective of landscape rife with the poetics of representation and abstraction. Exhibition dates are January 10th through February 14th. An artist conversation begins at 2pm. The Reception follows from 3pm through 5:30pm.
Living and working in the Coachella Valley of California, Manfredi’s rich visual language is influenced by the rugged beauty of the desert, a starkly contrasted landscape rich in succulents and wildlife adapted to the harsh realities of an arid landscape. The desert changes seasonally from greys and beiges to spring’s sparkling drag show, with bright flora bursting in luminous color and divine compositions competing for their brief moment of pollination. This Darwinian contrast is a bedrock of inspiration for Manfredi, its essence distilled into shapes of color with performative flora onstage. Animating the majestic dunes of the region, the desert is not only muse, but also media, as Manfredi sifts through desert sands, mixing small particles contoured by wind, water, and sun with prismatic color.
Manfredi studied with esteemed painters Grace Hartigan and Joyce Kozloff while earning her MFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA, 2007), where she had the honor of becoming their teaching assistants and friends. Citing both artists as influential, she credits Hartigan for imparting a bold use of brush and Kozloff with her handling of soft edges. Manfredi’s earlier mixed media paintings reflect growing up in Baltimore, living and working in an urban landscape until 2015 whereupon she departed for California.
Kim Manfredi’s exhibitions include the C. Grimaldis Gallery, Baltimore, Royale Gallery, Los Angeles and recently Modern Light, curated by Elizabeth Armstrong. She’s participated in artist residencies at the Vermont Studio Center; Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Amherst; and the Maryland Art Place, Baltimore. Manfredi received a full fellowship from the Torrance Art Museum for the Cycladic Arts Residency in Paros, Greece. In September 2026, Manfredi will have her first one-person museum exhibition at the Laguna Art Museum, Laguna, CA.