Painting Today

Hunter Museum of American Art

This grouping offers an array of miscellaneous paintings produced between 1982 and 1999. Philip Pearlstein’s closely cropped nude figures are characteristic of his work, which earned him a place as one of the country’s foremost realist painters. Another celebrated realist painter, Janet Fish, described her own work as “perceptual” given the undeniable visual richness of the glass and plastic materials she chose for her subject matter. As the title indicates, Whitfield Lovell’s composite tableaux Hope offers a hopeful interpretation of the past and future, as an elegantly dressed Black woman is drawn on the surface of a salvaged panel taken from a now-demolished building. The mason jars hold both personal and societal mementos, such as pre-1968 coins and dirt taken from a graveyard in North Carolina that holds the remains of many of the artist’s ancestors.