PRESS RELEASE

True Colors

Meghan Brady, Mary DeVincentis, Jai Hart, Riad Miah, Ilse Sørensen Murdock, Julia Rooney, Cordy Ryman, Paul Sevigny
June 13 – July 18, 2026

FREIGHT+VOLUME is pleased to present True Colors, a summer group exhibition bringing together eight artists—Meghan Brady, Mary DeVincentis, Jai Hart, Riad Miah, Ilse Sørensen Murdock, Julia Rooney, Cordy Ryman, and Paul Sevigny—whose works approach painting through color as structure, sensation, atmosphere, expression, and affect. The exhibition runs from June 13 through July 18 at FREIGHT+VOLUME’s location at 39 Lispenard Street in Tribeca.

True Colors brings together eight artists whose work approaches color as structure, sensation, atmosphere, and form. The exhibition’s title carries a double reference: first, to Anthony Haden-Guest’s legendary “True Colors” column in Vanity Fair, his chronicle of the downtown New York art world of the 1980s, where glamour, performance, visibility, and hidden dynamics continuously overlapped. Here, however, “True Colors,” while still functioning as a tellall of sorts, shifts its object of disclosure to a situation in which authenticity and performance, mood and structure, surface and revelation fold into one another.

In this moment, marked by political turmoil, digital saturation, and acceleration, this exhibition seeks solace in painting’s capacity for pleasure, intensity, and artistic freedom while simultaneously probing its emotional, optical, and psychological potential. Moving through visuality, formalism, and décor, the works on view treat painting as subject, structure, and a proposition. Each artist explores how color mediates surface and form to articulate complex relations, perceptual states, and affects. What is at stake is not simply color as appearance, but color as something capable of organizing feeling, perception, memory, and attention while simultaneously exposing its instability and indeterminacy.

The exhibition draws on a lineage extending from Eugène Delacroix and Romanticism through Symbolism, post-Impressionism, the Fauves, Wassily Kandinsky, and the Color Field painters, where color increasingly detached itself from description in order to function as atmosphere, sensation, and a subjective force. Within this trajectory, however, True Colors does not present color as pure expression or interior truth. It accepts that “truth” now arrives mediated, staged, coded, circulated, and performed, inseparable from the contemporary conditions through which images, identities, and affects are produced and consumed.

Through distinct material and formal strategies, these conditions circulate within True Colors, shaping the work of the participating artists. Cordy Ryman’s linked wooden constructions make color inseparable from materiality, structure, and residue, while Mary DeVincentis’s psychologically charged compositions hover at the edge of dissolution. Jai Hart’s sewn, stuffed, and densely patterned fabric works push painting toward bodily objecthood. Julia Rooney’s intimate paintings filter abstraction through the visual logic of illuminated screens and digital interfaces, while Ilse Sørensen Murdock’s landscape-derived works suspend color and imagery between immediacy and atmosphere. Riad Miah’s illusionistic shaped canvases compress gesture and process into dense chromatic configurations; Paul Sevigny’s compositional constraints test how little is required for color to generate spatial and structural variation; and Meghan Brady’s cut-paper-like geometries transform color into rhythms, intervals, and movement.

Across these artists, color does not consolidate into a single mode but persists as a distributed condition of material, image, and affect, linking otherwise divergent practices through a shared investment in color as substance under contemporary conditions. This diversity of approach marks this exhibition: each artist develops a distinct material and formal engagement with color, from salvaged wood to stained fabric, from screen-scaled paint to cut paper. Taken together, the artists suggest that the Romantic pursuit persists across abstract, narrative, and figurative modes alike, even as that pursuit now arrives mediated and performed through contemporary image culture. What binds them further is the way each artist uses color to re-enter the figural—to renegotiate how form, surface, space, and relation are assembled, sensed, and sustained.

What emerges from True Colors is not a unified position but a shifting set of models through which color structures attention, feeling, perception, and experience. The works do not resolve the tension between painting as image, object, surface, or event; rather, they hold those conditions in suspension. In this sense, color functions simultaneously as material presence and unstable sign—something seen, sensed, staged, performed, and continually reconfigured.

By Saul Ostrow

Saul Ostrow is an independent critic, curator and is an artist’s estate consultant. He has been the Editor of the book series Critical Voices in Art, Theory and Culture published by Routledge, London, Co-Editor of Lusitania Press (1996-12004) and since 1987 the Art Editor for Bomb Magazine. He has curated over 80 exhibitions in the US and abroad. His own writings have appeared in numerous art magazines, journals, catalogues and books in the USA and Europe. He is also the co-founder of Critical Practices Inc (2010) a not-for-profit cultural organization.

Meghan Brady received her BA from Smith College and her MFA from Boston University. She was the 2017 recipient of the Ellis Beauregard Foundation Grant, a 2018 Hewnoaks Summer Fellow, as well as a MacDowell Fellow in 2019. Recent group exhibitions include The University of Tulsa, Tulsa, OK; Steel House Projects, Rockland, Perimeter Gallery, Belfast and Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, New York, Anderson Gallery, Buffalo, Foreland, Catskill, Mrs., Maspeth, and a residency/exhibition at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Brooklyn, NY. Recent solo exhibitions include The Pit, Los Angeles; Caldbeck Gallery, Rockland, ME; NADA House, Governors Island; Independent, NY, and Mrs., Maspeth, NY, which was reviewed by the New York Times. Her work resides in the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME, the U.S. Department of State, Arlington, VA, the Fidelity Investments Art Collection, Boston, MA, SoHo House Art Collection, Brooklyn, Collection Francis J. Greenburger, New York and New York Presbyterian Hospital Collection, New York, NY. Brady lives and works in Camden, ME.

Mary DeVincentis employs a deeply personal iconography to investigate the dilemmas and mysteries of existence. Her paintings depict people, animals and elements of nature as equal in significance and numinosity. Her September 2022 solo exhibition Walking with Ghosts at Tappeto Volante Projects was inspired by the 12th century Persian poem The Conference of the Birds and was reviewed in the January 2023 edition of Art Forum. Previous NYC solo exhibits include Alone in This Together at M. David and Co, Out There, also at M. David and Co and Dwellers on the Threshold at David & Schweitzer Contemporary. Ongoing series include Dark Matters, paintings which investigate the shadowy side of human experience and Sin Eaters, works which depict society's saints, martyrs, scapegoats and outcasts. DeVincentis earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Maryland Institute College of Art and was awarded a Postgraduate Diploma in Advanced Printmaking from St. Martin’s College of Art in London, UK. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is represented in many public and private collections. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Jai Hart is an American artist. Jai holds a M.F.A. from School of Visual Arts, New York, a B.F.A. from Kansas City Art Institute, KC, MO., and studied at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In 2025 Jai participated in several exhibitions, included was a solo exhibition “Loose Ends" was the inaugural exhibition and the grand opening of The Burlington Micro Gallery, Burlington, MA.. and a couple of two-person shows: “How to Let Go of the World: A Duet with Kelly Worman” at Freight and Volume Gallery in Tribeca, NY., as well as “Chalky Wrinkle Shape and Shine”, with Timothy Kadish, at The Essex Art Center, MA. Hart’s 2025 group exhibitions include “SUBWAY RIDERS” at Spring Projects, Dumbo, NY., “So It Goes” at The Wassaic Project’s Summer Exhibition, NY., “Immortal Threads” at The Phoenix Gallery, Waterbury, VT. and “Pastoral: Refuge and Redemption” at ReadyMade Gallery, Orleans, (Cape Cod) MA. Other recent exhibits include “In Nature's Grasp” at The Brattleboro Art Museum, VT., “Stuffed” at Boston University Stone Art Gallery, MA. and “Slant Rhyme” at Brandeis University’s Kniznick Gallery, MA. Hart and was a nominee for the Rema Hort Mann Grant and has received artist grants, fellowships, and stipends from art organizations, including the The Massachusetts Cultural Council, The Oregon Arts Commission, The New York Foundation for the Arts, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, The Vermont Studio Center, and The St. Botolph Club Foundations, MA. Jai’s work can be found in private and corporate collections within the US, and abroad, Jai currently lives and works in Concord, MA.

Riad Miah (b. Trinidad) currently lives and works in New York City. His work has been exhibited at the Equity Gallery, Baltimore Museum of Contemporary Art, Sperone Westwater, Wave Hill, White Box Gallery, Rooster Contemporary Art, Simon Gallery, and Lesley Heller Workshop. He has received fellowships and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts and Germination Europe. He has been nominated for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, the Rema Hort-Mann Award, and the Basil H. Alkazzi Award for Excellence in Painting. Riad’s works are included in private collections, university, and corporate collections, including Novartis and the Children's Hospital in Cincinnati.

Ilse Sørensen Murdock holds a Certificate from the New York Studio School, a BFA from Parsons School of Design, 2000, and a MFA from Rutgers University at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, 2009. Murdock has been a resident of The Edward F. Albee Foundation, Skowhegan, Vermont Studio Center and a returning resident to DNA Provincetown Residency. Her work has been exhibited extensively in the United States, including with Alice Gauvin Gallery, ME and Tibor de Nagy Gallery, NY. In 2019 Murdock received the Cultural Award Grant from the American Scandinavian Society, concluding in an exhibition at the Trygve Lie Gallery, New York, 2020. She was also included in a survey of painting: Here and Now at the Center for Contemporary Art, Bedminster, New Jersey, 2020, and most recently exhibited in a two person show at Platform Project Space, Dumbo, NY. Murdock produces work out of her studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Julia Rooney (b. 1989, New York, NY) is a visual artist who makes paintings and site-specific installations grounded in real space, analog material, and the human body. Sensitive to the increasing dominance of a screen-based world, she creates work rooted in physicality and the bodily perception of one’senvironment, often responding to conditions such as light, scale, texture, and architecture. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Feels Like (2026, Queen Projects, Bellingham, WA), Tilt (2026, Yale Divinity School, New Haven, CT), Flats (2025, Essex Flowers, NYC), In the weather of it, (Below Grand, NYC), Blueprint (Band of Vices, Los Angeles, CA) and Album (2023, Freight+Volume, NYC). She has been awarded residencies and fellowships through The Joan Mitchell Foundation, The Rema Hort Mann Foundation, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The Studios at MASS MoCA, Yale University Art Gallery and DNA Residency, amidst others. She holds an MFA in Painting/Printmaking from Yale School of Art and a BA in Visual & Environmental Studies from Harvard College.

Cordy Ryman is an abstract artist who fuses painting and sculpture using humble materials, most often acrylic paint and wood. He’s known for large-scale, site-specific installations that can be broken down into smaller components and stand-alone pieces. Ryman’s works are often responsive, reacting to their environments, their own layered histories and to one another. He maintains a prolific resourceful playfulness in his practice, with an evolving vocabulary of form and color that informs the freshness of his work. Playful and unpretentious, he mines the rawness of his materials, elevating the imperfect with an approach that is physical, elegant and mysterious.

Ryman has been included in exhibitions at the Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY; The Barbara Walters Gallery, Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY; Bronx River Arts Center, Bronx, NY; Columbus College of Art & Design, Columbus, OH; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; Esbjerg Museum of Modern Art, Esbjerg, Denmark; MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT; University of Springfield Illinois Galleries, Springfield, IL; and Visual Arts Center, Summit, NJ. In 2006, Ryman was the recipient of the Helen Foster Barnett Prize from the National Academy Museum. In 2013, he installed a large-scale public commission at Michigan State University, and in 2014 he received a Percent for Art Public commission by the NYC Department of Education which was permanently installed at PS. 11 Kathryn Phelan Elementary School in Queens, NY in July 2017. Ryman’s work was the subject of a year-long solo exhibition, Free Fall, curated by Thomas Micchelli, at Tower 49 Gallery, New York, NY. A catalogue including new scholarship by critic and poet John Yau, an interview with the artist by art critic Jill Conner, and photographs by Jeffrey Sturges, was published to accompany the show. In 2021, the architect Morris Adjmi installed a site-specific installation of Ryman’s works in his New York headquarters.

The artist’s work has been reviewed in Artforum, The New York Times, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, Frieze, BOMB Magazine, and Time Out NY, among others. Ryman’s work is held in collections worldwide, including Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, FL; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA; Microsoft Art Collection; Pizzuti Collection, Columbus, OH; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, KS; Raussmüller Collection, Basel, Switzerland; Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL; and The Speyer Family Collection. Ryman received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts and lives and works in New York, NY.

With a name synonymous with New York nightlife, Paul Sevigny doesn’t require much of an introduction. He began his foray into the world of entertainment as a DJ spinning at exclusive parties in New York and around the world. Before long, he was opening and operating equally exclusive venues of his own with his most recent venture being Paul’s Cocktail Lounge at Tribeca Grand Hotel. With fluorescent, floral artwork created by Josh Smith, and a well-heeled crowd that embodies the full scope of downtown style and culture, the space is essentially the antithesis of New York’s contemporary nightlife scene. Which is exactly what Mr. Sevigny had in mind. Paul Sevigny received his BA in Studio Arts from College of Charleston in 1994. He started to show his paintings in 2017 with two consecutive shows curated by Bill Powers in NYC and Miami that were followed by a string of group shows, among them an exhibition held by Christie’s in New York.