Walker Youngbird Foundations Emerging Native Arts Grant awarded to Paiute Painter Melissa Melero- Moose.

Paiute Painter Melissa Melero-Moose Wins $15,000 Native Arts Grant for Work Made From Willow and Pine Nuts

Native-led nonprofit Walker Youngbird Foundation's grant supports the development of a new body of work for public presentation this fall

Melissa Melero-Moose doesn't just paint the Great Basin, she gathers it. Willow, tule, cattails, and pine nuts collected from her Northern Paiute homelands are embedded in the layered, abstract surfaces of her mixed-media paintings, alongside acrylic washes and rice paper.

That practice has now earned her the Walker Youngbird Foundation's Emerging Native Arts Grant, a $15,000 award given twice a year to Native artists developing new bodies of work. Melero-Moose, an enrolled member of the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe based near Reno, Nevada, is the fifth recipient. She will use the grant to create a new series of paintings for a public exhibition, with venue and dates to be announced this fall.

"Her work belongs to the Great Basin, not simply as subject matter, but as material and method," said Reid Walker, the foundation's founder, of her work.

"My proposal for this new series of work is to translate and create new imagery, in mixed media painting creations, that would accompany some of the traditional stories from the Numu (Northern Paiute) in my region. In my current work, the Basket Series, I present place, through color and textures, the feeling of the Great Basin region and Paiute culture with abstraction and design. I use organic objects like willow, pine nuts, cattails, and earth to create the textures that tell the story of place. These new works would be guided by those similar elements," said Melero-Moose.

Melero-Moose traces her practice to making her son's Paiute basket cradleboard with family members, an experience that drew her into weaving and, eventually, into working gathered materials directly into her paintings. It also made her an advocate for Native weavers losing access to traditional gathering sites on tribal and public lands. Her recent series "Access Denied" renders that loss visually: basketry designs that transform into barbed wire, cutting Indigenous people off from the willow, food, and water their traditions depend on.

She curates the Great Basin Native Artists Gallery at the Stewart Indian School Cultural Center and Museum in Carson City, an outgrowth of the artist collective she co-founded in 2014 to counter the invisibility of Great Basin Native artists in the broader Native art world.

Awarded bi-annually, the Emerging Native Arts Grant provides direct funding, mentorship, and visibility to Native and Indigenous artists at a pivotal stage in their careers. Native artists are often underrepresented in mainstream arts funding and gallery systems, and this initiative offers the resources to complete a proposed project, whether an exhibition, installation, publication, or other.

High-resolution images of the artist and her work are available upon request.

ABOUT WALKER YOUNGBIRD FOUNDATION
Founded in 2024, the Walker Youngbird Foundation is a Native-led 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to advancing contemporary Indigenous artists across North America. Through grants, mentorship, exhibitions, strategic partnerships, and institutional collaboration, the Foundation supports artists at pivotal moments in their careers while helping expand the presence of Native art in museums, collections, and public life. Learn more at walkeryoungbird.org.

SOURCE Walker Youngbird Foundation

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Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, & The Museum of Modern Art NY, Exhibition of Nilima Sheikh's work~Fractured Skies~ September 27, 20266. All details below

 

THE KIRAN NADAR MUSEUM OF ART AND THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART NEW YORK TO CO-ORGANIZE A LANDMARK EXHIBITION ‘FRACTURED SKIES’ BY INDIAN ARTIST NILIMA SHEIKH

Nilima Sheikh: Fractured Skies will be the artist’s first solo presentation in New York

Nilima Sheikh, Son el Lumiere (detail), 2006 – 2016, Casein tempera on canvas scroll (Two sided), 120.1 x 72in
Collection: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art

New Delhi and New York, July 22, 2026: The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA), New Delhi, announces Nilima Sheikh: Fractured Skies, an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA), organized in collaboration with MoMA. On view at MoMA from September 27, 2026, through June 13, 2027, the exhibition is devoted to the work of Indian artist Nilima Sheikh (b. 1945) and marks her first solo presentation in New York. 

The exhibition is co-organized by Cara Manes, Associate Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA, and Roobina Karode, Artistic Director and Chief Curator, KNMA, with Elizabeth Wickham, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA.

In Sheikh’s words, “The artist’s role is to bear witness—to both the past and present.” Over five decades, Nilima Sheikh’s practice has reinvented narrative painting as a mode of historical witness and social engagement, reflecting and engaging with histories of displacement and violence, especially the partition of Punjab and the contested terrain of Kashmir. As sites formed through complex and layered histories, Sheikh reconfigures them in a vertical scroll format through the use of tempera, stencils, citations and poetry, folklore, as well as historical accounts.

Bringing together works from three major series from the past two decades, the exhibition traces Sheikh's enduring investigations into trauma, loss, memory, and renewal. At the center is a selection of works from Each Night Put Kashmir in Your Dreams (2003–14), a groundbreaking series of suspended, double-sided painted scrolls executed in casein tempera on unstretched canvas. The series reflects Sheikh’s sustained engagement with the culturally rich, politically complex, and historically contested region of the Kashmir Valley. Juxtaposed on the surrounding walls are works in a horizontal format from Home, Land (2023–25), a series of mixed tempera paintings on paper that reflect on the precarity and displacement experienced by the nomadic Bakarwal communities of Jammu and Kashmir. And finally, making its debut at MoMA is Shahid/Witness, Sheikh's most recent reflection on war and unrest across the world. Commissioned by KNMA and comprising ten monumental, suspended painted scrolls, the work responds to the distinctive architecture and scale of MoMA's Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III Gallery.

“Over the course of her distinguished career, Nilima Sheikh has developed a singular approach to artmaking, drawing on literary, historical, and vernacular traditions to create layered visual narratives that connect the past to the present,” said Cara Manes, Associate Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA. “Her paintings confront histories of violence, displacement, and erasure with deep sensitivity and formal invention. Centering lived experiences, particularly those of women, her works bear witness to the enduring power of human connections across time and space. Through her visionary practice, Sheikh has become a touchstone for artists following the path she forged.”

Roobina Karode, Artistic Director and Chief Curator, KNMA, adds, “Nilima Sheikh’s practice occupies a significant place in the contemporary art world, offering a profound South Asian lens to the shared complexities and predicaments amidst geopolitical conflicts. With a nuanced artistic sensibility, Sheikh works through an aesthetic of slowness, combining the tragic with the poetic, intricately weaving texts and images to meditate on states of longing and loss. By bridging local inheritance with urgent universal dialogues, this co-organized exhibition marks a defining moment in our ongoing mission to present South Asia’s visionary voices on the global stage.”

Painting for Nilima Sheikh serves as a repository of personal and collective memory, marked by shifting topographies, labouring figures, maps, poetry, traces of erasure and moods of quiescence. In that, she creates a space to make visible both the precariousness of the present times as well as the persistence of life, seeking renewal and hope. 

Sponsorship
Major support for the exhibition is provided by The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art.

Generous funding is provided by The Young Patrons Council of The Museum of Modern Art.

The Bloomberg Connects digital experience is made possible through the support of Bloomberg Philanthropies.

Artist Bio
Based in Baroda, India, Nilima Sheikh (b. 1945, New Delhi, India) is one of the most consequential artists working in South Asia today. Sheikh studied history at Delhi University from 1962 to 1965. In 1971, she received a master’s in painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. Founded after Indian Independence, the school was an important center for artistic and intellectual exchange, and fostered a community that challenged inherited cultural and pedagogical frameworks. There, alongside her peers, Sheikh played a key role in shaping contemporary Indian art.

Sheikh’s recent solo exhibitions include Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong (2018); Gallery Espace at Bikaner House, New Delhi (2018); Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai (2017); the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois (2014); and Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi (2010). Sheikh is the recipient of the Nandjunda Rao Award by Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath, Bangalore (2021), and the Gagan Aban Puraskar Award by Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan (2011).

Selected group exhibitions include Barbican Centre, London (2024); Sharjah Biennial 15, Sharjah (2023); Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, Mumbai (2022); Pera Museum, Istanbul (2020); Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka (2020); Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi (2018); documenta 14, Athens and Kassel (2017); and Singapore Biennale, Singapore (2016).

Sheikh’s work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; the Leicester Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester; Sharjah Art Museum, Sharjah; Guggenheim Museum, Abu Dhabi; and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi.

About Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA)
Established through the initiative of avid art collector Kiran Nadar, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) opened to the public in January 2010 as India’s first private museum dedicated to modern and contemporary art from the subcontinent. KNMA is a non-commercial, not-for-profit institution supported by the Shiv Nadar Foundation. It seeks to foster a dynamic relationship between art and culture through its exhibitions, publications, educational initiatives, and public programs. Committed to institutional collaborations and artist support networks, KNMA actively engages with diverse audiences through its wide-ranging programming. KNMA supports artists whose work engages with social and political questions while expanding global understanding of South Asian art.
 
KNMA has presented major solo exhibitions by artists including Nalini Malani, Zarina, Nasreen Mohamedi, and has collaborated with leading international institutions such as the MET Breuer, Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, Qatar Museums in Doha, the Public Art Fund, Museum of Modern Art, Barbican Centre and Tate Modern in London, among others. The museum’s ever-expanding collection with seminal modernist and contemporary works from India and South Asia region is now broadening its scope to include classical and folk art, stretching the span from the 3rd century CE to the 20th century, tracing historical trajectories in Indian art alongside the experimental practices of young contemporaries.
 
KNMA is set to evolve into a landmark cultural destination with a new location, an expansive 100,000- square-meter (over 1 million square feet) architectural marvel, near the Indira Gandhi International Airport, New Delhi. It will feature multiple exhibition spaces, a performance arts centre, an education block, an archive centre, a library, restaurants, and a members’ room. Strengthening its role as a cultural epicenter, this expansion will further KNMA’s mission to be a vibrant hub for visual and performing arts, fostering artistic innovation and cultural dialogue.
www.knma.org

About The Museum of Modern Art, New York (MoMA)
The Museum of Modern Art connects people from around the world to the art of our time. MoMA aspires to be a catalyst for experimentation, learning, and creativity, a gathering place for all, and a home for artists and their ideas. Founded in 1929, MoMA realizes its mission by establishing, caring for, and presenting a dynamic collection of the highest order that reflects the vitality and complexity of modern and contemporary art; by welcoming millions of people every year to explore its exhibitions and participate in onsite and online programs; by sustaining a library, archives, and conservation laboratory that are recognized as international centers of research; and by supporting innovative scholarship and publications.
www.moma.org.

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An exciting public exhibition at Tom Wesselman's Cooper Square Studio Septembet 19-27,2026. See reservation slots available in the link below.

 THis is exciting as a retrospective slice of visual history seen by Tom Wesselmann, in the USA, and  Matsuyama in Japan artistic statements similar tones communicating visual language for cultural messaging. Scroll down ot the bottom to see the link for booking a walkthrough time for viewing this exhibit.

Tom Wesselmann’s Cooper Square Studio Opens to the Public for the First Time with Special Exhibition Wesselmann x Matsuyama

Presented by the Estate of Tom Wesselmann, the exhibition brings together works by Wesselmann and Matsuyama, on view from September 19 through September 27, 2026

L: Tom Wesselmann, Detail of Still Life #35, 1963, oil and collage on canvas, 120 x 192 inches. Courtesy of the Estate. R: Matsuyama, Detail of We The People, 2025, Acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 115.4 × 209.8 inches. Courtesy of MATSUYAMA STUDIO.

New York, NY (July 22, 2026) – This fall, Tom Wesselmann's Cooper Square studio, where he worked from 1994 until his death in 2004, opens to the public for the first time. Paintings by Wesselmann (1931–2004) hang alongside works by contemporary Japanese American artist Matsuyama, bringing together two artists separated by history and culture but united by a shared ambition: to transform the familiar into an experience of heightened perception. Installed in the space where much of Wesselmann's later work was created, the exhibition offers a rare opportunity to encounter two artists who challenge us to see the familiar world anew. Presented by the Estate of Tom Wesselmann, with the generous support of Almine Rech Gallery, Wesselmann x Matsuyama will be on view from September 19 through September 27, 2026.    That exchange first took shape on an international stage in 2024, when Matsuyama was among the contemporary artists commissioned for  Pop Forever, Tom Wesselmann & ... at the Fondation Louis Vuitton. His contribution revealed striking affinities with Wesselmann's paintings, not only through shared imagery but through a common impulse to rework familiar codes of figures, interiors, and popular culture into bold, visually striking compositions. Wesselmann x Matsuyama returns that encounter to Wesselmann’s former studio, allowing visitors to experience those affinities in the very setting where his late practice unfolded.    Wesselmann described his work as pursuing “super reality,” a sharpened state of perception in which the ordinary is encountered with renewed visual intensity. As he wrote, these everyday objects were “not especially significant… until they were isolated and their super-reality potential anticipated.” Once removed from habitual experience and reimagined within a painting, these objects become less things to recognize than things to see. Rather than commenting on American consumer culture, Wesselmann sought to intensify it pictorially, transforming the material world of daily life into one of extraordinary visual immediacy. Saturated color, monumental scale, printed imagery, functioning appliances, and shaped canvases all served that single aim.  Matsuyama approaches the contemporary image world from a different historical and cultural position. For him, the visual world of the twenty-first century is already global. Japanese visual traditions, Western art history, advertising, and the experience of living in Brooklyn coexist within a single visual vocabulary, which he reimagines through his own lived experience between cultures and geographies. If Wesselmann transformed the visual language of postwar America from within its own culture, Matsuyama works within a visual world in which cultural boundaries are already porous. His paintings transform recognizable imagery into renewed visual experiences while simultaneously reflecting the cultural and historical complexities of that global condition.  The affinities between the two artists are especially evident in their treatment of the interior. Wesselmann's Bedroom Painting series merges the nude and the still life, transforming domestic space through fragmented bodies, oversized flowers, and everyday objects. Matsuyama approaches the domestic interior through a different cultural lens. Shaped by a culture that prizes domestic privacy, he was struck by Americans' willingness to reveal their homes. He returns to that experience repeatedly, constructing fantastical interiors animated by saturated color, sensual poses, and lush, competing patterns. Here, memory, cultural identity, and contemporary visual culture converge, extending Wesselmann's exploration of domestic space into the twenty-first century. Both artists further expand that space through shaped canvases, treating the support as an active part of the composition rather than a neutral frame. The result is a painting that extends physically and conceptually beyond the conventional rectangle.  One of the exhibition's central pairings brings together Wesselmann's Still Life #35 (1963) and Matsuyama's  We The People (2025). Still Life #35, a billboard-scale still life composed of four canvases, depicts a table set with Royal Crown Cola, Made-Rite bread, and a can of Libby's Beef Stew. Rising from the tabletop is a monumental fragment of an actual Royal Crown Cola billboard. Rather than simply inserting an advertisement into a traditional still life, Wesselmann transforms the still life itself, enlarging it to the scale of the billboard so that the two occupy the same pictorial world. Familiar commercial imagery becomes an integral part of the painting's formal structure, embodying Wesselmann's idea of "super reality."   Across the studio, We The People, painted over eighteen months, presents a brightly lit American supermarket where everyday consumer packaging becomes the setting for a remarkable art historical encounter. At its center, Matsuyama reimagines the figures from Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Socrates (1787), one of the defining paintings of the Western canon, relocating them to the aisle of an American supermarket. Cereal boxes and medicine packages become formal elements—patterns of color, geometry, and typography that construct a deep, almost vertiginous space while drawing the eye repeatedly back to the central drama. For Matsuyama, the supermarket becomes a contemporary stage where art history, advertising, and everyday life coexist within a single pictorial order. Familiar brands are transformed from objects of recognition into a framework of looking. Rather than quoting familiar visual languages for their own sake, Matsuyama reorganizes them into a pictorial experience that rewards sustained attention. The new relationships that emerge are not only formal but cultural, inviting viewers to consider how art history, commerce, and contemporary life intersect within a global visual world.  Working in different historical moments and cultural contexts, Wesselmann and Matsuyama arrive at remarkably similar questions about what painting can do. Rather than asking us simply to recognize the world around us, both invite us to look again—to discover in the familiar the possibility of renewed visual experience. Seen together in the studio where Wesselmann developed many of these ideas, their works reveal a conversation across historical moments, united by a shared conviction that painting can still transform the familiar into something newly seen.

Editorial Notes: About Matsuyama   Matsuyama (b. 1976, Gifu, Japan) is a contemporary artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Working across painting, sculpture, and installation, he creates works that organically connect the Eastern and the Western, ancient and contemporary, representational and abstract elements. His practice reflects both his experience living between cultures and the changing nature of contemporary society in an information-driven age. Matsuyama’s public art projects include Midnight Moment (Times Square, New York, 2026), the Bowery Mural (New York, 2019 and 2023), JR Shinjuku East Exit Plaza (Tokyo, 2020), and Meiji Jingu Shrine (Tokyo, 2020). His exhibitions include Tomokazu Matsuyama: Morning Sun (Edward Hopper House Museum & Study Center, 2025), Liberation Back Home (SCAD Museum of Art, 2025), and Tomokazu Matsuyama: FIRST LAST (Azabudai Hills Gallery, 2025).  About The Estate of Tom Wesselmann  The Estate of Tom Wesselmann is dedicated to furthering the knowledge, appreciation, and exhibition of Tom Wesselmann’s art. Through exhibitions, scholarship, and the preservation of the artist’s archives, the Estate works to advance understanding of Wesselmann’s enduring contribution to postwar American art.  Exhibition Information  Wesselmann x Matsuyama  On view September 19–September 27, 2026  Visiting hours open to public:  Saturday September 19: 10-11am; 1-2pm; 3-4pm  Friday September 25: 10-11am; 1-2pm; 3-4pm  Saturday September 26: 10-11am; 1-2pm; 3-4pm  Advance registration is required:  https://calendly.com/tomokazu-matsuyama/matsuwesselmann?month=2026-09   #tomwesselmannmatsuyama#fineartmagazineblog.blogspot.com#sunstormfineartmagazine.com#artfunpop, #artfunreview#artfuncreate#artfunnow,

Michael Muldoon Elder founder of Vorpal Galleries honored by Norfolk Press Exhibition Saturday July 25, 3:00- 5:00 PM at the Art Space Retrospective, San Francisco

 Michael Muldoon Elder brought the work of M.C. Esher to a renewed interest in the 1970's. HIs legacy and work is being honored Sat July 25. see below info 

An ArtSpace Retrospective Exhibition   Please join us in celebrating the life and art of Michael Muldoon Elder 1935-2026   It is a great honor to host all of you who knew of my friend, weekly chess competitor, and fine arts mentor, Muldoon Elder. Come raise a glass to his incredible life and share a story or two or three.   Muldoon founded the Vorpal Galleries in San Francisco in 1962 and New York in 1974. As a preeminent gallerist, he brought the iconic art of M.C. Escher to North America, and helped launch the careers of many important and provocative artists.   And yet throughout all of this, unbeknown to most, he was a passionate and accomplished artist himself!   This retrospective exhibition includes paintings Muldoon created from the 1950s to very recent. A range of artwork styles are on exhibit, from abstract landscapes, cityscapes, and portraits, to depictions of spatial interpretations.   Curated by Lori Grissom   Hosted by Charles Cunningham   ArtSpace 2231 Newcomb Avenue San Francisco, CA 94124   Saturday, July 25, 2026 3:00 - 6:00 PM   RSVP DECENT OF THE GANGES: (Legend has it that the river Ganges comes out of the heavens and, so as not to pierce a hole through the Earth, lands on the back of a God, flows, and is the source of all life.) –Muldoon Elder

info@norfolkpress.com | norfolkpress.com

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Eugene Healy's work is featured at the Madelyn Jordon Gallery. The abstract seascapes are below for viewing!

Artist Spotlight Euguene Healy

As we reach the height of summer, we are pleased to highlight the work of Eugene Healy, whose luminous seascapes perfectly capture the shifting moods and atmosphere of the season.

VIEW WORKS

Eugene Healy 'The Boardwalk' 2022. Oil and mixed media on canvas, 30 x 30 in. /Frame: 30.5 x 30.75 in.

INQUIRE

For more than 25 years, Eugene Healy has lived and worked along the coasts of Connecticut and Rhode Island, drawing inspiration from the region’s ever-changing skies, waterways, and shoreline communities. Influenced by childhood memories of growing up on Long Island and a lifelong love of sailing, his work reflects a deep connection to the sea and its shifting moods. Celebrated for his distinctive collage-paintings and minimalist seascapes, Healy employs a variety of mediums , including oil, watercolor, encaustic, lacquer, and sand applied to fragments of canvas, board, and paper that gives the artwork a unique raised textured surface.  Inspired by artists such as Matisse, Vermeer, Richard Diebenkorn and Robert Rauschenberg, Healy distills his landscape into harmonious fields of color, balancing representation and abstraction. His work captures the interplay of light and atmosphere, evoking the quiet poetry of the American coastline.

Eugene Healy 'Hurricane Light' 2025. Oil and mixed media on canvas, 40 x 36 in. / Frame: 40.5 x 36.5 in. INQUIRE

Eugene Healy 'Montauk Light' 2021. Oil and mixed media on canvas, 30 x 40 in. / Frame: 30.5 x 40.5 in. INQUIRE

Eugene Healy 'The Front' 2022. Mixed media and oil on canvas, 30 x 40 in. / Frame: 30.5 x 40.5 in.

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Eugene Healy 'Stonington Point' 2024. oil and mixed media on canvas, 48 x 60 in. / Frame: 48.5 x 60.5 in.

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Eugene Healy 'Summer Squall' 2022. Mixed media and oil on canvas,36 x 36 in. / Frame: 36.5 x 36.5 in.

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For any inquiries, please send us an email or call us at (914) 723-8738. We look forward to welcoming you to the gallery!

Madelyn Jordon Fine Art 31 Mamaroneck Ave White Plains, NY 10601 T: (914) 723-8738 E: Madelyn@madelynjordonfineart.com W: MadelynJordonFineArt.com Hours: Wed-Fri. | 10:00 - 5:30 #MadelynJordonFineArt Follow Us: Instagram | Facebook | Twitter   Visit Us at: Madelynjordonfineart.com

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