Under the Radar

Ed Haddaway

“Even as a kid,” Ed Haddaway remembers,“I was really into making things. My parents would stick us in the back yard and we had hammers and nails and boards. There was a basic primal need to put things together from about the age of five.” Haddaway, a bearded burly man...

Sharon Weiner

Sharon Weiner’s explosive paintings appear to have come into being through random acts of nature—tsunamis, tidal waves, maybe even collisions of meteors in deep space. In reality, the artist fabricates the works by building up several layers of poured acrylic paint...

Julian Hatton

At the age of 19, Julian Hatton was lucky enough to have one of those life-changing experiences that could be the stuff of movies. Taking time off from his studies at Harvard, he went to visit a friend of his father’s, an abstract artist of some renown named Fernando...

Gelah Penn

Gelah Penn’s installations bristle with spiky energy, hugging the walls or colonizing corners, suggesting habitats created by insects with a taste for sci-fi, or abstract line drawings catapulted from two dimensions into three. The works are made from cheap and...

Christopher Benson

From a remarkably young age, Christopher Benson knew that he wanted to paint and, more pointedly, that he wanted to paint within the hallowed traditions of realism. There was no shortage of encouragement on the home front: He spent most of his childhood in Newport,...

Mary Zeran

From her mother’s side of the family, Mary Zeran inherited a deep love and respect for crafts of all kinds—from Norwegian rosemaling to metalsmithing to textiles and embroidering. “My mom was always making furniture and boxes, and even carved wooden Santas. I wasn’t...

Elisa D’Arrigo

Elisa D’Arrigo may be the only artist working in clay who can claim to have found early inspiration in “Dennis the Menace.” In one sequence from the hugely popular comic strip from the 1950s and ‘60s, Dennis’s parents are on vacation in Mexico and pay a visit to a...

James Austin Murray

James Austin Murray’s recent six- by six-foot paintings are made using the most basic of means: ivory black oil paint, a canvas and wood-panel support, and wallpaper brushes—up to nine affixed to a long handle. But the surface effects are far from simple, and indeed...

Alison Berry

Alison Berry’s recent paintings resemble maps of unknown and fantastical places, enchanted worlds that incorporate beasts both ancient and modern, floor plans for eccentric structures, buildings that look lifted from Quattrocento paintings, lush trees and plants—along...

Virginia Katz

“Landscape is something I’ve always gravitated toward,” says Virginia Katz, whose work for the past 15 years or so in one way or another incorporates a fascination with wind, water, and land. Though born in Brooklyn, she spent most of her childhood in upstate New...

Beverly Rautenberg

As a child, Beverly Rautenberg suffered from upper respiratory problems that plagued her from the age of three till she started high school. For most of the year, she was kept at home, in a suburb of Chicago, and as an only child found those early years difficult and...

Jane Barthes

In Jane Barthes’ first incarnation as an artist, she was both the heroine and the creator of a comic strip about a frustrated 18-year-old girl living in London. The main character, Mona, had a fairy godmother who would whisk her off to different adventures. “She’d go...