Philemona Williamson @ Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco - 'Disproportionate Upheavals' Exhibition of Paintings

Philemona Williamson

Disproportionate Upheavals 

Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco

November 1 - December 20, 2025

Philemona Williamson 

Uneven Terrain, 2025

Oil on canvas, 48 x 56 in (121.9 x 142.2 cm)

© Philemona Williamson, courtesy Jenkins Johnson Gallery

Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco, presents Disproportionate Upheavals, the gallery’s second solo exhibition with narrative painter Philemona Williamson. The presentation includes eight paintings created between 2024 and 2025, along with a significant piece from 2016.

Philemona Williamson, based in New Jersey, is known for her figurative paintings. Williamson’s narratives of childhood and adolescence create a space of fable and memory investigating the dissonance, possibility, and liminal state of transition. With a career spanning over forty years, she creates an iconography both personal and universal.

Figures are dynamic, passionate, volatile, familiar, and strange—moving through moments of uncertainty and landscapes beyond control. Toys and objects act as repositories of emotion and memory. Poetic and open-ended, the paintings invite viewers to tap into their own stories of change, chaos, and possibility. 

Philemona Williamson 

Dwelling in Discord, 2025

Oil on canvas, 36 x 40 in (91.4 x 101.6 cm)

© Philemona Williamson, courtesy Jenkins Johnson Gallery

Dwelling in Discord (2025) interweaves two very different places from her childhood: the upscale Upper East Side NYC apartment where her parents worked and lived, and a small room in a Harlem hotel with a communal kitchen. From a young age, she had to navigate these contrasting worlds. Philemona Williamson affirms that the longing for home, safety, and a sense of belonging in the world never diminishes.

The paintings are visually and technically fluid, with brushstrokes moving through saturated fields of color. The underlying hues in each piece emerge strongly through the figures; ambiguous gestures blur the boundaries between figures and their surroundings. Every plant, animal, object, and landscape feels resonant—as if recalling a half-remembered dream or a return to childhood memories.

Philemona Williamson 

A Crooked Line, 2016 

Oil on canvas, 55 x 80 in (139.7 x 203.2 cm)

© Philemona Williamson, courtesy Jenkins Johnson Gallery

A Crooked Line (2016) was inspired by Williamson’s 2015 artist-in-residence experience at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans. She explains, “I would often witness the Second Line parades held for important occasions, both joyful and somber. Here, I conjured that heightened revelry, both public and private, that seems to burst forth when one is free to be their authentic self.”

Philemona Williamson’s (b.1951, New York, NY) work is in institutional collections including: Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Montclair Art Museum, NJ; The Kalamazoo Art Institute, MI; the Sheldon Museum of Art, NE; CNAP: The French National Contemporary Art Collection; and Fondation Francès, Clichy, France. Museum exhibitions include the Queens Museum of Art, NY; the Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC; the Bass Museum, Miami, FL; and Contemporary Art, St. Louis, MO. In 2019, a mid-career survey was held at the Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey.

Upcoming in 2026: a group exhibition at the Newark Museum and an exhibition curated by Camilo Alvarez, opening in March 2026 at the Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury, CT. Her work is currently on view at Fondation Villa Datris, Vaucluse, France. In 2024, Philemona Williamson exhibited in Century: 100 Years of Black Art at the Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey.

Philemona Williamson is the recipient of numerous awards including Anonymous Was A Woman; Joan Mitchell Foundation Award in Painting; Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant; National Endowment for the Arts; and New York Foundation for the Arts. Williamson has taught painting at numerous colleges, including Pratt Institute and Hunter College, New York City, and served on the Advisory Board of the Getty Center for Education in California.

JENKINS JOHNSON GALLERY 

1275 Minnesota Street #200, San Francisco, CA 94107

www.jenkinsjohnsongallery.com

Enrico Riley @ Jenkins Johnson Projects, Brooklyn, NY - Stand

Enrico Riley: Stand

Jenkins Johnson Projects, Brooklyn, NY

September 10 – October 29, 2022

ENRICO RILEY

Together 2, 2022

Oil on canvas, 58 x 54 in

Courtesy of Enrico Riley 

and Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco and New York

ENRICO RILEY

Together IV, 2022

Oil on canvas, 58 x 54 in

Courtesy of Enrico Riley 

and Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco and New York

Jenkins Johnson Projects presents ENRICO RILEY’s solo exhibition Stand. The exhibition explores the materiality of paint and the expressive potential of painted images in relation to issues around identity and visibility. This is Enrico Riley’s second solo exhibition at Jenkins Johnson Projects.

Enrico Riley’s new series of paintings investigate the agency of bodies moving through space with dance. The artist uses formal techniques to expose the issues surrounding mobility through the flattening and abstracting of figures within a liminal space. Enrico Riley’s new body of work is inspired by and expands on the rich and complex traditions of hip-hop and other forms of street dance and in particular the way these activities allow individuals to expand their presence in space. This new series is a result of the artist thinking about hip-hop, break dance, and rap culture of the 1980s and 1990s and reflecting on the significance of these expressions on American culture. The artist uses a vibrant palette of monochromes such as magentas, greens, and yellows to highlight the role fashion played, with sneakers and polo shirts turning into identity markers. The result on the canvas is an homage to energy and expression. Building space through color and absences, Enrico Riley invites the viewer to question the ephemerality of the body.

Flattening the space and abstracting the figures, Enrico Riley mixes forms, bodies, colors, and atmosphere, to visualize how bodies can become vehicles of colors. Loosely thinking about the California Light and Space artists, Enrico Riley’s work carries a strong impression of color light that floods out of his canvases into the space. The simplicity and ease of the painted forms suggest a range of attitudes and, at times, contradict themselves in unexpected ways. For example, Enrico Riley often depicts the human form accompanied by complicated shadows which create a glitch in the perceptual space, making the bodies solid or light — and always in flux. Blurring the line between figuration and abstraction, Enrico Riley invites the viewer to keep an open mind and reading of his paintings, and to reflect on dance as a form of personal, social, and political expression.

ENRICO RILEY (b. 1973, Westbury, CT) is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize in Visual Arts, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Prize in Painting and holds the George Frederick Jewitt Professorship in Art at Dartmouth College. Enrico Riley has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the American Academy in Rome, the University of New Hampshire, and Jenkins Johnson Projects. He has participated in group exhibitions at “State of the Art 2020” at Crystal Bridges Museum of Art and “Black Bodies on the Cross” at The Hood Museum. His work is in institutions including the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Hood Museum, and Nasher Sculpture Center. Enrico Riley has an MFA in painting from Yale University and a BA in Visual Studies from Dartmouth College. Enrico Riley lives and works in Vermont and New Hampshire.

The exhibition is accompanied with a catalogue featuring an essay by Connie Choi, Associate Curator, Permanent Collection, The Studio Museum in Harlem. 

JENKINS JOHNSON PROJECTS

207 Ocean Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11225

www.jenkinsjohnsongallery.com