Mary Crenshaw: Inhale
EXHIBITION DATES: April 28 – may 23, 2026
RECEPTION: Thursday, April 30, 5 – 8 pm
CLOSING RECEPTION: Saturday, May 23, 4 – 6 pm
The Painting Center is pleased to announce the solo exhibition Inhale by Mary Crenshaw in the Main Gallery. The exhibition will run from April 28 through May 23, 2026, with an opening reception on Thursday, April 30, from 5 to 8 PM.
The concept for a series of immigrant portraits began last summer during a walk to the studio, when Crenshaw glimpsed, through the window of a daycare center, a display of large faces on paper drawn by small children. This moment formed the initial idea, which expanded through meeting and conversing with her subjects on the bus, in parks, and in stores, as well as including people she already knew. For a couple of years, she had also been taking iPhone photos of cigarette butts embedded in city sidewalks. Viewing a consumed cigarette as a metaphor for the migrant—carelessly tossed aside, crushed, and forgotten—she decided to include this object as subject matter in her paintings, while incorporating thrifted picture frames to emphasize the idea of rejection. Worn, ornate, and mismatched, the frames elevate the cigarette stubs into portrait-like presences. By pairing these overlooked remnants with salvaged structures, Crenshaw underscores themes of displacement, resilience, value, and disposability.
Mary Crenshaw received a BFA in Painting and Printmaking from VCU, an MFA from Lesley University College of Art and Design, and a DFA from the University of East London with a body of work titled “Materiality and Dislocation.” She explores diverse techniques, inventing objects that combine painting with varied media. She has exhibited at Prince Street Gallery (New York), Poplar Union Arts Centre (London), PigPrints (Milan), CICA Museum (Seoul), the Hunterdon Art Museum (NJ), Shoebox Gallery (LA), KrautArt (Berlin), the Palazzo Ducale Atina (Italy), Gate 44 (Milan), The Painting Center (NY), No Barking Art (London), Hartslane Gallery (London), Galleria L’Affiche (Milan), Il Castello Borromeo (Milan), The Apartment/Bow Arts (London), Jewett Gallery, Wellesley College (MA), the Katonah Museum of Art (NY), and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VA). Her paintings are in the public collections of Brunel University (London), CICA Museum, and L’Istituto dei Tumori (Milan). Crenshaw has been a resident artist at the Vermont Studio Center (VT), Centre d’Art de Marnay-sur-Seine (France), The League at Vyt (NY), and Atina (Italy). This exhibition was made possible thanks to the PS 122 Project Studio Program in New York, where Crenshaw is currently a residency recipient.
Discarded & Regarded
Mashed cigarettes crushed by a thousand heels, shreds of tobacco peering out of the slimmest of papers. How many mouths do they convey? Quick puffs by the side of the road, waiting for the bus, or fully smoked to calm a rapidly beating heart, more afraid of humans than nicotine. Detritus of anxiety, there for a moment, blown aside, soaked, melted away…Seen by an artist’s eye, saluted by their hands. Framed and re-framed, analogue slates of a movie set moving across the city. Looking down, cataloguing the progress of the apprehensive, their unread urban smoke signals. Absence is telling here, layering stubs with imagined bodies, invisible lips, stained hands. Icons of people who have already left. But then a sudden shift to Presence – Great heads of the real, encountered across the metropolitan sprawl. Their geographies stretching around the globe in ropes, bridging divides: Italy — China, Ukraine — Bangladesh, Chile — Niger, Morocco — Poland. Visible but not recognizable, just in case…A halo of hair, spectacular spectacles, the slope of a head, arc of a nose. People captured in loose lines and colours but not netted. Free to walk off the canvas, live lives in this city of layers, built over millennia by natives and incomers. Languages collide and blend, are absorbed as dress, custom, religion, desire, intersectional identities, like the area grids meeting, directing you west or east, north or south, up or down. Or the beams from both river and ocean bathing the space in silver and shadow, bright and blurred, running tracts of luminescence over the island and beyond. Just as the tide comes in and out, so do its citizens, always have, always will do. If that stops, the city will keel over, as a tired old man losing the will to live!
Emma Roper-Evans, January 2026
