SPRING/BREAK Art Show NYC 2026

Checklist

Nature/Nurture

The nature vs. nurture debate explores how much of an individual’s characteristics and behavior are the result of genetic inheritance (nature) versus the product of their environment (nurture). How much of what artists pass on to their literal offspring and metaphorical offspring (their artistic production) is seemingly predetermined, and how much is a consequence of their circumstances? Furthermore, how is artistic output influenced by the reality and demands – both practical and emotional – of parenthood on the artist? In Nature/Nurture, the artworks of Michelle Silver and Douglas Burns draw on both sides of this long-standing debate and are guided by this debate at different stages of the creative process.

Michelle Silver mines this dialogue intellectually and viscerally in the tension between creation and destruction. Her paintings explore the inherent contradictions in pregnancy and motherhood: restriction and permission, duty and desire, and control and surrender. Her body’s relationship to the canvas gives rise to gestural, turbulent landscapes that record her grappling with these conflicts. She builds up broad strokes of paint, only for them to be scraped away, a process that is, by turns, intuitive and rational. Her paintings amplify the physical and mental dismantling that is obscured behind motherhood’s loving smiles and tender embraces. It is in her acceptance of this breakdown that she reasserts her identity and power.

Parenthood required a similar shift in perspective for Douglas Burns and irrevocably changed his artwork. Working from his home studio, his young children would often spend time with him painting and drawing, including on his works in progress, despite his protestations. What started as a struggle to preserve became an affirmation of their presence and a receptiveness to their interventions guiding his work. This process continued when he started incorporating ephemera – scraps of paper, parts of printed spreadsheets, inventory labels, etc. – he covertly took with him from his work as a preparator and facilities manager at museums and from touring as a musician. By cutting up and reorienting these objects, he destroys their original, functional purpose and reclaims his self-identity as a visual artist.

In their compositions, both Silver and Burns use physical layering as a means of interrogating the layered demands of parenthood itself. For Silver, paint is built up and destroyed in a process that mirrors the physical and emotional weight of motherhood; for Burns, the responsibilities of fatherhood and the ephemera of a professional life are dismantled and reoriented in his artistic life. For both the artists, the layering – of paint, of mark-making, and of institutional detritus – reflects the demands of parenthood that press upon and reshape the artist beneath. What surfaces in each finished work is not simply a record of that pressure, but a questioning of it: of the roles assigned, the identities obscured, and what remains when the layers are pulled back. Together, their works ask what it means to be a parent and an artist simultaneously, and whether those roles compete, collaborate, or, in the end, quietly make each other possible.

Douglas Burns

8426 SE Stark, 2022
Mixed media on paper
5 x 3 inches
Framed: 13.5 x 13.5 inches
[DB0002]

$350.00

Banana Time, 2025
Mixed media on paper
12 x 9 inches
Framed: 17.5 x 15 inches
[DB0005]

$850.00

Bound for Pleasure, 2025
Mixed media on wood panel
38 x 58 inches
[DB0007]

$5,700.00

Dada Made It, 2021
Mixed media on canvas
60 x 48 inches
[DB0007]

$7,000.00

Family Trip, 2025
Mixed media on paper
12 x 9 inches
Framed: 19 x 17 inches
[DB0008]

$850.00

Flammability Requirements, 2024
Mixed media on canvas
15 x 15 inches
[DB0003]

$1,200.00

King Doyg, 2021
Mixed media on canvas
60 x 48 inches
[DB0014]

$7,000.00

Knock Knock, 2025
Mixed media on paper
12 x 9 inches
Framed: 19 x 17 inches
[DB0010]

$850.00

Lapado, 2021
Mixed media on paper
6 x 4 inches
Framed: 14.75 x 12.75 inches
[DB0001]

$450.00

Tierwelt, 2025
Mixed media on paper
9 x 12 inches
Framed: 15.5 x 19 inches
[DB0012]

$850.00

Michelle Silver

Conservation of Energy, 2025
Oil on linen
24 x 20 inches
Framed: 25 x 21 inches
[MS0001]

$2,000.00

Decreation, 2025
Oil on linen
20 x 24 inches
Framed: 25 x 21 inches
[MS0002]

$2,000.00

Explosions in the Sky, 2026
Oil on linen
20 x 24 inches
[MS0003]

$1,800.00

Harness, 2025
Oil on linen
8 x 10 inches
[MS0009]

$500.00

Hidden Pleasure, 2025
Oil on linen
30 x 24 inches
[MS0004]

$2,500.00

Lucid, 2025
Oil on linen
40 x 30 inches
[MS0005]

$3,000.00

Only in Dreams III, 2025
Oil on canvas
60 x 48 inches
[MS0006]

$5,000.00

Soft Animal, 2026
Oil on canvas
8 x 10 inches
[MS0010]

$500.00

The Dancer, 2024
Oil on canvas
30 x 24 inches
[MS0008]

$2,500.00

Through you I see myself, 2026
Oil on canvas
40 x 30 inches
[MS0011]

$3,000.00

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