Current Exhibitions
Nick Lamia | Blowhards and Rainmakers
May 21 – June 28, 2025
Opening Reception: Wednesday, May 21, 2025, 6-8PM
Download the press release here.
View the exhibition checklist here.
Nick Lamia's exhibition, Blowhards and Rainmakers, marks his second solo exhibition at Planthouse. In this show, Lamia revisits the abstract representations of clouds. For Lamia, clouds are a source of endless inspiration and interpretation. Their limitless variety in form, color, scale, and proportion makes them both exciting and challenging as subjects for abstract imagery.
For Cloud Architecture, a notebook drawing series exhibited at Planthouse in 2022, Lamia employed simple rules, using only graphite and colored pencils for the works on paper shown. These restrictions allowed for a focused exploration of an expansive theme. The streamlined material limitations kept Cloud Architecture directed along a specific avenue of exploration. As he continued to work on the series, he wanted to introduce new ground rules that would lead to various overlooked avenues where he could use different media and techniques in addition to a broader range of sizes.
The cloud-inspired artwork featured in Blowhards and Rainmakers results from some of those explorations. Expanding on his previous exhibition, this show offers new drawings, monotypes, and older screenprints by Lamia. Works include acrylic paintings on paper, cyanotypes, silkscreens, and cyanotype and intaglio monotypes, which are hand-colored with wax pencil and gouache. Each work is related to all the others through their connection to the cloud. The work is varied like its real-life counterparts, each being unique and having a personality. Some are ominous and dark, others light and fluffy; some evoke humor, and others convey seriousness. In this sense, some are blowhards, and others serve as rainmakers.
Nick Lamia is an award-winning artist whose work includes drawing, painting, printmaking, installation, and sculpture. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and residencies at Wave Hill, The MacDowell Colony, the Robert Blackburn Print Workshop, and the Triangle Artists Association. The inaugural Bronx Museum Biennial included 500 of his small-scale drawings in 2011. Recent solo exhibitions include Cloud Architecture at Planthouse and The Tailwaters Project at the AVA Gallery in New Hampshire, where proceeds went to supporting the Greater Upper Valley chapter of Trout Unlimited and their ongoing effort to protect and restore coldwater fisheries and watersheds.
HI | Group Exhibition
Anders Bergstrom, Dana Frankfort, Rachel Ostrow and David Soman
May 21 – June 28, 2025
Opening Reception: Wednesday, May 21, 2025, 6-8PM
Download the press release here.
View the exhibition checklist here.
This spring, the indoor back gallery at Planthouse will host Hi, a group exhibition featuring four artists, each showcasing a different medium: painting, printmaking, and drawing. The exhibition celebrates the process diversity and camaraderie of the Planthouse project space community. The exhibition invites us to draw loose connections between the selected works: Bergstrom’s conceptual paper-bag prints, Frankfort’s text paintings, Ostrow’s ethereal abstract prints, and David Soman’s charcoal drawings of nests and a wood pile. All of the artists contributed new work to this spirited May offering.
In addition to Hi, Planthouse will debut Laurie Lambrecht’s Bark/Cloth, a series of photographs of detailed tree bark on fabric that will be on view on the back terrace throughout the summer.
Anders Bergstrom (b. 1971) was born in Tucson, Arizona, and has a Bachelor of Arts, Sociology, and Fine Arts from the University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Bergstrom’s work is in the collections of The New York Public Library, University of New Hampshire, Beinecke Library at Yale University, Smith College Museum of Art, MA, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Dana Frankfort received a BA from Brandeis University and an MFA from Yale University. She has attended residencies, including the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Yaddo and Ox-Bow, and the MFAH Core Studio Art Program. She has had solo exhibitions at Inman Gallery (Houston, TX); Southwest School of Art (San Antonio, TX); James Harris Gallery (Seattle, WA); Sorry We’re Closed (Brussels, Belgium); Bellwether Gallery (New York, NY); and Kantor/Feuer Gallery (Los Angeles, CA). Her paintings have been included in group exhibitions nationally and internationally, such as Texas Women: A New History of Abstract Art (San Antonia Museum of Art), Abstract America (Saatchi Gallery, London), and The Jewish Museum (New York, NY). Frankfort has been a recipient of an Artadia grant as well as the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Her paintings are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Rice University, Houston, TX; St. Edward’s University, Austin; and The Jewish Museum, New York, NY.
Rachel Ostrow is a Brooklyn-based painter and printmaker. She earned an MFA in painting from Hunter College, a post-baccalaureate degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and a BA in Fine Arts from Wesleyan University. Ostrow’s paintings use movement and light to explore space and form and skirt the line between abstraction and representation. She has been awarded residencies at the Gowanus Studio Space (Brooklyn, NY), The Joshua Tree Highlands Artist Residency (Joshua Tree, CA), The Millay Colony (Austerlitz, NY), The Kimmel Harding Nelsen Center (Nebraska City, NE), the Cill Rialag Project (Ballingskelligs, Ireland) and The Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT).
David Soman is an artist who resides with his family in Rosendale, NY. He is a New York Times Best-Selling children’s book writer and illustrator and has taught at the School of Visual Arts for over thirty years. Despite being born on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, David has always been a woodsman at heart.
Dana Frankfort, Hi, 2025, 9 x 12 inches, oil on canvas
Laurie Lambrecht | Bark/Cloth
Bark/Cloth
May 21 – August 9th, 2025
Opening Reception: Wednesday, May 21, 2025, 6-8PM
Download the press release here.
View the exhibition checklist here.
This blanket is a necessity. It keeps me from cracking up. It may be regarded as a spiritual tourniquet. Without it, I’d be nothing, a ship without a rudder.
- Linus Van Pelt.
This summer, Planthouse is pleased to present Bark/Cloth, an outdoor installation of Laurie Lambrecht’s photographs of tree bark on the gallery’s patio. Seven photographs, each measuring 56 x 35 inches, printed on fabric, invite close inspection of the tree’s form, bringing attention to details of nature that often go unnoticed.
Lambrecht’s practice combines fiber and photography to replicate, enhance, and transform natural forms. Her series Bark/Cloth showcases a sensitivity to nature’s patterns, colors, and textures. The individuality and presence of trees are central to Lambrecht’s practice. By photographing bark close-up, she focuses on intricate surface details, highlighting irregularities of lichen, knots, and scars unique to the trees themselves.
When printed on fabric, chemical interactions shift the colors into surreal hues like lime green, lavender, and cornflower blue. This process investigates scale, magnifying the bark’s texture to an exaggerated size. The pieces are fade-resistant, colorfast, and printed with water-based inks.
For Planthouse, Lambrecht introduces the transformed images outside, suspending them against the weathered wood wall on the patio. Lingering in the dense urban cityscape, the pieces invite quiet contemplation. In this setting, the enlarged patterns evoke organic memory and urban contrast. The installation invites a moment of stillness and spirituality, allowing viewers to pause amid the city’s busyness. Lambrecht encourages the viewer to reflect on the natural world by isolating and amplifying the’ overlooked surfaces of trees, reminding us that trees, much like a blanket, provide a source of comfort and care.
Bark/Cloth by Laurie Lambrecht will be on through the summer at Planthouse.
Laurie Lambrecht is a visual artist based in Bridgehampton, NY, working at the intersection of photography and fiber. Her background as a sweater designer informs her acute sensitivity to texture, pattern, and color—qualities that permeate her explorations of trees. Museum collections include the National Gallery of Art, the Center for Creative Photography, and the Parrish Art Museum. She has participated in artist residencies at institutions, including the American Academy in Rome, The Watermill Center, the Rauschenberg Residency, and KH Messen in Norway. Lambrecht has lectured at institutions such as the National Gallery of Art, the Morgan Library, and the Art Institute of Chicago and led bookmaking and weaving workshops at museums and art centers. Recent projects include site-specific outdoor installations at the Madoo Garden Conservancy (2019), the Watermill Center (2021), and the Nassau County Museum of Art (2023).
Laurie Lambrecht, Kirkside (detail), 2025, fabric print, 56” x 35”
Download the exhibition press release here.