HANDS ON FIRE
JUDY MANNARINO | JOANNE McFARLAND | FARAH MOHAMMAD | KAREN J. REVIS
Open to the public:
Monday, June 8, 2026 - Friday, September 11, 2026
Opening reception:
Monday, June 8, 6-8pm
Open hours:
Monday - Friday, 11am - 5pm
HANDS ON FIRE brings together the works of four artists based in New York City—Judy Mannarino, JoAnne McFarland, Farah Mohammad, and Karen J. Revis. Curated by Michelle Weinberg and Leslie Kerby, the exhibition taps into the physicality and energy of each artist's handiwork whether they are collaging, stitching, glazing, firing, cutting, pasting or printing.
Their collected works energize and amplify the intersection of the inner lives of women with the challenges and triumphs they face from the external environment, encompassing physical landscape, social and historical contexts. Collectively their dazzling, concentrated energies and activities ignite many fires!
Referencing floral corsages worn by women in times past, Judy Mannarino makes complex, intimately-scaled objects out of porcelain. Her studio is a laboratory in which she constructs “set pieces”, each inspired by a story from current events or personal history—rich depositories of memory and sentiment that are deftly wrought, elaborately colored and assiduously re-worked to arrive at their final completed states. These small works embody and attract power far greater than their physical size suggests, working on us as fetishes, vibrating between painted image and three-dimensional ornament.
JoAnne McFarland actively engages with her collage work as a sketchbook she has been developing over twenty-five years. The tactile aspect of laying her hands onto various found papers and assembling them into dresses that serve as a reservoir of female agency is akin to the process of composing words into poetry, which is another of McFarland's creative outputs.
Each dress is redolent of history, gleaned from its texts, patterns and colorations. Made from wallpaper, book pages in French and English, rice and origami papers, comics, antique sheet music, silk fabric and beads, they radiate complex psychological states and address political and cultural issues all mapped and tailored onto the female silhouette.
The source of Karen J. Revis’s fire is her identity as a Black woman, channeling the experience of her communities in Washington, DC and New York City into iconography that conveys the history of our country. A consummate printmaker, Revis creates powerful works by carving and incising linoleum, layering images using collagraph, lithography and etching.
Through her work, she processes the violence of slavery and capitalism, transforming this history into exultant imagery that radiates a profound beauty. Her bold patterns and colors are influenced by African symbols and the legacy of African design, and she employs handmade papers created with a variety of fibers to produce moving statements.
Farah Mohammad actively breaks down and rebuilds her images over long periods of time, applying a variety of printmaking techniques and intricate drawing skills to create a new visual reality that expands to contain multiple identites and viewpoints. She invests her observations of both the natural landscape and urban environments with emotional power and luster that reflect change over time, referencing equally the organic forces of erosion and accumulation. Deeply saturated colors, patterns and abstract shapes form heightened spaces that are open to interpretation and appear to be continuously on the cusp of change.
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Judy Mannarino is a New York based artist working in ceramics, painting and drawing. She has exhibited in Europe and the United States and is the recipient of grants from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Joan Mitchell Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, Joseph Robert Foundation, City Artists Corps Grant, and Anonymous Was a Woman Pandemic Sponsored Grant. Mannarino has been awarded residencies at the Zentrum Fur Keramic, Berlin, Germany, The Brush Creek Foundation, WY and a fellowship at MacDowell Colony.
She received a BFA with honors from the School of Visual Arts where she is a long time faculty member teaching painting and drawing. She maintains studios in the Bronx and in the Catskills. judymannarino.net @j_mannarino
JoAnne McFarland is an interdisciplinary artist using text, paint, fabric and paper to create lyrical, often politically-charged pieces. The engine that fuels her output across multiple media and genres is her belief that violence and creativity are opposites. She commits to one creative act every day. Recent multimedia collections include: American Graphic, winner of the 2024 Wishing Jewel Prize for Poetic Innovation from Green Linden Press and the 2023 Experimental Poetry Award from the Connecticut Poetry Society; A Domestic Lookbook, finalist for the 2024 CLMP Firecracker Poetry Award, and Pullman, published by Grid Books.
McFarland's collection Psalms of Innocence will be published in September 2026 by Green Linden Press. McFarland's work is in the permanent collections of the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Museum, the Library of Congress, the Columbus Museum of Art, and the US Department of State, among others. McFarland's work is represented by Accola Griefen Fine Art. joannemcfarland.com @joannemcfarland55
Karen J. Revis is a New York-based printmaker and a member of the Black Women of Print collective. As part of the collective’s 2023 portfolio, Revis’s recent work has been acquired by several major institutions, including the Whitney Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cincinnati Art Museum, Milwaukee Art Museum, and the Jordan Schnitzer Collection in Portland, Oregon. Revis’s work is also in the permanent collection of the Yale Gallery. More recently, Richard Wright’s estate commissioned Revis to illustrate "Native Son" in a collaboration with Suntup Press. The limited edition was released in 2026. In 2020, two of Revis’s prints were chosen by Colossal Media as part of their "Represent: Black Arts" project, with murals in New York City and Los Angeles. Her work also features in the Winter 2026 issue of Hammer and Hope, the Spring 2023 issue of Architectural Digest and issue 22 of Pressing Matters. karenjrevis.com @karenjrevis_studio
Farah Mohammad is a visual artist and educator based in NYC. She received her BA from Bennington College and her MFA from Columbia University. Her exhibition highlights include a solo exhibition at Nyama Fine Art, New York, and group exhibitions at the Moss Art Center, Blacksburg, VA; Half Gallery, EFA’s Blackburn 20|20 Gallery, The Jewish Museum, ChaShaMa, Field Projects, and Fridman Gallery, all in New York. Mohammad has participated in artist residencies at MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Institute for Electronic Arts at Alfred University, Cornerstone Studios, LMCC Arts Center, and the Keyholder Residency at the Lower Eastside Printshop. She received the EFA Blackburn Print Excellence Award (2021) and the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship (2023). Her work is in the permanent collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art. farahmohammadart.com @famojee
Contact: Leslie Kerby or Michelle Weinberg projectartspacenyc@gmail.com
Founded in 2011, Project: ARTspace is an interdisciplinary creative project space. Our organization programs events and exhibition where curators and artists of all levels have the chance to meet, engage and promote new collaborative projects.
projectartspace.com @project.artspace
high resolution images available upon request
Judy Mannarino, Bunch, 2026, glazed porcelain 14 x 9 x 8 inches
Farah Mohammad, Learning Not to Pull the Thread, 2026
Woodcut, monotype and intaglio prints, collaged and
hand-sewn 34 x 30 inches
Karen J. Revis, Sixty Three, 2024, linocut and collage 30 x 24 inches
JoAnne McFarland Show of Hands Dress, 2024, paper collage 20 x 16 inches