Steven Cuffie, Louis Eilshemius,
Noah Jeminson, Clara Tice,
Faye Wei Wei, and Idris Young
Summer lingers in the imagination not as a season but as an atmosphere of incipience. A period in which the future seems unusually close, and the world appears ripe with significance. Curiously, these feelings transcend the calendar months and unfold throughout a lifetime, returning whenever ordinary reality seems charged with possibility.
Beauty is often tied to a similar experience. It is never entirely contained by the thing in which it appears. It points elsewhere. It makes the world seem near while rendering the present strangely unstable. Desire, fantasy, and dreams emerge from these encounters. Beauty carries with it the promise of another life, another horizon, another way of being in the world.
In Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding (1946), the pre-adolescent Frankie Addams passes through a "green and crazy summer" during which, as McCullers writes, she was "by dog days five feet five and three-quarter inches tall."
Clara Tice
Nude with Butterfly, ca. 1920s
Oil on canvas
20 × 25 in. (50.8 × 63.5 cm)
Clara Tice
Nude with Dog, ca. 1920s
Oil on canvas
28 × 20 in. (71.1 × 50.8 cm)
Steven Cuffie (1949–2014) was born in Baltimore, Maryland, where he lived and worked throughout his life. Cuffie worked as a photographer for the City of Baltimore, documenting civic events, infrastructure, and crime scenes. Following his death in 2014, his children, Marcus and Morgan Cuffie, uncovered a substantial body of previously unknown photographs, including hundreds of portraits made throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
Louis Michel Eilshemius (1864–1941) was born in Arlington, New Jersey. Eilshemius studied in New York and Paris before settling in New York. Known for his dreamlike landscapes, poetic allegories, and visionary depictions of the female figure, he was championed by Marcel Duchamp in the 1910s and 1920s. His work is included in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, among others.
Noah Jemison (b. 1944) was born in Birmingham, Alabama and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Birmingham Museum of Art, and the Stanley Museum of Art. In 2022–23, his work was featured in Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces at the Museum of Modern Art.
Clara Tice (1888–1973) was born in New York City, where she lived and worked throughout her life. Associated with the bohemian and proto-Dada circles of Greenwich Village, she became known as the “Queen of Greenwich Village.” Her work is held in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the New-York Historical Society, among others.
Faye Wei Wei (b. 1994) born in London and lives and works in New York City. She received her MFA from Yale University in 2026.
Idris Young (b. 2003) was born in Buffalo, New York and lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut.
