Julie Buffalohead
Ponca Tribe
Born Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1972
Lives Saint Paul, Minnesota

The Song of the Ravens, 2014
Acrylic, ink, and pencil on Lokta paper
60 x 90 in.
Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Museum purchase with funds from the Weatherspoon Art Museum Acquisition Endowment for the Dillard Collection, 2021.3

When I work with paper it’s like the paper is an object in itself, and what becomes important to me is less [about] making space and more about the characters I’m drawing . . . I almost feel like there’s a relationship between the paper and the figures . . . and I don’t need to fill it with a lot of information.

Native American trickster characters such as the coyote appear frequently in Julie Buffalohead’s enigmatic paintings. Both good and evil, tricksters operate not in the black and white realms of right or wrong, but in the grays and contradictions between. Buffalohead notes their ability to represent the chaos that is part of being human, and she embraces the ways their stories invite multiple interpretations.

That notion of possibility also resonates in the open space that Buffalohead creates around her characters in The Song of the Ravens. Conceptually, her leaving so much of the composition blank forces us as viewers to imagine the connections among the figures. Formally, she finds the handmade paper on which she works too beautiful to cover with more marks than are absolutely essential.

© Julie Buffalohead

Al Denyer
Born Bath, England, 1968
Lives Salt Lake City, Utah

Borders and Boundaries III, 2020
Ink on paper
30 x 30 in.
Courtesy of the artist 

My drawings are both maps and illusions of physical space. I am interested in how space and form can accurately be described two-dimensionally using a linear language, and subsequently, how we are able to interpret topographic lines as a way of comprehending physical space.

The evocative, finely drawn lines in Al Denyer’s drawings play purposeful tricks on our eyes—suggesting both distant scans of vast spaces and close-up examinations of specimens, the views of satellites and microscopes. Indeed, environmental photographs of all kinds inspire her work. From pictures of melting Arctic Sea ice to images of abandoned urban landscapes, her work is rooted in an effort to better understand our impact on a range of landscapes. With obsessive, repetitive marks made in white ink on black paper, she translates these images into abstractions—ones that encourage us to slow down and pay careful attention.

© Al Denyer

Gonzalo Fuenmayor
Born Barranquilla, Colombia, 1977
Lives Miami, Florida

Botanical Improvisation #4, 2020
Charcoal on paper
52  x 36 in.
Courtesy of the artist and Dot Fiftyone Gallery, Miami 

I consider myself a painter who is ironically using drawing as a medium.

Throughout his work, Gonzalo Fuenmayor questions what it means to be a Latin American artist. As a Colombian immigrant to the United States, he has frequently encountered assumptions that his work will include vibrant colors and tropical motifs. Instead, he deliberately limits his palette to black and white and ironically uses anticipated imagery in unexpected ways. Here the lush leaves of a philodendron plant twist their way around the activated body of a figure in a suit—whether the individual is fighting against the plant’s grip or joyously dancing beneath its foliage is unclear. In that ambiguity rests the possibility that it’s both. The multiple possibilities are key. Fuenmayor notes that, “I have a hard time labeling art as contemporary, modern, Latin, American, conceptual, etc. Many times these labels limit the scope of the meaning of what art can be. Personally, art offers a way to access and learn about the world by continually questioning and challenging personal paradigms and expectations.”

© Gonzalo Fuenmayor

Nate Lewis
Born Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, 1985
Lives New York, New York

Probing the Land 9 (Charles Aycock, after the fire), 2021
Hand-sculpted inkjet print, ink, frottage, and graphite
70 x 32 in.
Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Museum purchase with funds from the Weatherspoon Art Museum Acquisition Endowment for the Dillard Collection, 2021.10

Treating the paper like an organism itself, I sculpt patterns akin to cellular tissue and anatomical elements, allowing hidden histories and patterns to be uncovered.

Artist Nate Lewis formerly worked as a nurse, and that experience of attending to human bodies and seeing their complexity through medical imagery is critical to his work. Layering patterns and textures into altered photographs, he challenges us to look from multiple perspectives—to see similarly to how doctors use scans and samples to understand an illness.

This image is one of many based on Lewis’s photographs of monuments, here a statue of Charles Aycock, long known as North Carolina’s “Education Governor.” While Aycock did advocate for school reforms, he was also a White supremacist who agitated for a coup that decimated the Black community of Wilmington in 1898. By splicing a photograph of the statue with images of internal organs, Lewis dissects our image of Aycock—reminding us that history is rarely as straightforward as monuments suggest.

© Nate Lewis

Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski
Born Bordeaux, France, 1985
Lives Brooklyn, New York

The One Time I Dreamed It, It Came True, 2020
Gouache, watercolor, acrylic, collage, graphite, colored pencil, and airbrush on paper
64 x 42 in.
Private collection

I’m looking at the most basic of human stories about genesis, where we originate, where we go, all these stories we’ve inherited about being and belonging, and who gets to exist and why.

In her vibrant paintings, Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski offers utopian, futuristic worlds populated with emphatically Black and Brown femme characters. Here one such figure stands between two versions of herself: a skeleton in front, and a gray-toned echo behind. In each of their foreheads, a third eye looks up, while tiny ghosts hover at their feet.

The image’s dense symbolism might be interpreted through multiple lines of thought, from psychology, to spirituality, to fantasy. The latter is particularly important to Moleski. Throughout a nomadic childhood, she found a constant sense of home in libraries and the fantasy novels she read there. She notes that such stories speak to the human condition: “Just because something is a fantasy, doesn’t mean it’s not real and doesn’t have teeth in this world.” In her own images, the figures may inhabit some fantastic realm, but their existence is anchored in the artist’s own lived experiences as a queer Puerto Rican woman here today.

© Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski

Robyn O'Neil
Born Omaha, Nebraska, 1977
Lives Washington State

Paul Benedict's Primary Battle (No Numbers), 2019
Graphite, colored pencil, and acrylic on paper
20 x 30 in.
Courtesy of the artist and Susan Inglett Gallery, New Yorkk


I want to zoom way, way out and look at us humans as minorly important just like everything else. We are not the center of our world.

Working laboriously with a simple mechanical pencil, Robyn O’Neil creates vast, imagined worlds inspired by a broad array of interests—from landscapes and meteorology, to art history and science fiction, to movies and pop culture. Though the subjects in her images vary, the overwhelming power of nature remains a constant. One can consider these images as a contemporary extension of 18th-century philosopher Edmund Burke’s notion of the sublime, or “feelings of awe mixed with terror.” O’Neil, however, often tempers that terror with humorous titles—here she references beloved tortillas and actor Paul Benedict’s role as “the number painter” on the children’s television program Sesame Street.

© Robyn O'Neil

Sherrill Roland
Born Asheville, North Carolina, 1984
Lives Raleigh, North Carolina

Artforus: April 2014 Issue, 2018
ArtForum International Magazine (April 2014), toilet paper, legal paper pad, primer paint, Kool-Aid, Sharpie marker, and steel
26 x 24 in.
Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Museum purchase with funds from the Weatherspoon Art Museum Acquisition Endowment for the Dillard Collection, 2021.8.6

Everyone had their own story and different way of processing the experience, and their emotions.

Just before his final year at UNCG, Sherrill Roland was wrongfully convicted of a crime and sent to prison. Though exonerated, the experience lives on in this series that reflects on his devastating months behind bars. The paper is made from the issues of an art magazine that Roland received while there. After saving bits from their covers, he ground the pages into a pulp with the few other materials he could have accessed in jail: toilet paper, coffee filters, and the like.

Sherrill then recreated texts and images from the mail he received from friends, Bible passages he read in the prison chapel, and lines from his journals. The drawings offer a record of vulnerability and resilience—both the artist’s and his community’s. As Roland points out, prison changes the lives of those incarcerated and those who love them.

© Sherrill Roland

May Tveit
Born Nyack, New York, 1966
Lives Lawrence, Kansas

The Road, 2017
Laminated corrugated cardboard
68 x 29 ½ x 4 in.
Courtesy of the artist


In sculptural works and monoprints that monumentalize the most humble of materials, I cut, stack, and join flat generic/universal box template forms to create geometric volumes that evoke ancient architectural structures.

As a professor of industrial design at the University of Kansas, May Tveit has brought numerous students to visit the Lawrence Paper Company. This massive manufacturing facility produces corrugated materials, packing products, and cardboard boxes. During a residency there, she had the opportunity to explore the formal and conceptual qualities of cardboard—study that ultimately led to a personal investigation of the “physical and emotional aspects of compartmentalization, memory, and sacred space.” The works on view here grew out of that thinking. Each is roughly as tall as the artist herself, alluding to the body as yet another type of container, one that metaphorically holds so much more than any cardboard box filled with consumer goods.

© May Tveit, photo by E.G. Schempf