Interviews by Brainard Carey

Yu-Wen Wu has exhibited at institutions such as the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Washington D.C.; Acropolis Museum, Athens, Greece; Center for Border Studies, Cucuta, Colombia; the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Boston, MA; the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA; SITE Santa Fe, Santa Fe, NM; Perlman Museum at Carleton College, Northfield, MN; Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN; and Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA. 

She was the 2024 Artist in Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and her work is held in public collections including the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA; the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX; the Haslla Museum of Art, Gangneung, Korea; the Princeton Art Museum, Princeton, NJ; and the Davis Museum of Art, Wellesley, MA; among others.   

Yu-Wen Wu, Artifact XIV, 2026, gilded stone on wooden base, 11.5 x 6.5 x 5.5 in; 29.2 x 16.5 x 14 cm

Yu-Wen Wu, Artifact XI, 2026, ceramic, concrete, and porcelain on wooden base, 12 x 5.5 x 5 in; 30.5 x 14 x 12.7 cm

Yu-Wen Wu, Accumulation of Dreams (Flight II) [detail], 2026, graphite, gold ink, and 18 carat gold leaf on Arches paper, 34 x 59 in; 86.4 x 149.9 cm, framed

Julian MacMillan (b. 1992) lives and works in New York. Working across painting, printmaking and sculpture he creates works that resemble mythical landscapes, mysterious figurations, and funerary objects. Through his multidisciplinary practice, which also spans carpentry and metalworking, MacMillan is able to combine and compress these genres, and make images that are both sensitive and other-worldly. Born and raised in Washington DC, MacMillan studied art at Dartmouth College prior to receiving his MFA in painting at Boston University. Recent exhibitions include Left Tower at Atlantic Mills (Providence, RI), Do It Again at East Manning Projects (Providence, RI), The View From Mars at Gallery 263 (Cambridge, MA) and Tell The Devil I’m Coming As Fast As I Can at Outlet Manhattan, New York, NY.

Surface Tension, 2025 oil on canvas 68 x 52 inches, 173 x 132 cm
Regretful Decoy, 2026 wood, glue, paint, steel 4 x 14 x 12 inches, 10 x 36 x 30 cm
Tomb Painting (Diver), 2025 oil, charcoal, and pastel rubbing on canvas 40 x 30 inches, 102 x 76 cm

Maia Cruz Palileo

Portrait of the artist by Mary Inhea Kang
(b. 1979, Chicago) creates paintings, works on paper, installations, and sculptures that honor familial archives and imagined contemporary realities. Beginning from a space of personal inquiry around their family’s migration from the Philippines to America, Palileo quickly uncovered the immense connective points between individual histories and broader global systems, like colonization, displacement, assimilation, and the Philippine–American War.

The artist’s research into overlapping historical timelines, paired with the transmutational effects of memory, provides a framework for their color-rich compositions. This overlapping is made physical through the layering of oil paint, which—even in instances where one layer is concealed by another—permanently maintains its material presence on the canvas, creating its own recorded history. While painting has been at the center of the artist’s practice in recent years, Palileo utilizes their background as a sculptor to incorporate hands-on processes, from mixing their own paints, to making cardstock cutouts of drawings, and incorporating collage techniques to create preparatory sketches.

By obscuring horizon lines and vanishing points, their paintings emphasize the densely varied landscapes—mountains, forests, bodies of water—present in the Philippines, while simultaneously foregrounding the figures represented in these archival materials and imbuing them with care, dignity, and presence of spirit that is often flattened in a photographic archive. For Palileo, these parallel modes of research open up narrative possibilities and account for some of the somatic information that gets lost to time and distance, filling in the gaps that emerge when people and families migrate outside of their ancestral land.

Maia Cruz Palileo Once Again There Was No Time, 2026 oil on linen 80 x 83 inches (203.2 x 210.8 cm) Photo: Dario Lasagni. Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery

Maia Cruz Palileo Ulit Ulit (Again and Again), 2026 oil on linen 77 x 98 x 1 1/2 inches (195.6 x 248.9 x 3.8 cm) Photo: Christopher Stach. Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery

Maia Cruz Palileo Makiling The Restless Mountain, 2026 oil on linen 82 x 107 x 1 1/2 inches (208.3 x 271.8 x 3.8 cm) Photo: Christopher Stach  Courtesy of the artist and David Kordansky Gallery

Studio portrait, Cornell University, 2025. Photo: Yun Hsiang Wang
Michael Morgan (b. 1992, Syosset, Long Island) is an artist and curator whose work spans painting, sculpture, collage, and assemblage. Raised in a conservative suburb of Long Island, Morgan’s early experiences navigating his sexuality within a community at odds with his identity profoundly shaped his artistic voice. Exploring identity, loss, LGBTQ history, environmental issues, and societal division, his practice often draws attention to overlooked histories and underrepresented voices, including a project honoring Christine Jorgensen, the pioneering transgender figure who grew up in his hometown.

Morgan earned his B.A. in Environmental Sciences from Northwestern University in 2014. Following the passing of his father, he shifted his focus from a legal career toward art and art education. He went on to graduate from Columbia University with a second bachelor’s degree in visual arts. While at Columbia, he was also a graphic designer at the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment, a finalist for the 2020 Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics for his writings on environmental theory and art, and inducted into the academic honor society, Phi Beta Kappa.

From 2024 – 2026, Morgan pursued his Master of Fine Arts in Creative Visual Arts at Cornell University. He curated Magnum O-Pspsps at Cornell University, a large-scale exhibition featuring over 40 artists that received coverage in Hyperallergic and Art Spiel. Morgan’s research has also been supported by a grant from the Cornell Council for the Arts.

Morgan has exhibited work at Sotheby’s, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, Columbia University, Cornell University, Roberson Museum, the Long Beach Island Foundation of the Arts and Sciences, Ely Center of Contemporary Art, and Ortega y Gasset Projects. He is the curator of Deus Ex Bark-ina at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art and will be an artist-in-residence at the Wassaic Project in fall 2026.

Michael Morgan, If a Tree Falls, Oil on canvas, 2024, 30 by 40 inches, Image Courtesy of Artist
Kati Gegenheimer, Mars at the Door, Oil on linen, 24 by 36 inches, 2024, Image Courtesy of Artist
Michael Ashkin, Dog of War, Acrylic and charcoal on paper, 1990,  Image Courtesy of Artist
Emilie Louise Gossiaux, True Love Will Find You in the End, Drawing, 23 by 17.4 inches, 2021, Image Courtesy of Artist

Portrait of Jimena Velarde-Alvarez in her studio, 2026, Portrait by Silver Mikiver
Jimena Velarde-Alvarez (b. 2001, Lima, Peru) is a Peruvian artist based in New York. She received her BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Emerging from attention—to and over time—Velarde-Alvarez’s work develops through a process of accumulation and return. Working primarily across painting, drawing, and sculpture, she approaches image-making as a practice of sustained attention, returning to an image as it gradually emerges and evolves. Through repeated encounters, her work follows the echoes of time as they surface and recede.

In her paintings, carefully considered compositions and an atmosphere of restraint allow light, shadow, and architecture to emerge in quiet relation to one another. Spacious interiors, recurring windows, doorways, and thresholds create spaces where atmosphere becomes an active presence within the image. Through translucent figures, shadows, and layered surfaces, Velarde-Alvarez traces the subtle ways time gradually reveals the contours of things.

Across painting and writing, layering becomes both material and metaphor. The accumulation of paint and language mirrors the ways memory, attention, and time are sedimented within the self: how the past accumulates and is continually rewritten, and how these layers can only be accessed through stillness, yet never be fully recovered.

Parallel to her painting practice, Velarde-Alvarez’s writing opens another point of entry into the work. Through poetry, diary fragments, and text-based pieces, language serves as both companion and counterpart—a space for reflection and self-examination that deepens and expands the questions posed by the paintings rather than explaining them.

Deeply rooted in personal experience, Velarde-Alvarez’s practice continues to evolve alongside her, unfolding through and remaining open to the questions that emerge over time.

Velarde-Alvarez’s work has been exhibited in the United States and Peru. She is currently presenting her first solo exhibition, La sombra del tiempo, at Margot Samel, New York.

Jimena Velarde-Alvarez Autopsia I, 2026 Graphite and dried pedals on board 13 x 15 in | 33 x 38.1 cm (framed) | 7 1/2 x 9 1/2 in | 19.1 x 24.1 cm (unframed) Image courtesy of the artist and Margot Samel, New York. Photo by Matthew Sherman.
Jimena Velarde-Alvarez El peso de las cosas al caer, 2026 Oil on canvas 92 x 68 in | 233.7 x 172.7 cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Margot Samel, New York. Photo by Matthew Sherman.
Jimena Velarde-Alvarez Puente, 2026 Oil on canvas 38 x 30 in | 96.5 x 76.2 cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Margot Samel, New York. Photo by Matthew Sherman.
Jimena Velarde-Alvarez Adentro, 2026 Walnut, found keyhole, graphite, paper, light 10 x 6 1/2 x 6 1/2 in | 25.4 x 16.5 x 16.5 cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Margot Samel, New York. Photo by Matthew Sherman.