Interviews by Brainard Carey

Lola Stong-Brett (b. 1996, London, United Kingdom; lives and works in Margate) most recently graduated the Tracey Emin Artist Residency (2024) following studies at the Edinburgh College of Art (2016). Her first solo exhibition, For That, I’ll Always Smile, was presented at Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate in 2025. While her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions across the United Kingdom and in Mexico City, Sometime Somewhere Someone Is Dancing marks Stong-Brett’s debut in the United States.

Working at a scale that envelops the body, Stong-Brett’s mark-making is deeply diaristic. Cartoon-like figures emerge from fields of heightened gestural abstraction, recording fluctuating inner states to form an entwined world of direct expression. Across the paintings, figures intertwine, drift apart, cling to one another, or reach beyond each other’s grasp. With great emotional immediacy, the works evoke the complex, shifting choreography of human connection—the experience of holding on and letting go, like witnessing someone you love move beyond you.

Within this symbolic setting, Popeye returns from earlier works alongside Bimbo and a newly introduced female figure. Part childhood nostalgia, part reference to tattoo culture, Popeye first entered Stong-Brett’s paintings as an emblem of raw humanity. The artist recalls initially being drawn to the character’s visual language before discovering the significance of Max Fleischer’s early animations, in which Popeye emerged as one of the first distinctly working-class cartoon characters, depicted within commonplace settings in sharp contrast to the polished fantasy worlds of early Disney. Over time and through repeated use, however, Popeye’s original allegorical charge has loosened and expanded. Evolving into a more fluid emotional architecture, the figure retains its cultural and personal history while remaining open enough to be inhabited by multiple identities and relationships—at times forming a stand-in for the artist herself and the people closest to her.

Lola Stong-Brett On Stage Where You Once Danced, 2026 Oil on canvas 2 panels, overall: 74 3/4 × 130 inches
Lola Stong-Brett Yellow Christ And Raft, 2026 Signed and dated verso Oil on canvas 76 3/4 × 133 7/8 inches (overall) 76 3/4 × 66 15/16 inches (each)
Lola Stong-Brett It’s Like I Can Still Feel Your Arms Around Me, When You’re Standing Behind Me, 2026 Signed and dated verso Oil on canvas 70 7/8 × 59 1/16 inches

Caitlin Keogh (b. 1982 in Anchorage, Alaska) lives and works in New York. Her work has recently been included in group shows at Fondation Carmignac, Porquerolles, France, and The Church, Sag Harbor, NY. Keogh has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Melas Papadopoulos, Athens, Greece; and MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY. In 2021, Keogh completed a mural in the city of Holbaek, Denmark in conjunction with Holbaek Art, and in 2019, she participated in Art Basel Parcours, Basel, Switzerland. Her work has also been exhibited at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, CA; MoMA Warsaw, Poland; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Künstlerhaus Bremen, Germany; the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; and the Queens Museum, Flushing Meadows, NY.

Her work is represented in the collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Amorepacific Museum of Art, Seoul; the Rollins Museum of Art, Winter Park, Florida; and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence.

Caitlin Keogh 07.10.25, 2025 Colored pencil on paper mounted on panel 16 3/8 x 11 5/8 x 3/4 in (41.5 x 29.5 x 2 cm)
Caitlin Keogh Beige Matrix, Woman With Opera Glasses, 2026 Acrylic on canvas 72 x 96 in (183 x 244 cm)
Caitlin Keogh Ultramarine Matrix, La Fornarina, 2026 Acrylic on panel, postcard 23 1/4 x 13 in (59.1 x 33 cm)

Peter Acheson was born in Washington, DC, in 1954 and received his BFA from Yale University in 1976. An early member of Williamsburg’s art scene in the 1980s, he relocated to upstate New York in the 1990s, where he continues to live and work in Columbia County.

His paintings range from textured abstractions to restrained gestures that draw on a wide range of influences, including nineteenth-century French painting, Blinky Palermo, Raoul De Keyser, Bill Jensen, and Forrest Bess, alongside close observation of the landscape surrounding his studio.

Acheson’s concern is less with resolving these references than it is to allow them to coexist, permitting his paintings to act as habitats where various traditions and approaches can meet without hierarchy. This carries through to Acheson’s playful way of treating his compositions, leaving them caught between styles, simultaneously structured and chaotic, with direct references and happenstance similarity.

His work has been exhibited at Anton Kern Gallery, New York; Steven Harvey Fine Arts, New York; Gordon Robichaux, New York; Brennan & Griffin, New York; Novella Gallery, New York; John Davis Gallery, Hudson, New York; the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York; Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York; and Baumgartner Gallery, New York. His work has been discussed in Hyperallergic and The Brooklyn Rail.

Peter Acheson Four Levels, 1983 – 1984 Oil on wood 8 7/8 x 11 1/8 inches (22.5 x 28.1 cm) Photography Izzy Leung, Courtesy Anton Kern Gallery
Peter Acheson Untitled, 2020 Oil and stick on wood block 2 x 6 1/4 x 1 3/4 inches (5.1 x 15.9 x 4.4 cm) Photography Izzy Leung, Courtesy Anton Kern Gallery
Peter Acheson Untitled, 2010-2012 Oil on wood 10 1/4 x 6 3/8 inches (26 x 16.2 cm). Photography Izzy Leung, Courtesy Anton Kern Gallery
Peter Acheson Untitled, 2019 Oil on canvas 16 x 20 inches (40.6 x 50.8 cm) Photography Izzy Leung, Courtesy Anton Kern Gallery

Yuya Saito (b. 1982, Japan) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He makes wall-based works and freestanding sculpture in laminated and bent wood, a language he has developed over more than a decade out of the craft of bent-wood furniture-making.

Saito’s work has been presented internationally at such institutions and venues as Rockefeller Center, New York; Brooklyn Army Terminal, New York; National Art Center, Tokyo; and Setagaya Art Museum, Tokyo.

Public commissions include installations for the Brooklyn Army Terminal, New York (2026) and Art Link at Yokohama Red Brick Warehouse (2022). He is the recipient of the TRiCERA Award and Jury Award at IAG Awards 2021, as well as the Special Jury Award at Independent Tokyo 2020.

Yuya Saito, Ground Rules, Installation View
Yuya Saito, Ground Rules, Installation View
Yuya Saito, Ground Rules, Installation View

Portrait of Shaun Leonardo, 2024. Photo by Argenis Apolinario.
Shaun Leonardo (b. 1979, Queens, NY) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work negotiates societal expectations of manhood, namely definitions surrounding Black and brown masculinities, along with its notions of achievement, collective identity, and experience of failure. Leonardo received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and has received support from Creative Capital, Guggenheim Social Practice, Art for Justice, and A Blade of Grass. His work is currently included in the traveling group exhibition Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture, open now at the Perez Art Museum Miami.

Leonardo’s work has also been featured at the Guggenheim Museum, the Norton Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Queens Museum, the High Line, and the New Museum, and profiled in The New York Times, Artnet News, and CNN. His solo exhibition, The Breath of Empty Space, was presented at MICA, MASS MoCA, and The Bronx Museum, and his first major public art commission, Between Four Freedoms, premiered at Four Freedoms Park Conservancy in 2021. Numerous institutions hold Leonardo’s work in their collections, including the Bowdoin Museum of Art, the JP Morgan Chase Corporate Art Collection, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, El Museo del Barrio, the Portland Museum of Art, the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation, and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Shaun Leonardo, Self-Portrait Icon (Sculpture), 2007. Marble. 24 x 6 x 24 inches (61 x 15.2 x 61 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York.
Shaun Leonardo, Self-Portrait Superhero 4 (Sleeping Giant), 2008. Sign enamel on plywood cutout. 48 x 70 x 3/4 inches (121.9 x 177.8 x 1.9 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York.
Shaun Leonardo, Champ (Mike Tyson), 2014. Charcoal on paper. 76 1/8 x 64 inches (193.4 x 162.6 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York.