Street Corner Conversations brings together Sharon Butler, Wendy Fulenwider Liszt, and Ariel Mitchell—three artists who approach abstraction as an active, embodied way of engaging the world. The exhibition’s title, borrowed from Vanessa Bell’s early foray into abstraction, places the works as voices in dialogue: distinct, overlapping, and rooted in the ongoing evolution of abstract painting. In this context, Street Corner Conversations positions abstraction as a meeting place—an intersection where lines of thought, gesture, and experience converge, overlap, or pass each other by. 

The exhibition engages the political dimensions of painting without requiring overt narrative content. The politics of abstraction emerge through self-determination, refusal, attention, and persistence. Historically, women who pursued abstraction did so against cultural and institutional constraints; to claim time, space, and intellectual seriousness was itself a transgressive act. The works on view extend that lineage, asserting abstraction not as withdrawal from the world but as a way of engaging it—through material choices, through the body, and through the slow, accumulative processes of making.

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