Opening Reception of "Lines are marked, yet we are all outsiders"
"Lines are marked, yet we are all outsiders"
Natessa Amin - Kathleen Eastwood-Riaño - Leslie Friedman - Vincent Hron - Jody Joyner - Henry Morales - Cobi Moules - Tania Qurashi - Peter Sparber - Jonathan Wahl
JUNE 26 - JULY 24, 2026
Opening Reception, Friday, June 26 | 6 - 8 PM.
Pentimenti presents Lines are marked, yet we are all outsiders, a group exhibition featuring 10 artists from across Pennsylvania. As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, the exhibition celebrates the Commonwealth's artistic community while reflecting on Pennsylvania's cultural landscape through a contemporary lens.
Bringing together artists from diverse backgrounds and across generations, Lines are marked, yet we are all outsiders explores the boundaries- geographic, social, political and personal, that shape our understanding of place and belonging today. While Pennsylvania occupies a central place in the nation's history, the exhibition reflects on how identity is continually formed through individual experience. Collectively, these works present a multifaceted portrait of contemporary artists living in Pennsylvania, revealing the many perspectives that coexist within a shared region.
To accompany the exhibition, each artist has been invited to contribute a written reflection on their work, providing insight into the ideas, experiences, and questions that inform their artistic practice.
NATESSA AMIN
“These works move between painting, textile logic, and drawing in space. The two paintings draw from early American coverlets alongside South Asian ornamental traditions, using repeated floral and geometric motifs to think through inheritance, migration, and memory. Line Dance extends those rhythms into sculpture, translating pattern into a tactile, haptic register where painting enters space and line becomes bodily. Across the works, ornament functions as a language of orientation, care, and continuity carried across generations, materials, and forms.”
— Natessa Amin
Natessa Amin received a BFA in Painting from Boston University and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from the University of Pennsylvania. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally: CUE Art Foundation, American University Museum, Berman Museum of Art, EFA Project Space (New York), Galerie ISA (Mumbai), and Hangar H18 (Brussels), among others. She has received fellowships and residencies from Winterthur Museum & Library, the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts, and The Fabric Workshop and Museum.
KATHLEEN EASTWOOD-RIAÑO
“The two paintings in this exhibition represent parallel practices that inform on another. Suegritos explores psychology, family relationships, and memory through layered compositions. May is part of an observational series I work on during a specific time period. If the work is not finished within that season, I wait until the following year to complete it. Though one body of work is more conceptually focused and the other more observational, both investigate color, relationships, spatial complexity.”
— Kathleen Eastwood-Riaño
Kathleen Eastwood-Riaño is an artist whose colorful paintings investigate intergenerational memory and relationships. In 2022, Eastwood-Riaño was commissioned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Mural Arts to create a mural in response to their exhibition Matisse in the 1930’s. Her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions nationally and is held in private collections in the United States and abroad. Recent awards and residencies include a 2025 Helene Wurlitzer Foundation Residency Grant, a 2024 Jentel Artist Residency, the 2022 Soaring Gardens Artist Residency, and a 2021 Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation grant. She received her MFA from The San Francisco Art Institute and a BFA from The University of the Arts.
LESLIE FRIEDMAN
“Smoked Whitefish and Yaddah Floor use silkscreen, laser-cut acrylic, and printed vinyl tile to drift between printmaking and sculpture. Glittering fish hang in suspended formation, at once humorous, seductive, and faintly uncanny, drawing from Jewish food traditions, drag vernacular, and the uneasy choreography of belonging. Repeating stars, nuts, and bolts spread across the floor like traces of a fictional social order. Built through accumulation and pattern, the works use shine, excess, and multiplicity to ask how identities are performed, shared, consumed, and kept at the edges of community.”
— Leslie Friedman
Leslie Friedman is an artist who specializes in printmaking, sculpture, and installation. She has a BA in political theory from Brown University and an MFA in printmaking from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. She founded the art collective NAPOLEON in 2011, was a member of Good Children in New Orleans until 2019, and is currently a member of Baton Rouge Gallery in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Pink Noise Project in Philadelphia, PA. In 2014, Friedman completed a fellowship at the Center for Emerging Visual Artists and won the Fleisher Wind Challenge. She has participated in residency at Shiro Oni in Japan and the Studios at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally with some highlights including solo shows at Space 1026 in Philadelphia, Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, and the Delaware Contemporary in Wilmington. Her work deals with political and social themes like identity, simulacra, stereotype, gender, and religion.
VINCENT HRON
“My training emphasized the importance of form, as well as the philosophy and history of art. The painting Common Ground reflects on our increasingly divided culture. In it, I synthesize two subjects that I have been working with for many years – playgrounds and skyscapes to encourage viewers to appreciate that though we may be looking in opposing directions we are essentially standing in the same place sharing common interests.”
— Vincent Hron
Vince Hron earned a BFA from Drake University (1984), an MFA from the University of Michigan (1987), and studied for a year at The State Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe Germany (1987-8). He has received distinguished awards including a Pollack-Krasner Fellowship, and State Art Council Merit Fellowships (4 from NE and 3 from PA). He has exhibited nationally, is included in numerous permanent collections, and is a full professor of Art at Commonwealth University of Pennsylvania’s Bloomsburg Campus.
JODY JOYNER
“I make sculptures from infrastructural objects like shipping pallets and storage crates. Produced as a byproduct of the global supply chain, packaging is fascinating to me in the way it’s been relegated to a secondary status– only existing to support and protect more precious objects, rarely the thing to be beheld itself. Through a kind of pseudo-alchemy, I transform discarded infrastructural objects with processes like casting, flocking, and UV printing to create novel forms.”
— Jody Joyner
Jody Joyner is an interdisciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation, and video. She received her M.F.A. from Yale University and her B.A. from Colorado College. Jody has recently exhibited work at Galerie Timonier (New York, NY) Fleisher Art Memorial (Philadelphia, PA), as-is.la (Los Angeles, CA), the List Gallery (Swarthmore, PA), Franconia Sculpture Park (Minneapolis, MN) and Vox Populi (Philadelphia, PA). She is the recipient of multiple grants, awards, and residencies including SOMA Summer (CDMX), the Al Held Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, and the Josef Albers Traveling Fellowship.
HENRY MORALES
“The painting Peekaboo captures an everyday moment in my relatives’ kitchen, a space filled with warmth, routine, and play. It reflects the ways my extended family, living in different parts of the U.S., create comfort and connection through shared meals and laughter. I combine dirt with oil and acrylic paint to reference the land my loved ones inhabit, along with fragments of newspaper clippings attached along the sides of the work. These clippings echo the current political climate surrounding immigration, ICE raids, birthright citizenship, and racial profiling in the U.S. Through these layers, a familiar domestic scene becomes a meditation on care, resilience, and the act of sustaining joy and belonging within a country that often questions our right to be here.”
— Henry Morales
Henry Morales is a multidisciplinary artist. His experience as a first-generation Guatemalan American inspires him to explore themes of labor, immigration, identity, and place through works that mix non-traditional and familiar materials. He is driven to explore what it means to be a first-generation American, and seeks to document the complex experiences of those who straddle multiple cultures, identities, and histories. Henry Morales (b. 1993, Los Angeles, CA) received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from The Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University in 2021. Previously, Morales has been awarded residencies at the Chautauqua School for Art, The Atlantic Center for the Arts and The Sam and Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts. Morales was most recently the Post-Baccalaureate Fellow for the Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities at Haverford College from 2021-2023.
COBI MOULES
“We are living in a world reminiscent of a 1980s horror film, where the trans figure is cast as an alien presence to be surveilled, legislated, and erased. What we are experiencing today is just one example within a long history of the “other” being represented through fear and degradation. My work draws on this history and utilizes the visual language of horror and science fiction to reframe the queer body as one that, under constant threat, adapts, endures, and is insistently alive.”
— Cobi Moules
Cobi Moules (b. 1980, Oakdale, CA, USA) received an MFA from The School of Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University in 2010. In 2004 he received his BFA from San Jose State University. His work has been exhibited at The Leslie Lohman Museum, The Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Jepson Center, The Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Crystal Bridges Museum, Ogunquit Museum of American Art, and The Tang Museum. Notable awards include the SMFA Traveling Fellowship, Ruth and Harold Chenven Foundation Grant, and the Joan Mitchell MFA Grant. He has been an artist-in-resident at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Ucross Foundation, Kimmel Harding Nelson, Vermont Studio Center, Space Gallery, among others. His work is in the collections of the Crystal Bridges Museum, Leslie Lohman Museum, RISD Museum, Cornell Fine Arts Museum and 21c Museum.
TANIA QURASHI
“This series of drawings and a painting focuses on objects from my parents' homelands, Pakistan and Guatemala, that carry layered histories of place and memory. The compositions draw from manuscript painting and still life traditions, allowing me to explore the relationship between space and object. I am particularly interested in how objects can be subtly personified, and become placeholders for diasporic experiences.”
— Tania Qurashi
Tania Qurashi explores cultural and racial melancholy through painting and drawing, using symbolic objects, vessels, figurative, and floral motifs. Qurashi received an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Qurashi has exhibited her work in group exhibitions including the Asian Arts Initiative (Philadelphia, PA), Long Beach Island Foundation (Loveladies, NJ) Amos Eno Gallery (Brooklyn, NY) and Fjord (Philadelphia, PA). She has attended residencies including the Vermont Studio Center and Jentel Residency. She is a recipient of the Brodsky Center of PAFA James V. Nixon Jr. Award and her work has been published in New American Paintings. Tania Qurashi received a 2026 Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.
PETER SPARBER
“The drawings are part of a series exploring the theater of celebrity through a recurring structure: the celebrity, their protectors, the press, and the audience...visible or implied. The celebrity may be political, cultural, or criminal, but the dynamics remain constant. We, the audience, are both observers and participants, drawn by proximity to power, glamour, or notoriety. In this ecosystem, attention becomes currency: our gaze, clicks, and fascination feed a system in which fame is produced, consumed, and monetized.”
— Peter Sparber
Peter Sparber’s practice explores the psychological complexity of contemporary life through intricate, improvisational compositions. He earned his MFA from Cornell University and returned to full-time studio practice following a career in corporate leadership, which included six years living and working in Shanghai and Tokyo. His work has been exhibited at Vox Populi, InLiquid, Highwire Gallery, the Wichita Center for the Arts, and numerous other venues. In addition to his studio practice, Sparber is a contributing art writer for several publications.
JONATHAN WAHL
“Jonathan Wahl’s current work is the result of his ongoing fascination with American Tinware. Tin objects of the colonial period were not just functional objects but tools that enabled our ‘Manifest Density” and the establishment of the United States. The tin lantern like the Conestoga wagon were the means that allowed the spread the ideals of “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” and the creation of the American Republic. Utilizing the same means of manufacture and inspired by the original forms from the colonial period Wahl creates contemporary pieces to recontextualize the past in the present.
The work parallels the current political and cultural currents in the United States where Democratic, Revolutionary and Humanist ideals are morphed, subverted and evolve as our nation does. The function of the objects Wahl creates is not always clear, too many handles, too small a spout, an odd color but a familiar form, text that seems misleading or incomplete. The objects evoke familiarity, humble tools from a bygone past yet still recognizable. Wahl hopes these pieces illicit the same strange experience he feels today as an American, that things seem in flux, changing without a definitive direction, that cultural forces are beyond our control, or with outcome that is vaguely associated with the ideals explicit in our founding documents.”
— Jonathan Wahl
Jonathan Wahl’s artwork ranges from drawing and sculpture to decorative art. Wahl’s work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the MFA Boston, the Houston Museum of Fine art, The New York Historical Society and the Museum of Arts and Design in NYC. It has been featured or reviewed in publications as diverse as The New York Times, Art in America, The New Yorker, Architectural Digest, Oprah Magazine, W Jewelry, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Metalsmith Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, the Aventurine, Advocate and The Antiques Magazine, among others. Wahl has been awarded the Louis Comfort Tiffany Emerging Artist Fellowship from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships one for Craft and one for Drawing and the Pennsylvania Society of Goldsmiths Award for Outstanding Achievement.
For all inquiries, please contact us at [email protected] or +1 (215) 625-9990.
ADDITIONAL EVENT | First Friday/Gallery Walk: Friday, July 3, 5 - 8 PM.
SUMMER HOURS: Tuesday – Friday, 10 AM – 5 PM; Saturday by appointment.
