Janet Bowdan has recently retired after 30 years of teaching English literature and creative writing at Western New England University. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, The Rewilding Anthology, Lit Shark, and other journals, as well as in the anthologies Poetry Daily and Best American Poetry 2000. She likes poems that sneak intelligence into imagery. She likes poems that make her see aspects of the world in a new light. She loves to read. She lives in Northampton with her husband, their son, and a book-nibbling chinchilla.

Lorna Ritz: Paintings

YveYang Gallery, YveYang.com

12 Wooster Street, NYC 10013 [email protected] #617 834 5356

07/11/2025 – 08/16/2025

YveYang will soothe the heat of downtown Manhattan this summer with abstract expressionist views of rural Massachusetts, courtesy of Lorna Ritz, whose debut New York solo exhibition Lorna Ritz: Paintings opens July 11. Though long celebrated by institutions and United States collectors, this marks Ritz’s first major gallery show in New York—a milestone that feels both long overdue and perfectly timed. The exhibition features never-before-seen paintings spanning two decades, all created in her studio barn overlooking the mountains, trees, and wide-open fields of bucolic Western Massachusetts. There, Ritz has developed a rigorous yet intuitive painting practice—one rooted in deep seeing, muscular color, and uncompromising labor. “I paint the light that the relationships of color finds, specific to the time of day, or the season, that breathes life into the painting,” Ritz said. “The view from my studio barn doesn’t change, but it’s never the same.”

Ritz’s work is neither plein air nor romantic abstraction—it is a radical formalism grounded in nature. Her paintings translate lived perception into fields of color that reject sentimentality, yet thrum with emotional charge. A canopy might dissolve into symphonic scribbles of white and red. Kinetic yellows press forward, while darkened underlayers hold memory and tension. Each pigment is custom-mixed, each surface labored over until the warm–cool harmony is exact. Only one color is ever used straight from the tube: cobalt blue—for the perfect sky. “I love when one color, with all those layers, sits next to another color, with its own temperature range of warms and cools,” Ritz said. “They pull apart from each other spatially... and yet simultaneously push back when in relation to newly placed colors. They make each other vibrate. Everything is in a constant state of motion. What the viewer thinks is coming forward, then pushes back at the same time. Where the colors sit in space creates the composition.”

Fourth generation from Worcester, Massachusetts, and trained under James Gahagan—a Hans Hofmann student whom PBS once called “one of the most skillful American colorists”—Ritz carries forward a lineage of postwar abstraction rarely granted to women of her generation. She has painted with total commitment for decades, largely outside the commercial art world—a path shared by many women artists of her generation, whose contributions are only now being recognized. Her work, though deeply rooted in tradition, resists nostalgia or decorative ease. It is urgent, electric, and often larger than life. Though her canvases may appear gestural or loose, they are in fact the result of months of precise work. Ritz hand-builds and stretches her surfaces with drum-tight tension. Her drips are not accidents, but decisions. Nothing is casual. This is painting as a physical argument—deliberate, intimate, and fiercely alive. “I always knew painting was hard and would take all of me to keep getting better. In my earlier work, I was trying too hard,” she said. “Now there is so much more pleasure in the search, the wonder. Process has to be the root of it—not the finding, but in the seeking pleasure in how to handle oil paint anew each time. The paint finds the concept.”

Her earliest encounters with painting began at the Worcester Art Museum as a child, where she felt a deep kinship with Monet, Pissarro, and Van Gogh. That sense of direct, sensory connection continues in her work today—not as imitation, but as kindred intensity. With this exhibition, YveYANG invites the New York art world to reckon with a painter who has spent decades doing the real work—quietly, seriously, and with conviction. Lorna Ritz (b. 1947, Worcester, USA) has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, Brown University, the University of Minnesota, and Dartmouth College. She is a MacDowell Fellow and her work is held in the collections of the Cedars-Sinai Collection, the Aidron Duckworth Art Museum, the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth, the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art, the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, the Worcester Art Museum, and the Provincetown Art Museum.

www.lornaritz.com

Laurel Benjamin is a San Francisco Bay Area native, where she invented a secret language with her brother. She has work forthcoming or published in Lily Poetry Review, Pirene's Fountain, The Shore, Sheila-Na-Gig, Sky Island Journal, and South Florida Poetry Journal, among others. Affiliated with the Bay Area Women’s Poetry Salon, with the anthology Turning a Train of Thought Upside Down: An Anthology of Women's Poetry and her own group Ekphrastic Writers, she holds an MFA from Mills College. She has featured in the Lily Poetry Review Salon and has been nominated for Best of the Net.

Michelle Holland is currently the Poet-in-Residence for the Santa Fe Girls School and the treasurer of NM Literary Arts. She lives in Chimayo, where she gardens, writes poetry and creative non-fiction, and runs the trails from the BLM gate through the barrancas to Truchas. Her poems can be found in literary journals, in print and on the internet, as well as in a few anthologies, most recently New Mexico Poetry Anthology 2023, UNM Press, and The Common Language Project: Ascent, 2024. She has two book-length collections of poetry, Chaos Theory, Sin Fronteras Press, and The Sound a Raven Makes, Tres Chicas Press, winner of the New Mexico Book Award.

Almeria Esmurria recently graduated Western New England University with a major in Creative Writing. She was the recipient of the Max Y. Litman English Prize in April 2024. Her preferred genres for reading and writing are LGBTQ+ contemporary fiction, romance, and fantasy. Two of her favorite poems are ii (“I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming”) from Adrienne Rich’s Twenty-One Love Poems, and "The Vulture and the Body" in Ada Limon’s The Carrying. When she isn’t developing her works-in-progress, she will be found with a Nintendo Switch controller in hand or with her calico cat, Vivian.

Elisa is currently a junior studying Creative Writing at Western New England University. Her love for writing sprouted at the age of 9 and blossomed at 12. She has high aspirations of becoming a published fiction author down the road.