train show

Yura Adams, Jazmine Catasús, J.A Feng, Colleen Herman, Fiza Khatri, Cassandra Mayela, Lucy Mullican, Naomi Nakazato, Aliza Sternstein

September 23 - October 15, 2023

Location: Great Barrington Train Station: 46 Castle St, Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

“Signs form a language, but not the one you think you know.”

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Olympia is pleased to present Train Show, a group exhibition taking place in the Great Barrington Train Station. The exhibition highlights the spirit of a train station – monumental, atemporal, a place for arrivals and departures and of journeys and homecomings. 

The Great Barrington Train Station was erected in 1842 and operated for 120 years. Since closing in 1971, the building became a venue for various small businesses and public groups: a restaurant, a state welfare office, a gallery, and a dance studio, to name a few. In 1981, the building underwent a comprehensive rehabilitation to bring it back to its original architectural form. Carpeting and the dropped ceiling were removed, the cubicles dismantled, and the stained glass windows were renewed that overlook still-active train tracks. 

Thus, scaffolding between here and there, then and now, is an active co-existence of travel and transformation. Huffs, steam, and clouds of smoke are all part of the history of this phenomenological space. The exhibition celebrates this state of transience, the physical environment standing as a gateway for beginnings and ends of journeys.    

Yura Adams is an artist who makes paintings and sculpture and is known for her exploration of materials. Her most recent solo show was at Olympia in New York City fall of 2022 and spring 2023, she exhibited her sculptures at Turley Gallery in Hudson, New York. Adams was presented at NADA New York Art Fair by Olympia and exhibited at LABspace, Hillsdale, New York in 2022. Adams has shown extensively throughout the Hudson Valley with many solo shows with John Davis Gallery of Hudson, New York and other venues including Opalka Gallery in Albany, New York. Her awards include Tree of Life Foundation (2023), Peter S Reed Foundation (by nomination 2022), Drawing Center Viewing Program (2021), Pollock-Krasner Grant (2019), Martha Boschen Porter Fund, Berkshire Taconic Foundation (2017). Both her BFA and MFA were earned at the San Francisco Art Institute IN 1975 AND 1980. She paints in an industrial building on a farm in Western Massachusetts.

Jazmine Catasús is an artist and educator primarily working with print and papermaking. Her practice is concerned with the intersections of ornamentation, materiality, and spiritual practices, and Black Subjectivity.  She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA from CUNY-Hunter College.  She was trained as a papermaker at Pace Paper and Dieu Donné Papermill. Jazmine has taught printmaking and papermaking workshops at several institutions, including Dieu Donné, the Center for Contemporary Printmaking, the International Print Center of New York, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Noguchi Museum. Her work has been exhibited nationally, most recently at the National Arts Club (NYC). She is the Artistic Director/Master Printer at  EFA-Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop and serves on the Board of  Handpapermaking Inc. Jazmine has attended residencies at The Bard Graduate Center, The Penland School of Crafts, and the Morgan Conservatory.

J.A Feng (b. 1982, Champaign, IL) received her MFA from Boston University (2015) and completed her residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2016). Recent solo exhibitions include: 12.26, Dallas, TX (2023 and 2020) and Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles (2022). Recent group exhibitions include DC Moore, New York, NY (2023); Nathalie Karg, New York, NY (2022); Eric Firestone Gallery, New York, NY (2022); Harkawik, New York, NY (2022); Tops Gallery, Memphis, TN (2022) and North Loop, Williamstown, MA (2022). In 2021, Feng was an Artist in Residence at the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program in Brooklyn, New York. Feng has also received fellowships from NYSCA/NYFA (2021); Shandaken Paint School (2020) and NARS Foundation (2017). Feng currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Colleen Herman (B. 1982, Baltimore, MD) is an artist living in New York City who works with polychromatic media on natural, often raw surfaces. Herman earned her BFA at Syracuse University in 2004. She has had solo shows in New York and Los Angeles, most recently at Sarah Brook Gallery in February 2023 and upcoming at Olympia in New York City opening December 2023. She has completed two residencies in Oaxaca, Mexico at pocoapoco in 2018 and 2019, and one in March 2022 at Casa Balandra in Mallorca, Spain.

Fiza Khatri was born and grew up in Karachi, Pakistan. Their work features intimate portraits and gatherings of human and nonhuman inhabitants of their community. They remix imagery from lived experiences, imagined fantasies, sacred landscapes, and archival research to imbricate the social, sacral, and political stakes of building ecosystems of cohabitation.  

Khatri received their MFA from Yale School of Art in 2023, and was awarded a BA from Mount Holyoke College in 2015. They were the recipient of a Dedalus Foundation MFA Fellowship in Painting & Sculpture in 2023 and their work was featured in Phaidon Press’s 2022 publication ‘Great Women Painters.’ Their work has been exhibited most recently at Thomas Erben Gallery, New York (2023); Perrotin Gallery, New York (2023); GRIMM, London (2023); The Clemente, New York (2022); Twelve Gates Arts, Philadelphia (2022); Olympia, New York (2022); Jhaveri Contemporary, online viewing room (2021); IVS Gallery, Karachi (2019); The Research and Publication Center, Lahore (2019); Photo Kathmandu, Kathmandu (2018); and Lahore Biennale Collateral, Lahore (2018).

Cassandra Mayela (b. Caracas, Venezuela) is a self-taught textile artist based in New York since 2014, when she forcedly migrated from Venezuela. Her creative journey is deeply interwoven with her personal experiences as an immigrant and a woman of color, furthering her explorations of identity, migration, and belonging. Her fascination with textiles stems from their unique story-telling potential and influence on one’s personal sense of self, examining how memories, stories and histories can be preserved and reimagined through material transformation. Cassandra crafts community-oriented pieces through dedicated research, meaningful conversations, active community involvement, and a creative blend of textiles and found materials, which additionally offers an avenue for practicing sustainability. Her work has been exhibited at Vacation Gallery, La Salita, Acompi/ NARS Foundation, Olympia, JO-HS, NADA House and EFA Project Space.

Lucy Mullican (b. 1994, New York) received her BFA in Studio Art from the Glasgow School of Art in 2019. Recent exhibitions include: Fragments, Villa Magdalena, San Sebastian, Spain (2022, solo); Sensed As Well As Seen, Olympia, New York City, USA (2022, solo). Veils, presented by Villa Magdalena and Galeria Mascota on the occasion of Mexico City Art Week 2023, marked the first time Mullican exhibited in Mexico. In the Spring of 2023, Mullican participated in the group show I Rossori Dell’Arte (The Redness of Art) at Ronchini in London. Mullican‘s work has appeared in Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, and Hyperallergic. She lives and works between New York City and Berlin.

Naomi Nakazato (b. 1992) is a Japanese-American, multidisciplinary artist whose predominately materials-based practice surveys the conglomerate landscape of memory, language, and the artificial authenticity of the biracial experience. Her work utilizes the semiotics and syntactic intervention of natural objects to examine the weight of authenticity and the yearning to articulate a simultaneously close and unfamiliar self. Nakazato holds a BA in Painting and Drawing from the South Carolina School of the Arts and an MFA in Painting from the New York Academy of Art. Her recent work and installations have been exhibited at Zona Maco 2023, presented by Olympia (CDMX), LVL3 (Chicago), Below Grand (NY), Olympia (NY), Galerie Tracanelli (Grenoble, FR), and PADA (Barreiro, PT). She is the recent recipient of grants from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, FST Studio Projects Funds, and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation. Nakazato lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Aliza Sternstein was born in New York City, where she currently lives and works. She received her MFA from Boston University in 2016 and her BA from Brandeis University in 2013. Don’t Move Stones marked Sternstein’s debut solo exhibition (Olympia, 2022). Other notable venues include Contemporary Art Now (2023), SPRING/BREAK (2020), Jip Gallery (2020), and Vacation Gallery (2019). Sternstein’s work has appeared in Artforum and Artnet News.

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