Announcing our spring 2026 exhibitions lineup

ArtYard is pleased to announce a new lineup of exhibitions opening to the public on Saturday, February 21. Anchored by two major exhibitions — In the Company of Still Life and Lora Webb Nichols: Photographs Made, Photographs Collected — ArtYard’s spring exhibition programming also includes Dennis Quillin and Christian Turner: One Wicked Mime, Artificial Insurance, a paranoid normal triptych, and The Deep, a participatory art project presented in collaboration with Mudtown Ceramics.

The public is invited to celebrate with a free opening reception from 6 to 8 PM on February 21 at ArtYard (13 Front Street, Frenchtown, NJ). Visitors will have the opportunity to explore all five exhibitions, meet curators, artists, and experience a wide range of artistic approaches spanning sculpture, painting, photography, and installation.

In the Company of Still Life (February 21 – May 31)

In the Company of Still Life explores the complex and enduring relationship between humans and objects through still-life paintings, prints, drawings, collage, sculpture, ceramics, photography, and found objects. A Kings Oaks project curated by co-directors Alex Cohen and Clara Weishahn, the exhibition features work from the 1800’s to the present day by 40 artists displayed in a series of distinct rooms inspired by homes, studios, and architectural spaces encountered and imagined by the curators.

Still life is a genre defined by intimacy, by proximity, care, and sustained attention. Within its quiet cone of perception, objects become companions, witnesses, and vessels for presence and time. Cohen and Weishahn have drawn upon the relationships, tensions, and rhythms proposed by the artists’ work to design an immersive exhibition design. Over the past year, they have honed in on architectural elements, color, and ornamentation in search of a visual vocabulary sympathetic to the experience of still life.

Highlights include works by contemporary luminaries such as Susan Jane Walp and Aubrey Levinthal. Late renowned artists include 19th-century trompe-l’œil painter John F. Peto, African American still-life painter Charles Ethan Porter, and author, illustrator, and designer Edward Gorey, whose own passion for objects is conveyed in his meticulous drawings.

Seating areas throughout the exhibition, including a library of related publications and inspiration sources, encourage visitors to linger.

“We were inspired to create a space that is, above all, a place that welcomes visitors into the quiet beauty and specificity of these artists’ worlds,” Weishahn said.

Cohen and Weishahn’s curation reflects their personal attraction to and relationships with artists working across diverse media and at different stages of their careers.  From artists in their 20s to their 90s, a quality of endurance threads its way through the exhibition.

“Still life is never early, never late, both never relevant and always relevant,” Cohen said. “It’s right on time.”

In conjunction with In the Company of Still Life, ArtYard presents a series of public programs that invite visitors to engage more deeply with the exhibition’s themes and practices. These events will include artist talks, tea with the curators, and recurring Thursday night Drawing Nights that invite visitors to explore still life as both a historical genre and a living contemporary form. The first is a Curator Talk with Cohen and Weishahn, which is on Sunday, February 22 at 12:15 PM.

Lora Webb Nichols: Photographs Made, Photographs Collected (February 21 – June 14) 

Lora Webb Nichols: Photographs Made, Photographs Collected is a remarkable presentation of work drawn from one of the most extraordinary photographic archives of early 20th-century America. Curated by Nicole Jean Hill, this exhibition brings together images made and collected by Lora Webb Nichols (1883–1962), a pioneering photographer whose vast body of work documents life in Encampment, Wyoming, and beyond.

Nichols began photographing at the age of 16, ultimately creating and collecting approximately 24,000 negatives over several decades. Her images — portraits of family and neighbors, everyday scenes of work and domestic life, landscapes, and moments of quiet ritual — offer an intimate, unvarnished window into community life on the rural American frontier. This exhibition presents a curated selection of these photographs, emphasizing Nichols’ singular eye for the rhythms of ordinary life and the rich visual stories she uncovered in small-town America.

Unlike many photographic archives of the period, Nichols’ work reflects a deeply personal and community-oriented perspective. Her images capture a range of human experiences — from labor and leisure to celebration and repose — offering both historical insight and aesthetic depth. Through this exhibition, audiences are invited to encounter the world as she saw it: with curiosity, empathy, and a profound insistence on the beauty of everyday moments.

The public is invited to a Curator Talk with Hill on Sunday, February 21, at 11 AM.

Additional projects

Alongside these exhibitions, visitors can experience the following exhibitions and projects in ArtYard’s galleries:

• Dennis Quillin and Christian Turner: One Wicked Mime (February 21 – June 14) presents drawings and sculptures that playfully explore form, balance, and visual poetics by artists from progressive art studios Art Enables and Studio Route 29.
• Artificial Insurance (February 21 – May 31), a paranoid normal triptych, is a miniature exhibition on view in ArtYard’s VSG (Very Small Galleries) that navigates uses found objects, papier-mâché, and wire sculptures to create snapshots of a Dadaist puppet show — dream images from the subconscious, sent as a reminder that, to insure full humanity, art cannot be a product of data mining.
• Aqualumina Workshop (February 21 – June 14) is a maker’s workspace located in ArtYard’s Lab Gallery dedicated to the creation of costumes and objects for Aqualumina festival, featuring a video from Aqualumina 2024 and past creations.
• The Deep (February 21 – June 14) is a participatory art project co-hosted by Mudtown Ceramics that invites community members to contribute ceramic waves to a collaboratively built representation of the ocean, emphasizing collective experience and shared creation in the lead-up to ArtYard’s Aqualumina festival.
• Visitor drawings created during recurring Thursday night Drawing Nights as part of In the Company of Still Life will be on view in the Stairway Gallery.

Admission to gallery exhibitions is free, ensuring accessibility and openness as fundamental elements of ArtYard’s mission.