San Art Framing is proud to announce ‘CREATURES,’ a group show featuring the work of Elizabeth Adams, Elizabeth Tolson, Rachel Urkowitz and Michelle Weinberg. We will celebrate the opening of the show on Thursday March 19 at 7 PM. The show is on view through Saturday, April 25.
If you would like to see the catalog and price lists for this show, please click here. If you are interested in making a purchase, we ask that you go through the artists directly.
What is a creature? Something unfamiliar, suggestive of a living being, a curiosity and a question, the manifestation of a dream or a nightmare. In the collected works of these four artists, inanimate objects suggest a secret life force with the potential to jump, ooze, or shudder into action. Embracing chance operations, found materials, and multiple processes, these artists defamiliarize the textures and patterns of the quotidian and play with the chaotic disturbances of inner lives, the imprint of city streets, and hidden lives of domestic spaces. Are these vaudeville stages, runaway lab experiments, night clubs, or crime scenes? Whatever the answer, for each artist, “creation” is a mode of play and a realm in which creatures manifest in unexpected and mysterious ways.
Elizabeth Adams collects flattened cans from the streets of New York CIty to explore surprising transformations of the discarded. Her work mines the limitless possibilities of objects whose 3D uniformity has been compressed into 2D specificity. For Adams, the gutter is lush with figuration and abstraction -- strokes of paint, disco dancers, pure geometry. The results exude latent histories of early mornings and late nights; thirst and longing; pleasure and addiction; profit and loss; getting “trashed” and also letting go. Elizabeth Tolson's ceramic and textile based wall sculptures seem to be making themselves, through weaving, reaching, dripping and hanging. Drawing from personal narrative and the body’s lived experiences, her weavings and ceramics reflect on the spaces we inhabit, internally and between one another. Ceramic finger-like protrusions grasp woven spillage and the body, though missing, has left an imprint. Rachel Urkowitz's insectoids conjure a weird anatomy hacked from articulated industrial plastic and hardware. Insects appear, as if in dreams, their moving parts assign mysterious powers and their evolutionary stages suggest new states of being and becoming. Michelle Weinberg's carbon transfer drawings invert the normal or direct way of drawing, by inscribing on the back of the paper. She describes this as a pseudo printing process: the used carbon papers are her negatives. With her conscious drawing intentions hidden as she marks, each work is a collaboration with chance, a wayward drift that engenders a new place of invention, learning and growth. From this process, figures emerge from habitats, as if stepping onto a stage.
Michelle Weinberg is the recipient of awards, fellowships and residencies including an Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation Award, a NYSCA Grant to Individual Artists, a NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship, residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell and Millay Colony, two Pollock-Krasner Foundation Awards (2016, 2025), a Lower East Side Printshop Keyholder Residency, Studios at MASS MoCA, South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship, 100 West Corsicana in TX, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, homesession and Fundacion Valparaiso in Spain, and Altos de Chavon in the Dominican Republic. Recent exhibitions include: a collaboration with Carini Lang Carpets in NYC, ArtBridge/Studio 502, NYC, Project: ARTspace, NYC, ArtPort Kingston, Delaware Valley Arts Alliance in Narrowsburg, Pulp Holyoke, MA, the Wolfsonian Museum and Dot FiftyOne Gallery in Miami and La Plataforma in Barcelona. Commissions include “River Semaphore” in Battery Park, produced by ArtBridge, "Tropic Episodes" at Miami International Airport, murals for The Wolfsonian Museum-FIU in Miami Beach, facebook offices, other projects for Miami-Dade County Art in Public Places and City of Tampa, FL. Weinberg has organized exhibitions and presentations of work by other artists, including “Artists Draw Their Studios” and “Cuts a Figure” via her platform Available Space. She is Co-Director of Project: ARTspace in NYC, a Lecturer at SUNY Purchase College and an Instructor at Marymount College.
@mwpinkblue
Rachel Urkowitz is an artist and designer from New York City. Her work has been exhibited widely in the US and Europe, including solo shows at Artport, Kingston in the Hudson Valley, NY, Galerie Michael Neff in Frankfurt and Michael Steinberg Fine Art and White Columns in New York City. Her large-scale installations and projects with public and private organizations include a permanent hanging sculpture in Newburg’s Resorts World Casino and a series of sculptural, modular barriers for the non-profit Street Lab. Her artwork is represented by DeChiara Projects, New York/Berlin. She is the recipient of an Artist Residency in Giverny, from Art production fund and the Rockefeller Foundation, The 9/11 Artist’s Residency at the Santa Fe Arts Institute, and a studio residency at the artist collective La Generale in Paris. She is an Assistant Professor at Parsons School of Design.
Rachel Urkowitz
@rachel.urkowitz
Elizabeth Tolson is an artist and educator whose work merges textiles and ceramics to explore themes of fertility, motherhood, time, and space. By integrating sewing, weaving, and clay, she unites the meditative rhythm of stitching with the grounded, tactile presence of ceramics. Tolson holds an MFA from Parsons School of Design and a BFA from Alfred University, and has been awarded residencies at the Textile Arts Center, Trestle Projects, Chashama’s ChaNorth, Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, and ProjectArt at the Bushwick Brooklyn Library.
Her work has been featured in a solo exhibition at 934 Gallery in Columbus, Ohio, and in a two-person exhibition at the Appalachian Center for Craft in Smithville, Tennessee, as well as in group exhibitions at the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn, New York; Local Projects in Queens, New York; Target Gallery in Alexandria, Virginia; and Cuchifritos Gallery in Manhattan, New York. Tolson has an upcoming solo exhibition at the Workhouse Arts Center in Lorton, Virginia, scheduled for 2027. In addition to her studio practice, she has served as a guest juror for the Textile Arts Center’s Work in Progress Residency. Tolson is based in Brooklyn, New York, where she is a part-time Assistant Professor in the First Year Program at Parsons School of Design.
@msliztolson
Elizabeth Adams’ work as a painter and mixed media artist is informed by previous lives as an investigator of capital punishment cases at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and as an award winning documentary film producer. The process of asking questions, collecting, and re-shaping information was central to that work. As an image-maker, she continues to be engaged in the process of finding things: on the street, in her memory, in another painting, in language -- and reorganizing them into new forms. She has shown her work in venues in the Bay Area and New York City. Her solo show of paintings and works on paper inaugurated the gallery program at San Art in May 2025. She has an MFA from California College of the Arts and has studied at the Slade School of Art, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and the New York Studio School, where she received the Premier Prize in Drawing and Painting and was awarded a painting fellowship. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
@elizabeth.c.adams