MADE IN PAINT, THIRTEEN
This is our thirteenth exhibition. I still have trouble believing it. Each spring when the new cohort of artists arrives, I feel the same mix of excitement, curiosity, and — if I’m honest — a bit of awe. I know what this place can offer, but I never know what these individuals will make of it, or what they will reveal to us while they’re here. There is a particular kind of intelligence that happens only in the studio — an intelligence-born curiosity, repetition, failure, and the sheer audacity to begin repeatedly. Made In Paint 13 is a record of that intelligence at work. Eighteen artists joined us over the course of 2025, each arriving with their own vocabulary, their own urgencies, and their own stories. What they made here — quietly, methodically, boldly — charts a map of what art can be right now.
If earlier Made in Paint exhibitions traced the widening reach of this program, this year’s show reveals something subtler and, I think, more profound: the Residency as a site of recalibration. The last fifteen months have been a pressure chamber — politically, environmentally, socially and personally. I don’t think anyone arrived here untouched by the turmoil we’ve all been living through. Many of the Artists who joined us in 2025 carried that pressure with them. Some arrived from abroad and many with strong international roots; many came from communities that continue to bear the weight of marginalization. Almost all stepped into the Residency with some mix of exhaustion, vigilance, and determination.
What the Residency offered was not an escape, but a unique quiet — a temporary suspension where urgency could be redirected into a new inquiry. Here, the landscape’s stillness and the studio’s abundance of space and limitless materials created a kind of universe all its own. At times the outside world felt impossibly distant; other times, inescapably near. Several artists avoided the news altogether. Others wrestled with it on the studio floor. Whether through abstraction, figuration, collage, installation, video or hybrid forms that stretch the category itself, their work reflects the complexity of this moment with incredible clarity.
To say that we are remote is true — but incomplete. Yes, the Sam & Adele Golden Gallery sits in a rural valley where winter squeezes the breath, and the quiet is deep enough to hear your own pulse. But remoteness is not a deficit here; it is a condition for seeing differently. In this stillness, distractions fall away. What remains is the work.
The artists who come here arrive with intention. Each of the eighteen artists in this exhibition was selected through a careful, independent review process grounded in one principle: the quality of the work. For fourteen years, we have invited an outside panel of curators, museum professionals, gallerists, faculty, and artists to examine applications with seriousness and candor. Their conversations are thoughtful, often spirited, and never casual. While artistic judgment is inherently subjective, it is not arbitrary. Every artist gathered here represents the outcome of that disciplined discernment — chosen for the strength, depth, and integrity of their practice.
What often goes unspoken is the commitment required of the artists themselves. Many leave teaching positions, studio routines, family obligations, and exhibitions in progress. Some travel across continents to reach this valley. They arrive willing to step outside of what is familiar — willing to be curious again, to experiment, to learn. That leap of trust does not go unnoticed.
The Residency is not simply a retreat; it is a gathering of premiere artists who choose to immerse themselves in discovery. Central to that discovery is the extraordinary engagement with the Materials and Research & Development teams at Golden Artist Colors. These are individuals with decades of materials knowledge — chemists, educators, innovators, artists themselves — who meet the artists with equal curiosity. What unfolds is more than instruction, but rather an exchange. Artists test ideas; the staff responds; questions deepen; assumptions are challenged; everyone learns.
And then something remarkable happens beyond the studio walls. Our local community is profoundly welcoming. Neighbors attend Openings. Employee owners visit studios. Instead of friction, we find a connection. The artists absorb something from this landscape; the landscape absorbs something from them. While our geography remains rural, the conversations and level of talent here are undeniably global.
Made in Paint 13 gathers that exchange. It is not a survey of trends, a thematic show, nor a tidy summary of the year’s upheavals. Instead, it is evidence — evidence of what happens when artists are trusted with space, materials, and the time to follow an idea without interruption. Evidence that rigor and generosity can coexist. Evidence that painting, in all its expanded forms, is still one of our clearest instruments for processing the world as it is and imagining the world as it could be.
For anyone tempted to skip number thirteen, this exhibition offers its own form of superstition breaking. There is too much curiosity, too much determination, too much beauty in these works for fear to trip us up. As I write this in a long stretch of sub-zero weather — with air so sharp it seals your nostrils and a sparkling white cover that is blinding — it strikes me that this year’s cohort shared something with this winter landscape: clarity, tension, resilience, and a surprising capacity for brilliant illumination and reflection.
We are honored to present these artists and grateful for what they have given to this place, and to us personally. We will continue to be warmed by their deep friendships. Made in Paint 13 is, above all, a celebration of the studio and of the people who make it a site of continued discovery and joy.
Mark Golden, President
Sam & Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts