Reception: Thursday, September 10, 6 - 8pm

Carter Burden Gallery presents two new exhibitions: Material Evidence in the East Gallery featuring the abstract work Hilda O’Connell, Debra Salomon, Sumayyah Samaha, and Martha Stotzky; Then and Now: Connecting the Dots in the West Gallery featuring the vivid and diverse work of Tom Hill. The reception will be on Thursday, September 10 from 6pm to 8pm. The exhibitions run from September 10 - October 6, 2026, at 548 West 28th Street in New York City. The gallery hours are Tuesday - Friday, 11 a.m. - 5 p.m., Saturday, 11 a.m. - 6 p.m.

Material Evidence 

Carter Burden Gallery presents Material Evidence, an exhibition bringing together the work of Hilda O’Connell, Debra Salomon, Sumayyah Samaha, and Martha Stotzky. Though working across painting, mixed media, textile, and three-dimensional sculpture, the four artists share a compelling sensitivity to material, texture, line, and form. Their abstract works are united by vivid, richly layered color and a warmth that emerges through their distinct approaches to surface and gesture. Across the exhibition marks accumulate, materials transform, and lines move between structure and spontaneity, creating pieces that invite a closer look.

In Hilda O’Connell’s color field paintings, color becomes both subject and expressive force. Her early fascination with the calligraphy of Medieval manuscripts led to a lifelong interest in language and the visual structures of alphabets, while abstraction opened another avenue for exploring visual communication beyond literal meaning. In these works, color is liberated from naturalism and allowed to expand across open fields with chromatic intensity, creating spaces in which hue, scale, and formal relationships carry their own language.

Drawing from years of observing the urban landscape and the cultures encountered through travel, Debra Salomon’s three-dimensional wall sculptures are informed by what she calls a “personal thesaurus of weight, skin, fragrance, textures, form and physics.” Translating the sensory qualities of the world into abstract forms that occupy a space between the real and imagined.

Sumayyah Samaha approaches abstraction through an intuitive visual vocabulary developed over decades of painting. The artist’s stream of consciousness determines the composition; playful shapes and rich colors are connected by lines, which create boundaries between the negative spaces of the canvas. Samaha’s focus is on color, texture, contours, weight, and defining edges; these paired with her choice of appropriate medium tell her visual story.

Martha Stotzky’s freestanding sculptures transform discarded tree-cage armatures through yarn, thread, weaving, and knotting, allowing the properties of the materials to guide each form as it develops. Her improvisational process captures the “spontaneity, energy, and gesture” of weaving, tightening, loosening, wrapping, and knotting, while disparate and often forgotten materials are brought together to create a sense of wholeness.

Together, these artists demonstrate how material can become both subject and language, leaving behind a tangible record of gesture and transformation.

Then and Now: Connecting the Dots

Tom Hill’s work focuses on harnessing, reinforcing, and expanding the untamed forces of queer masculine energy. Like other expressions of queer experience, his pieces take on elements of de- and reconstruction, subversion, flamboyance, and innuendo. Working across painting, sculpture, and printmaking, Hill embraces the queer spirit of the shapeshifter: repurposing found and chosen materials; employing graphic design and painterly elements; exploring surface and volume; and ping-ponging between abstraction, representation, and symbolism. Color is a key factor in his work, where industrial fluorescents and jewel-box metallics coexist, often complemented and amplified by tones of earthy growth and decay. More than occasionally, Hill uses words as coexisting visual elements that articulate, punctuate, and support an idea or theme.

Above all, Hill enjoys coaxing static forms and functions into transformational stages and highlighting paradoxes to transcend culturally reinforced binaries. Elements are turned inside out and upside down, skewing centers of gravity and balance and creating whirls of disorientation and confusion. Hill states, “Overall, my work is anchored in a tradition in which the queer tongue is held firmly in cheek and dissonant elements create magnetic polarity: each of these pieces simultaneously emits a grunt of rough exertion and wistful sigh – every light-in-the-loafers step accentuated by the march of steel-toed boots.”

Born in Washington, DC, and raised in nearby Maryland, Hill attended the Maryland Institute, College of Art before studying at the University of New Mexico, where he received a bachelor’s degree with concentrations in art and architecture. Following his studies, he lived and worked in a variety of locations before settling in New York City, where he spent more than 20 years as a studio artist. In addition to bar and restaurant work, he supported himself through a range of art-related and skills-building positions, including art handler, nightclub decorator, theatre set and prop designer, decorative and mural painter, graphic designer, and artist’s assistant. During his years in New York, Hill was also involved with a number of AIDS and queer activist groups.

In 2001, Hill moved back to Washington, DC with his husband and has lived in the area since. His recovery and activism led him to pursue an MSW in community organizing from Hunter College in New York, which led to work in healthcare organizing, advocacy, and policy. After retiring in 2022, Hill was able to resume his studio practice on a full-time basis. He is currently enrolled in an MFA program at the University of Maryland.