“Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories” – Zadie Smith


In her debut solo exhibition, Tuere Nicole Lawton explores the themes of Black girlhood and generational legacy through a series of striking new paintings. Drawing from family stories of Big Ma’s garden in Alabama and her own mother’s green thumb, she plays with the traditional marriage of floral images and femininity. Her figures, exclusively Black and female, sprout from the earth not fully formed, but as young women. Growing, blooming, blossoming across the canvas. Lawton explains, “My work, my garden so to speak, is a way to process something that’s been shared between the generations of my family. A way to process the frustration that I feel when I’m forced to say ‘woman’ although I’m compelled to say ‘girl’ – to protect my characters’ youth for as long as they want, like I wished I could’ve. A way to process the ugly secrets of my ancestry that have been buried beneath the soil, that I am desperate to excavate with the tools I have been given.” Each brushstroke digs into this history.

A dichotomy is defined as something with seemingly contradictory qualities. Past and present. Adolescence and womanhood. Abstract and figurative. Lawton’s work revels in these tensions. With an expressionistic use of color, she creates backdrops for her figures that seem both timeless and ephemeral. Floral motifs and abstract patterns combine to create dreamlike gardens for her heroines to inhabit. Yet her figures possess an arresting physicality, weight, depth. A grounding in truth. Black girlhood and Black bodies depicted with a reverential realism. Lawton uses her own family pictures, archival photographs, and other Black ephemera to create her girls, each character an alchemy of personal experience and communal inheritance.

Her work nods to the long history of portraiture – Manet’s impressionistic depictions of the female form come to mind – but inverts many conventions of the genre by centering focus on Black femininity. Modern and classical. Nature and girlhood shown mid-blossom, frozen on the canvas as they bloom.

The harmony of contradictions. Dichotomy has another definition – in botany, it refers to repeated branching into two equal parts. Tangled vines traced back to a single root. A family tree. For Lawton, her branches extend from the tributaries of Alabama to her mother’s house in Brooklyn. A family of women, genera- tions of gardens. She traces her ancestry back, following the vibrant green threads until they disappear deep in the American South. Sometimes a flower is a revolutionary act. She explains, “I used to feel uncomfortable about the ambiguity of space, and the ambiguity of iden- tity in my pieces, however after spending time with my grandmother I am less perturbed. She is here with me in the kitchen, but also in the mess hall of her school in 1947. In my face she can see her sister, and talk with us both at once, reaching across space and time. In my paintings I like to think that we can reach together, if only for a moment.”

– Sean Flahive


Download Press Release





Tuere Nicole was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. After graduating from Skidmore College in 2016, she traveled to Madrid, where she lived and worked as a teacher from 2018-2022. After her return to the United States, she felt ready to start sharing her work again. Sustaining a love of oil paint, she works from her room in her family’s apartment in NJ.