Tender is the Night
January 15 – February 14, 2026

Alexandria Couch, Kimberly Heard, Tuere Nicole


Picture Theory is pleased to announce Tender Is the Night, a three-person exhibition featuring Alexandria Couch, Kimberly Heard, and Tuere Nicole, whose work approaches figuration as a site of interior, material, and temporal inquiry. The exhibition’s title refers to the moment when exterior certainty dissolves and inner life becomes legible—a condition that resonates across each artist’s engagement with memory, sensation, and lived experience.

Emerging after decades of Black figurative painting that established visibility and representation, Tender Is the Night turns toward quieter registers of subjectivity. Working between abstraction and figuration, the artists consider how painting can register states of being that remain unfixed and unresolved. Across dreamlike interiors, distorted recollections, and cultivated landscapes, the figure operates as a temporal condition—continually formed through experience, inheritance, and material process.


Alexandria Couch’s paintings unfold through layered, dissociative environments in which figures and spaces are continually assembled, disrupted, and repaired. Working through collage as both method and metaphor, Couch incorporates materials such as thread, fabric, paint, and furniture to construct compositions shaped by fragmentation and mending. Her figures emerge as composites of memory and personal archive, occupying suspended states where transformation is constant and identity remains provisional. Across her practice, instability functions not as rupture but as a generative condition.

Kimberly Heard’s work explores the instability of memory and the elasticity of time through gesture, gravity, and material experimentation. Rather than depicting fixed narratives, her paintings attend to the slippages between seeing, sensing, and feeling, allowing sensation to guide composition. Color, movement, and surface operate as temporal markers, registering experience as something fluid and unfixed. Heard’s figures and fields remain open, shaped by accumulation and drift rather than resolution.

Tuere Nicole Lawton’s practice centers on Black girlhood as an evolving, intergenerational condition. Her paintings depict Black female figures situated within cultivated landscapes that merge personal history with collective inheritance. Framing her work through the metaphor of the garden, Lawton approaches painting as a site of care, continuity, and growth. Across her practice, becoming is understood as cyclical rather than linear, with figures shaped by lineage, environment, and time.