The Garden Reveals Me
April 17 – June 14, 2025
Opening reception: Thursday, April 17, 2025, 6:00-8:00 pm
Including work by Tim Braden, Samella Lewis, Cathy Lu, Michael Mazur, and Andrew Raftery

RYAN LEE Gallery is pleased to present The Garden Reveals Me. This group exhibition explores the ways in which artists use depictions of nature – from seeds to leaves to flowers – as a form of self-expression that reveals their desires, history, ancestry, and culture. In a way, an artist is like a gardener as they choose colors, lines, and textures and arrange them in a precise composition. The cyclical nature of the four seasons is explored in the works on view here through various mediums including painting, ceramics, engraving, and sculpture. Just like the interconnected, interdependent ecosystem of plants, insects, and animals that live in a garden, the works in this exhibition exist in symbiotic harmony.

In Michael Mazur’s Seasons by a Pond (2000), he depicts images of nature that verge into abstraction. The paintings transition from white and blue-gray ice, to the soft chartreuse hues of spring, to the vibrant red and purple blooms of summer, and finally the brown decay seen in autumn. Influenced by elements of Impressionist art, abstract expressionism, and traditional Chinese landscape scroll painting, Mazur combines aspects of several periods of art history separated by nearly seven centuries to create lush and luminous work. A larger set of the Seasons paintings can be found in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Cathy Lu reimagines garden creation myths like the Garden of Eden and the Immortal Peach Garden as a way to think about the United States as both a utopian and dystopian space for historically excluded communities struggling to belong. Incorporating images of peach pits, Lu references the Chinese symbology of peaches as signifying immortality as well as the creation myth of the mother goddess Nüwa, who hand-sculpted humankind from the soil.

The title of the show derives from a quote by artist Andrew Raftery, writing about his series of twelve engraved plates that explore the life cycle of a backyard garden. Inspired by nineteenth century transferware, Raftery created unique designs for each ceramic plate that depict the artist working in his garden. With these works, Raftery sought a different approach to autobiography – revealing himself selectively through the narrow lens of garden imagery.

In the early 1960s, Samella Lewis became deeply engaged with Chinese studies, traveling to Taiwan and China to study Chinese art, language, and history. Her painting The Garden (1962) is an expressionistic, abstract portrayal of a flower garden, bursting with exuberant color. Individual blossoms merge together into a mass of vivid, swirling brushstrokes. Lewis described the marks in this work as “calligraphic,” inspired by her time in Taiwan.

Tim Braden’s paintings verge into abstraction while still conveying a specificity of place. An abundance of shapes and colors makes these works as bountiful as a well-tended garden. Braden says, “I have always been interested in color charts, how colors affect and change depending on what is put next to them, and how my mood can be altered by certain color combinations.” Braden’s work, based on keen observation with a painter’s eye, translates a saturated color palette into a light-filled vision.

Tim Braden (b. 1975) is an artist who uses different types of paint, support, and application to explore subtle shifts in space, mood and tone. Braden’s work is ultimately drawn from a close reading of his environment and an attempt to depict the act of looking. He often combines patches of color and light to produce scenes that recall both the specificity of personal experience and nostalgia for another time and place.

Samella Lewis (b. 1924 – d. 2022) was an artist who studied with Elizabeth Catlett and later became an art historian, writer, curator, and activist. Through her artwork, she sought to uplift the Black community and portray them as beautiful. Perhaps best known for figurative works on paper, she also created paintings and sculptures.

Cathy Lu (b. 1984) creates ceramic sculptures and installations that manipulate traditional Chinese imagery and presentation as a way to deconstruct assumptions about Chinese diasporic identity and cultural authenticity. Unpacking how experiences of immigration, cultural hybridity, and cultural assimilation become part of American identity is central to her work.

Michael Mazur (b. 1935 – d. 2009) is known for his use of abstract and figurative visual vocabulary across a wide range of media, including painting, drawing, pastels and printmaking. Influenced by elements of Impressionist art, abstract expressionism and traditional Chinese landscape scroll painting, Mazur uniquely combines aspects of several periods of art history separated by nearly seven centuries to create lush and luminous work.

Andrew Raftery (b. 1962) is an artist whose work explores both observational and autobiographic narratives of contemporary American life. His artistic practice rests upon a deep expertise and appreciation for the antique medium of engraving, and his precise and labor-intensive works demonstrate the enduring relevance—and efficiency—of this medium’s application on contemporary subjects to disseminate images that are universally accessible.

About RYAN LEE
Celebrating emerging and established artists and estates, RYAN LEE presents innovative and scholarly exhibitions across all spectrums of art practices, including painting, photography, video, sculpture, and performance. The gallery takes chances on a wide variety of boundary-pushing artists; their work consistently transcends political, cultural, material, or technical boundaries. In addition, RYAN LEE has, throughout its history, demonstrated its long-standing interest and dedication to feminist, Black and Asian American, as well as queer narratives in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Founded in 2013 by Mary Ryan and Jeffrey Lee, the gallery is led by partners of different generations and backgrounds with over six decades of combined experiences informing its unique approach.