Ferrin Contemporary

06/19/2026

ON VIEW: Jacqueline Bishop in: Iaohontso’ktá:tie / To Move Across the Land / The Indigenous Contemporary Art Biennial

Curated by Armando Perla & Michael Patten
Launched in 2012, the Indigenous Contemporary Art Biennial (BACA)is a Montreal-based non-profit organization (registered in 2016) that promotes the work of Indigenous artists. The biennial takes place every two years in various locations, with each iteration focusing on a specific theme.

ABOUT THE WORK: The Market Woman
Centered around artist and scholar Jacqueline Bishop’s Fauna (2024) tea service and related textile, painting, and poetic works, this installation examines the market woman as a keeper of botanical knowledge, reproductive autonomy, and cultural continuity within the violent economies of colonialization, the transatlantic slave trade and plantation economies. Works such as The Keeper of All the Secrets (2023), printed on Sea Island cotton, foreground the exchanges of plant knowledge between Indigenous women of Abya Yala and forcibly displaced African women, tracing how these forms of knowledge became crucial to survival, healing, and reproductive care within the Caribbean. Bishop follows how these systems of medicinal practice and communal support moved through markets, shaping Caribbean women’s worlds across generations. Within these histories, Black women used plants, herbs, and market exchange networks to regulate fertility, terminate pregnancies resulting from sexual violence, and sustain forms of care excluded from colonial archives.

Installed on a textile by Trama Textiles, a cooperative of Maya women weavers formed during the Guatemalan genocide, the tea service situates women’s knowledge within broader Indigenous and diasporic systems of survival carried through markets, fabric, foodways, and oral transmission. Bishop’s paintings, garments, and poem Island Women extend this reflection, foregrounding women whose knowledge circulated through gesture, memory, and trade despite displacement and rupture.

Expression, Centre d’exposition de Saint-Hyacinthe
Saint-Hyacinthe, QC
On view June 6 – September 13, 2026
featuring Jacqueline Bishop

Photos curtesy of Michael Patten

06/17/2026

ON VIEW NOW | A Golden Age for Whom? at Figge Art Museum featuring Beth Lipman, Mara Superior, and Kurt Weiser

A Golden Age for Whom? will bring together contemporary artists responding to the themes and aesthetics explored in the Figge’s concurrent exhibition The Golden Age: Featuring Northern European Works from the Collection of the National Gallery of Art. The two exhibitions will be installed in adjoining galleries, allowing visitors to move directly between historic works and contemporary responses.

The exhibition aims to foster a richer conversation about how Renaissance and Baroque styles and narratives continue to shape artists today—while also highlighting the ways contemporary artists critically engage with the histories, power structures, and inequities embedded in early modern patronage and society.

The exhibition will feature both loans and works from the Figge’s collection, including pieces by Beth Lipman, Oliver Okolo, Yasumasa Morimura, Fabiola Jean-Louis, Mara Superior, Kurt Weiser, and others.

1, 3, 5, 7: “Golden Age for Whom?” Installation image, courtesy of Figge Art Museum
2: Kurt Weiser, “Confidential”, detail, 1997, porcelain, 18 X 12 X 12”.
4: Mara Superior, ”The Nymph of Spring (After Lucas Cranach)”, detail, 2021, high-fired porcelain, ceramic oxides and underglazes, gold leaf, epoxy, digital print, 12.5 x 18.5 x 1.5”. John P***k Photography.
6: Beth Lipman, “Scale and Gazing Ball”, detail, 2020, glass, wood, metal, paint, adhesive, 64 x 42 x 32”, image courtesy of the artist.

05/30/2026

ARTIST NEWS: SERGEI ISUPOV Moderne Gallery, Alex J. Ettl Grant, and The Portal Gallery at Project Art

Philadelphia represents a special place for artists and is particularly meaningful for Sergei Isupov. It is where his work was first introduced to America in 1992, and it is now where an important collection of his early works are available in Moderne Gallery's "Subconscious Surfaced". Writing for the exhibition's catalog provided me with the opportunity to interview Isupov about his early life in the USSR, reflect on the the work he produced in his first USA studios, and the impact of the ongoing war on his families in Ukraine and Estonia.

Contemporary East European Ceramics at The Clay Studio was the first survey of 74 artists from the former Eastern Bloc countries. Held in Philadelphia during the annual NCECA conference, it was attended by thousands of ceramicists and inspired American artists to travel to clay studios and symposiums throughout Eastern Europe. We discussed establishing his studios in Kentucky and Virginia where the works, now featured in the exhibition, were produced, as well as the path that led to our work together and eventually to Project Art in Cummington, MA - Leslie Ferrin, director notes

In today's newsletter, we share news about Subconscious Surfaced, Isupov's recent Alex J. Ettl Grant awarded by the National Sculpture Society, and "Mama Cat," featured in the inaugural exhibition in The Portal Gallery, the latest public art installation at Project Art in the Cummington Cultural District.

SUBCONSCIOUS SURFACED On view May 1, 2026 – August 29, 2026 Opening Reception: Friday, May 1, 2026 | 5 – 7 pm Moderne Gallery 1705 N American St. STE 3 Philadelphia, PA

05/26/2026

SERGEI ISUPOV featured at in Philadelphia.

“Ceramic works by Sergei Isupov on view as part of our latest exhibition Subconscious Surfaced.

Sergei Isupov occupies a prominent position in international contemporary ceramics, known for his extraordinary ability to marry three-dimensional sculpture with narrative painting. Born into a family of artists and educated across Ukraine and Estonia during the Soviet era, Isupov immigrated to the United States in 1994. His porcelain works, characterized by hand-built forms and intricate stain-and-glaze paintings, explore the complexities of the human psyche and the body. In light of recent geopolitical conflicts in Ukraine and Estonia, his work has taken on a renewed urgency, serving as a visceral, creative response to the anxieties of war and the fragility of peace.

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Subconscious Surfaced, a group exhibition featuring works from the 1960s through the early 2000s, explores a shared thread of surreal, otherworldly sculptural form across a range of expressions, techniques, and contexts.”

Photography by

05/12/2026

NOW ON VIEW: Sally Silberberg: Shifting Ground at Berry Campbell
Curated by Glenn Adamson

Berry Campbell is pleased to present a focused exhibition of porcelain sculptures by Sally Silberberg, an extraordinary and largely unseen body of work that marks a pivotal moment in the artist’s practice. The exhibition is curated by Glenn Adamson, an independent curator, writer, and historian, and previously Director of the Museum of Arts and Design and Head of Research at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The exhibition is accompanied by a 72-page catalogue.

Created during the 1980s, a concentrated period of experimentation for Silberberg, these sculptures are a decisive shift away from functional ceramics and toward a radical new sculptural language. After years of working on the potter’s wheel, Silberberg developed a new method built from solid blocks of porcelain. Layered with pigment, cut, torn, and carved, each work introduces both risk and unpredictability and pushes porcelain to its structural and perceptual limits.

Sally Silberberg is a longtime friend and colleague of Ferrin Contemporary. We are so excited to see this exhibition come to fruition, congratulations, Sally!

Sally Silberberg: Shifting Ground
April 23 – May 30, 2026

ARTIST TALK WITH CURATOR GLENN ADAMSON
Saturday, May 16 | 3PM
Berry Campbell
524 W 26th Street, New York, NY

05/06/2026

MARA SUPERIOR | ON VIEW AT THE MET

We are thrilled to announce a recent acquisition to The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Mara Superior's “The Pursuit of Happiness”. Originally commissioned by Barry and Merle Ginsburg, and most recently shown at Shelburne Museum as part of “Porcelain Love Letters: The Art of Mara Superior”, the work has been generously acquired and will remain on view in the American Wing at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In 2012, Barry and Merle Ginsburg commissioned Superior to create an all-American tribute to the founding fathers and the best of 18th century American democratic ideals. Completed in 2015, the architectural stacked porcelain commemorative sculpture uses symbols and references drawn from history and decorative arts including miniature presidential portraits, busts, The Declaration of Independence, and an apple pie.

“’The Pursuit of Happiness’ is Superior’s most detailed and ambitious work yet. It stands out not just because of its size but because of its powerful, nonpartisan, patriotic message. She describes it as “a commemorative celebration of the American idea, the great experiment, the system—three branches of government, checks and balances, Grecian democracy dependent on an educated citizenry.”
-Kory Rogers, Francie & John Downing Senior Curator of American Art at Shelburne Museum

Congratulations Mara on this exceptional addition to one of America’s most influential institutions; located, fittingly, in Mara’s home city.

“The Pursuit of Happiness”
2012-2014
high-fired porcelain, ceramic oxides, underglaze, glaze, glaze, wood, gold leaf, brass, bone, paper
27.5 x 25 x 20″

04/30/2026

SUBCONSCIOUS SURFACED
at Moderne Gallery, Philadelphia, PA

Over the past 3 years, Ferrin Contemporary has had the pleasure of working with the collection of Marc & Diane Grainer, collectors of contemporary ceramics, studio furniture and craft from 1970-present. Their generous gifts have provided support and helped establish collections of American and British studio craft at numerous museums throughout the US.

Opening Friday, May 1, 2026 at Moderne Gallery in Philadelphia, PA, selected works from the Grainer’s and other private collections are featured in “Subconscious Surfaced”. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog with an introduction by Moderne Gallery and two essays by curator of Ceramics at the Everson Museum of Art, Garth Johnson, and Ferrin Contemporary Director, Leslie Ferrin.

Please join us at Moderne Gallery with Marc & Diane Grainer to celebrate their contributions to the world of contemporary surrealist ceramics and studio craft.

“Over the course of 45 years, Marc and Diane Grainer collected functional and sculptural ceramics and juxtaposed them with studio furniture and textiles and household items that invariably bore the imprint of their maker. Although they are perhaps best known for their encyclopedic collection of British studio pottery, the Grainers consistently chose work by artists who draw from the Surrealist well like Sergei Isupov, Michael Lucero, Nancy Carman, and Sun Koo Yuh. Each of these artists mixes and matches strategies like chance operations, including automatism, dream logic, juxtaposing seemingly unrelated elements, and metamorphizing their subjects.”
–Garth Johnson, Curator of Ceramic Art, Everson Museum of Art

Opening Reception:
Friday, May 1, 2026 | 5 – 7 pm

Moderne Gallery
1705 N American St. STE 3
Philadelphia, PA