Summer Arangement

Jenkins Johnson Gallery is pleased to present Summer Arrangement at our San Francisco location, bringing together works by Ben Aronson, Dewey Crumpler, Nnenna Okore, and Enrico Riley. Through distinct approaches to painting and sculpture, the exhibition considers floral imagery and organic form as sites of memory, transformation, atmosphere, and cultural meaning.

Ben Aronson’s intimate paintings capture fleeting conditions of light and space through expressive brushwork and richly layered surfaces, balancing direct observation with painterly abstraction. Dewey Crumpler’s Tulip Memories paintings draw from the history of the Dutch tulip trade and its entanglement with systems of global commerce, migration, and colonial exchange. Layering vivid color and gestural abstraction, Crumpler transforms the tulip into both historical symbol and personal metaphor, reflecting on beauty, speculation, and cultural circulation across time.

Nnenna Okore’s suspended sculptural forms transform organic and reclaimed materials—including burlap, cheesecloth, rope, dye, wire, and bioplastics—through labor-intensive processes of twisting, fraying, dyeing, and layering. Evoking tangled growth, root systems, and shifting ecologies, her immersive works foreground cycles of growth, erosion, fragility, and renewal while reflecting her longstanding engagement with environmental sustainability and material consciousness. Enrico Riley’s intimate portraits merge figures with lush floral environments, creating evocative compositions that exist between observation, memory, and imagination. Flowers become both setting and structure, framing figures that appear as archetypal presences connected to music, ritual, and the natural world. Through expressive color and fluid mark-making, Riley constructs psychologically resonant spaces that invite reflection on identity, symbolism, and belonging.

Together, Summer Arrangement considers the floral and the organic not simply as decorative motifs, but as complex visual languages through which artists engage histories of place, identity, memory, environment, and transformation. Moving between abstraction and figuration, intimacy and monumentality, the exhibition foregrounds the expressive and symbolic potential of organic form across generations and practices.