Ann Craven | Painted Time: Moons (Laboratory) was originally conceived by and exhibited by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art

Curated by Julia Trotta (September 3–21)

Opening Reception Wednesday, September 3, 6-8pm

Curated by Clémence White (September 24 – October 12)

Opening Reception Wednesday, September 24, 6-8pm

Curated by Matthew Higgs (October 15 – November 9)

Lecture and Reception Wednesday, October 15, 6:30pm

The New York Studio School is pleased to present Ann Craven | Painted Time: Moons (Laboratory), September 3–November 9, 2025. Originally conceived and first exhibited at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, where it was organized by co-director Anne Collins Goodyear in collaboration with the artist, the exhibition focuses on the artist’s paintings of the moon, created between 2020 and 2024.

Based on direct observation, each work documents the date, time, and place of its making, underscoring Craven’s interest in the relationship between the cyclical rhythms of nature and the personal experience of time and memory. Craven’s repeated renditions of the moon, captured as both an eternal presence and an ever-changing one, reflect her deep fascination with seriality, a hallmark of her practice, as she revisits and reinterprets motifs over time. The return of the work to New York from Maine mirrors the cyclical nature of the moon, and of life itself, both primary concerns of Craven’s work.

To highlight the experimental breadth of Craven’s practice, the exhibition features the artist’s “laboratory” of lunar studies, a collection stored and inventoried in carefully labeled cardboard containers. This presentation will offer visitors insight into the artist’s process, revealing how Craven’s canvases trace both a celestial trajectory and a personal one.

Unfolding in three rotations—as the exhibition did at Bowdoin—each installation reaffirms the resilience of Craven’s subject matter. The inaugural iteration will be curated by Julia Trotta, Independent Curator (September 3–21). Clémence White, Director at Karma, will curate the second rotation (September 24–October 12). The third and final installation (October 15–November 9) will be curated by Matthew Higgs, Director and Chief Curator at White Columns. Collectively, the exhibition will draw from 185 compositions, each executed from direct observation of nature. Just as the moon reveals itself in both rural and urban environments, adopting shifting nuances in these different contexts, so too Craven’s depictions of this glowing orb will render accessible new constellations of thought as filtered through the vision of each curatorial contributor.

The movement of Ann Craven | Painted Time: Moons (Laboratory) from Maine to New York echoes the artist’s own trajectory and underscores her deep commitment to both locales. This connection is accentuated by the exhibition’s formative relationship to Ann Craven: Painted Time (2020-2024), on view at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine through January 4, 2026, and Spotlight: Ann Craven, on view at the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine through September 14, 2025. The New York Studio School’s presentation of Ann Craven | Painted Time: Moons (Laboratory) testifies to both the resilience and transformation implicit in the work of Ann Craven and affirms its enduring and essential qualities.

The exhibition will be accompanied by public programming this fall as part of the New York Studio School’s illustrious Evening Lecture Series, taking place on October 15. The conversation will feature Ann Craven, Anne Collins Goodyear, Julia Trotta, and Matthew Higgs.

Ann Craven (b. Boston, MA) makes self-reflexive paintings that comment on devotion, loss, and the immortalizing nature of her medium. Primarily using both unabashedly high-key colors and dark blues and blacks, she paints and repaints her key subjects—winsome animals and flowers modeled after those found in vintage books and postcards, and the moon as observed by the artist herself. Craven’s emotional conceptualism inheres in these affectively charged repetitions, each of which is accompanied by an indexical canvas Palette used for the respective work’s color mixing and archived by the artist, like her Stripes, for her future reference. Like On Kawara, her oeuvre is a catalog of time passed; like Agnes Martin, evidence of her hand is the true content of her work. With each rearticulation, Craven reasserts her brushstroke as a bulwark against the degradation of memory. Craven lives in New York City.

As the artist stated: “Capturing the moment just passed and the idea of revisiting for me is spiritual, it has nothing to do with the market, originality, or questioning ideas on comparisons. I need to revisit and remember things that I wouldn’t necessarily remember. This is almost like praying; saying the same prayer again and again is so cathartic. There is love in a repeated brushstroke—like revisiting a poem or a book or the memory of a loved one who has passed.”

Recent solo exhibitions include the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine (2025), the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine (2025), and the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine (2025). Additional solo exhibitions include SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia (2023); Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, Maine (2019); and Le Confort Moderne, Poitiers, France (2014). Craven’s paintings are in the public collections of the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine; Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Portland Museum of Art, Maine; SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.

Selected Works

Installation Views

Curated by Clémence White

Photos courtesy of Karma

Curated by Julia Trotta