Library Street Collective is pleased to present A Meadow in the Clouds, a group exhibition at the Shepherd, opening Thursday, February 5, 2026, featuring the work of Nina Chanel Abney, Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Anthony Akinbola, Amna Asghar, Sadie Barnette, Elliot Bergman, Beverly Fishman, Reginald Sylvester II, and Qualeasha Wood, curated by Allison Glenn.
Communication is coded, and subtleties hold so much power. A slight shift in voice inflection or body language can completely change how information is received, and euphemisms, jargon or vagueness can reverse or disguise. Similarly, the relationships between text and image informs how a message is interpreted. A Meadow in the Clouds includes the work of nine contemporary artists who–by leaning into subtleties, double entendre, and mixed messaging–deliberately veil, disguise, or distort. By employing myriad themes and techniques, these artists question how materials hold meaning, and what happens to that meaning when the material is transformed.
Informed by West African modernist painting aesthetics, Tunji Adeniyi-Jones’ large-scale compositions cleverly slip between figuration and abstraction. In the three lush paintings, developed in response to the Shepherd’s historic stained-glass windows, avatars emerge from highly decorative backgrounds, diving in and out of the scene. For the artist, usage of deeply saturated color becomes a conversation around skin tone. Throughout the compositions, temporality is evidenced by the figure’s movements, which is suggested by their repeating appearance on the canvas. The unapologetic presence of Nina Chanel Abney’s four protagonists stands in contrast to Adeniyi-Jones’ subtly sublime, slightly hidden forms. Abney has mastered the building of a slight tension within her painterly worlds, one that is almost imperceptible. Mary, Jackie, Jordan, and Sheila (all 2023), for example, sit in front of the viewer with a defiant confidence, casually smoking and relaxing. Jackie rests casually in a seated position, knees tucked and legs splayed, while Sheila sits topless, leg crossed on her knee. Together, they mimic composite pictures, yearbook-like photographs of active fraternity or sorority members, speaking to a collegiate community in which Abney found embrace and joy as a Black, queer woman. The embodied air of Abney’s Cubist-inspired subjects suggest they’re biding their time, with not a care in the world.
Finish fetish, pop art, and minimalism inform the work of Beverly Fishman, whose seductive, electrically hued, painted wood objects question the promise of a cure inherent in the pharmaceuticals and medications in our everyday lives. Deriving the artwork titles from the promises inherent in the pill’s effects, the playful arrangement of forms can suggest a sense of delight and ease. Relief, Focus, Calm, Rest, Choice (2025), for example, is a series of forms derived from enlarged pills, their luminous surfaces imbued with kaleidoscopic color. The surfaces of her works belie their intent, from which a delicate dance between truth and perception emerges. Concerned with the meaning of materials, Anthony Akinbola makes textile paintings with durags, sewing these fabric, utilitarian objects into large-scale, painterly abstractions. For A Meadow in the Clouds, Akinbola has created an eighteen-foot, multi panel painting that continues his interest in how materials can adapt. The ombre ties that whimsically repeat across the surface of this new, large scale, handsewn, stretched tapestry allude to the source material, yet evolve into a very decorative read. The gradient color choice echoes the varied richness of the velvet and satin fabrics, pushing them into a gestural, painterly dialogue, which, for the artist, is his take on landscape, or garden, paintings.
Qualeasha Wood, Sadie Barnette, and Amna Asghar deploy double entendre through the usage of digital images, internet culture, art history, and text. Barnette’s coolly collagedworks sit atop a site-specific, ombre photomural that includes photographs the artist has taken. Plants, bling aesthetics, rims, food, cars, cowrie shells, and text imbue this new work developed specifically for the Shepherd, which is in dialogue with a commission Barnette recently developed for the California African American Museum in Los Angeles. With her dynamic, jacquard-woven textiles, Qualeasha Wood aims to archive the fluidity of online, using the movement inherent in the material as a metaphor for the digital realm. Keyboard Warrior (2023) is a glitched Windows desktop, with cursors, open windows, and cropped images repeating across the textile, the most prominent of which is a haloed image of Wood as Mary holding a keyboard version of baby Jesus. A cursor points to Woods bleeding heart with stigmata appearing on her hand that bears the keyboard, suggesting a point that will be affected by input from a viewer.
At first glance, Amna Asghar’s titles, such as A Meadow in the Clouds (2022) and Touch Me Minto (Halo) (2016), seem cleverly descriptive, but there is clearly more that exists beyond the surface. Pulling from multiple sources, including Bollywood film stills, Orientalist paintings and photography, cartoons, photographs, and advertisements, Asghar stitches together images through dynamic compositions. Touch Me Minto (Halo) is a diptych of a screen printed advertisement for toothpaste in Urdu lettering alongside an airbrushed depiction of a sublime, yellow halo, and A Meadow in the Clouds, titled by the artist’s daughter, depicts a portal into a bucolic landscape emerging from a fluffy cumulus skyscape. The combination of skies in these paintings are taken from iPhone photographs the artist has taken over time. Similarly interested in the symbolism of portals, Reginald Sylvester II has cut an aperture at the bottom of Payne’s Offering (2025) an acrylic on rubber painting named in reference to the cool blue-gray hue of the paint created in the late nineteenth century by William Payne, as a shade to use for atmospheric conditions. At times relying on minimalism as a gateway to the spiritual, Sylvester’s offering asks us to look for meaning beyond the material itself. This precise excision into the painted rubber surface offering that vantage.
Elliot Bergman is a musician, record producer, and sculptor with an expansive practice rooted in the relationships between sound and form. Bergman has developed a suite of stark, black and white, geometric monoprints, which are actually impressions of precision-tuned bells. Each print is representative of a various hertz frequency, which the artist at times legibly scrawls in the marginalia of the prints. At times, these hand-cast bells are welded into sculptures that are also instruments, a series of which will be on view in the former nave, which will be activated by the artist during a performance at the opening. A Meadow in the Clouds is on view through April 18, 2026, at the Shepherd.