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Among the artists Half Gallery has showcased early in their careers are Danielle Orchard, Louise Bonnet, and Vaughn Spann, all now internationally recognized. This marks the second time we’ve had the pleasure of working with Powers, who once again brought a no-nonsense approach to his selections—he knows exactly what he likes. The results speak for themselves: this is an exceptionally strong and diverse issue of New American Paintings.

I also want to thank Michael Wilson, an extraordinary writer we’ve collaborated with for many years, for his insightful essay. Connecting the work of forty distinct artists is no easy feat. Though varied in medium and background, these artists converge around themes of memory, identity, and human experience. Many transform personal and collective histories—family stories, ancestral trauma, archival images—into visual narratives that question what is remembered, erased, or reimagined.

Closely tied to memory is an exploration of identity and belonging, especially amid displacement, diaspora, and intersectionality. Their work reveals identity as fluid, shaped by history, geography, and community, balancing intimate autobiography with broader social and environmental contexts. Themes of isolation and connection, permanence and change, permeate their practice.

The human figure is often central—portrayed with vulnerability, intimacy, and complexity. Many depict women, queer bodies, or marginalized identities, using gesture and texture to convey emotional and cultural narratives while challenging traditional notions of beauty and representation.

Nature and the environment emerge as vital materials and metaphors. Organic forms, cycles of growth and decay, and ecological interdependence mirror emotional states and social relations.…

A few months ago, I joined a (surprisingly popular) Facebook group devoted to “liminal photography.” Anticipating a polite experience, I was surprised by the amount of passionate debate around the category’s definition. Any contributor who deviated from an unwritten list of subjects that included hospital corridors, empty highways, abandoned shopping malls, and not much else was soon confronted by a tsunami of disapproval. Members were, it seemed, wedded to a very particular vision of liminality as explicitly nocturnal, “eerie,” and urban. But while such images can certainly be affecting, the idea of “in-betweenness” or life on the threshold can and should be stretched a little, to incorporate ideas and images that are themselves neither entirely one thing nor another, that admit some genuine ambiguity rather than simply checking a set of stylistic boxes.

While in this issue of New American Paintings we are concerned with painting rather than photography, the appeal of the non-place, of the indefinable zone that marks a passage from one condition to the next, remains in play, and the artists who inhabit it here are happily far from the dogmatism of that Facebook pile-on. The work of William Matheson, for example, is certainly inflected with an uncanny spirit, but his landscapes and interiors convey a subtler and more complex atmosphere than this might suggest—one truly liminal in that it moves between the everyday and the unknown but refuses to settle in either domain. The modest scale of Matheson’s work and his use of highly tactile supports…