2025 virtual Cohort
Spring 2025 | Summer 2025 | Fall 2025
Mondays via Zoom
With Canopy Mentor
Matt Phillips
Artist
Based in Brooklyn, NY
Cohort Artists
The artists featured below were accepted to the 2025 year of The Canopy Program. Together, with the guidance of their Faculty Mentor, Matt Phillips, the artists will develop their studio practice through critiques, Artist Talks + Q&As, seminars, and workshops. The Canopy Program is a year-long commitment, this Cohort will meet via Zoom for three consecutive semesters. Their experience will culminate with a pop-up Group Show in Chelsea (NYC).
Ashlie Benton
James Buckhouse
Jenny Zoe Casey
JBH Scholarship Recipient
Anna Guarneri
Andrew Kossow
Lisa Mullikin
Quinn O'Connell
Jen E. Sanders
Narelle Sissons
Andrea Stanley
Katie Zesiger
Cohort Exhibition
Each Canopy Cohort presents a culminating pop-up group exhibition.
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral
Canopy Studio, 508 W. 26th St. #6E
December 4-6, 2025
OpeningThursday, December 4, 6-8 pm
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral is a group exhibition featuring the work of ten artists who worked together for one year with their Canopy Mentor, Matt Phillips, as part of the 2025 Canopy Program.
The show's title refers to an ancient system of classifying the natural world, distinguishing life from other matter, as well as discerning what moves from that which remains still. In the work of the ten artists presented here, the distinctions between animal, vegetable, and mineral become porous and blurred. What might be described as inert vibrates with vitality; solidity gives way to fluid motion, the distinction between inner and outer set free. In their time together, these artists have engaged in rigorous self-examination, positioning their work uniquely in the entanglement between that which can be classified, and that which evades naming.
Working in figurative painting, Katie Zesiger’s skillful realism buzzes with the tension of animal presence in unexpected places. Andrea Stanley builds fantastical worlds where strange forms and beings are in perpetual motion. Ashlie Benton employs animals as metaphors to create compelling psychological scenes. Jen E. Sanders renders the sensory overload of arcade interiors. Narelle Sissons builds expressive compositions that signify a body, and a moment, within the confined space of the canvas. James Buckhouse creates narratives on dry erase board to investigate undercurrents of longing. Working in abstraction, Jenny Zoe Casey records subtle aural experiences in delicately drawn depictions of forms. Andrew Kossow uses a process akin to writing, building drawings through repetition on the scaffold of a grid. Anna Guarneri’s luminous watercolors manifest the transformative experience of childbirth. Quinn O’Connell mixes beeswax, pumice, and paint to call forth plant-infused spaces that echo the materiality of the earth.
Please join us for the opening reception, Thursday, December 4th, 6-8pm.
The show's title refers to an ancient system of classifying the natural world, distinguishing life from other matter, as well as discerning what moves from that which remains still. In the work of the ten artists presented here, the distinctions between animal, vegetable, and mineral become porous and blurred. What might be described as inert vibrates with vitality; solidity gives way to fluid motion, the distinction between inner and outer set free. In their time together, these artists have engaged in rigorous self-examination, positioning their work uniquely in the entanglement between that which can be classified, and that which evades naming.
Working in figurative painting, Katie Zesiger’s skillful realism buzzes with the tension of animal presence in unexpected places. Andrea Stanley builds fantastical worlds where strange forms and beings are in perpetual motion. Ashlie Benton employs animals as metaphors to create compelling psychological scenes. Jen E. Sanders renders the sensory overload of arcade interiors. Narelle Sissons builds expressive compositions that signify a body, and a moment, within the confined space of the canvas. James Buckhouse creates narratives on dry erase board to investigate undercurrents of longing. Working in abstraction, Jenny Zoe Casey records subtle aural experiences in delicately drawn depictions of forms. Andrew Kossow uses a process akin to writing, building drawings through repetition on the scaffold of a grid. Anna Guarneri’s luminous watercolors manifest the transformative experience of childbirth. Quinn O’Connell mixes beeswax, pumice, and paint to call forth plant-infused spaces that echo the materiality of the earth.
Please join us for the opening reception, Thursday, December 4th, 6-8pm.
Guest Speakers + Visiting Critics
Each semester, Matt Phillips' Cohort received Artist Talks, Lectures, Workshops
and Visiting Critiques from an esteemed roster of Guest Artists + Speakers.
Jackie Gendel
Guest Artist
Sky Glabush
Guest Artist
Kris Rac
Art History Speaker
Eric Hibit
Color Theory Lecture
Jason Stopa
Artist Lecture + Visiting Critic
Catherine Haggarty
Artist Lecture + Visiting Critic
Amanda Nedham
Guest Writing Editor
Rob Dimin
Visiting Critic
DIMIN Gallery
Alex Allenchey
Visiting Critic
Associate Director at CHART
Amir H. Fallah
Professional Practices Speaker
Adrienne Elise Tarver
Professional Practices Speaker
Canopy Mentor Matt Phillips
Matt Phillips is a painter living in Brooklyn, NY. His works often employ fundamental elements of painting: simple shapes, modulated values and color relationships. These rather rudimentary components are combined and remixed to produce unexpected outcomes. Color, shape, mark and form engage one another in both strange and familiar ways, becoming tense, humorous, quirky and ultimately meaningful.
Matt Phillips has had solo exhibitions at Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, FL; The Landing Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Anna Zorina Gallery, NYC,NY; Studio d’Arte Raffaelli, Trento, Italy; and Zillman Art Museum, Bangor Maine. He has participated in group exhibitions at The Mass, Tokyo, Japan; The Hole, Los Angeles, CA; The Pit, Los Angeles, CA; Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; and Hollis Taggart, NYC, NY. Phillips has been an artist-in-residence at The Fores Project, Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony.
