Beatriz Williams, El Nido, 2026 acrylic on canvas, 24 ×18 in.

May 13–16, 2026

Chelsea Industrial, 535 W 28th St, New York City

under the pale blue is pleased to present new work by Adina Andrus, Mitchell Craig, and Beatriz Williams — three artists whose practices consider how we locate ourselves—within our bodies, our histories, and the natural environments we increasingly overlook. Their voices converge in a shared sensitivity to connection and the act of careful listening.

Adina Andrus works across sculpture, painting, and installation, exploring themes of memory and cultural preservation. Her practice considers how everyday actions become acts of survival — how we retain what is essential while adapting to new environments. Through daily mark-making, she has developed an evolving visual language composed of symbols that carry the weight of the sacred — yet are built from remnants of history and everyday observation. Using materials such as ceramic, gold leaf, and plastic, these forms accumulate meaning through repetition and time, functioning as an invented symbology with immense presence. Drawing on their own visual associations, audiences participate in completing the work, creating a shared space where personal and collective histories converge.

Mitchell Craig's large-scale paintings emerge from a photographic practice begun during the pandemic, when he turned his attention to whatever nature his Manhattan neighborhood could offer — fenced-in bushes, patches of grass in local parks, small intrusions of green in an otherwise dense urban landscape. Rooted in Thoreau's Walden — a foundational text on deliberate attention and the act of seeing one's immediate surroundings — Craig applies that same philosophical rigor to the urban landscape. Translated into gridded, monochromatic compositions, these close-up images become dense, structural, and visually demanding, resembling something almost architectural. The limited palette strips away the familiar comfort of color, forcing a confrontation with form, light, and texture. There is nothing quiet about these paintings; they reward sustained attention not with calm but with increasing complexity — revealing that the world underfoot is as intricate and relentless as the city surrounding it.

Beatriz Williams creates vivid acrylic paintings that merge portraiture and landscape, exploring identity through a diasporic lens. Born in Puerto Rico and raised in New York, her work reflects the tension and fluidity of existing between cultures. Figures emerge intertwined with lush, natural forms, dissolving the boundary between human and environment. Drawing from ancestral ties to the land, her practice honors lineage while emphasizing the inseparability of self and nature. Through color, gesture, and symbolism, Williams invites viewers into a space of reconnection — one that is both deeply personal and universally resonant.

Within this exhibition, each artist approaches the natural world as a site of meaning. Andrus excavates the past through complex symbols; Craig slows down time by examining every angle of a blade of grass; Williams explores presence and absence within the landscape. Together they ask what it means to truly pay attention — to the ground beneath us, to the cultures that shape us, and to the quiet connections that remain when we do.