by Emma Riva
2025 was definitely…a year. The good, the bad, and the ugly, as they say. But here at Petrichor, I saw a lot of great art. I continue to be so impressed with what I see in Pittsburgh and it is a gift to get to write about art and artists here. I found that what stuck with me most this year was work that dealt with consumerism, beauty, and kitsch. All of the work included here uses bold colors, fastidious attention to material, and big ideas. I’m excited for what art I’ll get to see and write about in 2026, and I’m excited to share it with you. But here are my favorite shows I saw this year.
Forced Necessary Rest – Madison Manning
Bunker Projects
Madison Manning’s Forced Necessary Rest was an all-timer for me, an exhibition that merged attention to material with a powerful, poignant concept. I liked it so much I wrote about it twice—in TABLE and in Bunker Review. It feels especially relevant to call this particular exhibition a “body of work,” as the textile works came out of Manning’s diagnosis of epilepsy and reckoning with their changing sense of their body and their self. The work is unabashedly feminine, drawing from Manning’s life growing up in Southern femininity and reclaiming that as a femme lesbian and lover of drag. It was a highly complex exhibition that stuck with me for a long time and I hope to see Manning again in Pittsburgh.
Corners of my Mind – Natalie Westbrook
ZYNKA Gallery
I think every artist should work big at some point. Natalie Westbrook can do both enormous, sweeping canvases and tiny, contained ones. Her talent shows through in both iterations, but her big paintings are stellar. They had an ideal display space in ZYNKA Gallery. One of the things I appreciate about ZYNKA is that it isn’t just a neutral space, but has its own character that brings out different elements of artists’ work. In Corners of my Mind, the largeness of the space and varied nooks and crannies it offered let Westbrook express herself in different ways and showed the whole breadth of her artistic range. I loved her use of animal print patterns and mysterious feline figures.
Just For You – Tasneem Sarkaz
ROMANCE
The first three shows on this list are all work by women that either implicitly or explicitly works with femininity, which is perhaps my personal taste and what’s on my mind. But Just for You is the only one still open, closing January 19. And it’s Tasneem Sarkez’s first United States solo show. Paradise City, Sarkez’s largest painting, shows the bedazzled, mascara-laden eye of an unnamed woman, looking up or away, evoking the sort of images we see on beauty products or salon ads. Another standout is her series of perfume bottles, where the show’s title comes from. It’s a meditation on the line between beauty and kitsch, informed by Sarkez’s cultural background as a Libyan-American interested in “Arab Americana.” Rather than look for the ideal of beauty in purity, Just For You reveals the plastic, glitter, and neon that make up modern-day consumer culture that becomes beauty culture. Our city is extremely lucky to have ROMANCE bringing in artists like Sarkez, and I can’ t wait to see what the gallery does next.
No Better Moment – Jacki Temple & Caleb Adams
Ketchup City Creative
It’s hard for an exhibition to be truly novel. At the end of the day, art shows are empty rooms where people go to look at stuff, no matter how dressed up the concept is. ButNo Better Moment hooked me in with its concept, bringing together 47-year-old Jacki Temple and 17-year-old Caleb Adams to collaborate on paintings and exhibit side-by-side. When younger generations and older generations have such a deep disconnect, an exhibition like this shows how shared passion for art can bridge that gap. Oh, and the work was just really good. Solid displays of abstraction from both artists. Quality work that also celebrated that artists’ careers are not stagnant. The work you make at 17 will not be the same you make at 47, and that’s probably a good thing.
Pageant Queen – Tara Fay Coleman
Bottom Feeder Books
You really never know what you’re going to see in the Bottom Feeder Books gallery room. This past January, Tara Fay Coleman set up eleven mannequins in the space, each with sashes emblazoned with titles like “Miss Mediocre Lightskin”, “Miss Respectability Politics”, or “Miss Diversity Hire.” The show contextually worked with the recently-deceased Lorraine O’Grady’s Mlle Bourgeoise Noire. What I appreciated about it was its inventiveness and willingness to be misunderstood as it provokes complex questions. If you didn’t “get it,” the work still stood as proud in the space as if you did. There was something both really vulnerable and really strong about it, a through-line I see in Coleman’s work. My colleague Pria Dahiya wrote on it that: “Pageant Queen‘s deceptive simplicity mirrors the reductive power of words often used to flatten an artist into a system of symbols and signifiers.”
Red Pop – Brian Gonnella
Pullproof Studio
Gonnella’s practice reminds me of a conversation I had with a curator who said that her biggest interest is in art’s radical capacity and dealing with the question of whether art can change the world in any meaningful way. Gonnella is an organizer as well as an artist and his work is intertwined with radical politics, critiques of consumer culture, and explicitly leftist imagery. What I took away most from Red Pop was how difficult it is for anything to feel radical or shocking when everything is an aesthetic to be co-opted. As my colleague Zach Hunley wrote: “I, too, love SpongeBob and Kentucky Fried Chicken, but it’s always a good idea to let the people know that you are a Maoist, too. You can always swap it for a different style at any time; everything is just aesthetics and vibes anyways. We consume what we hold to be at least a fragmented portion of our identity, what we want to be — this relationship is not symbiotic, it’s parasitic.”
Happy new year!
This month’s articles are produced with support from the Frick Pittsburgh in conjunction with their landmark exhibition The Scandinavian Home: Landscape and Lore, running through January 19. Get cozy as the seasons change with David and Susan Warner’s collection of paintings, tapestries, and sculptures from around the Nordic region. Tickets now on sale.
PETRICHOR 
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