As part of our effort to continue to help artists and art galleries thrive, we’re proud to bring you this week’s “Virtual Gallery Walk.” Browse the artwork below and click the image itself to learn more about it, including how to contact the gallery.
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Want to see your gallery featured in an upcoming Virtual Gallery Walk? Contact us at [email protected] to advertise today. Don’t delay, as spaces are first come, first served, and availability is limited.
“The Fey Wild,” Patricia Watwood’s solo debut at Equity Gallery, comprises multi-figure narrative oil paintings, large-scale drawings, and a theatrical forest installation (extending out to the gallery courtyard) that quotes Victorian fairy paintings, Shakespeare, Fragonard’s Frick murals, and the shadowy woods surrounding the artist’s rural Pennsylvania property.
“In this exhibition, my work is inspired by the playfulness of the Rococo, set in the faerie and imaginative world of the Fey realm of Titania, with a meta-narrative of theatrical trans queer magic and romantic extravagance,” Watwood says in her Artist Statement. “Installation elements invite viewers to move through the gallery spaces as they leave behind the world as we know it, and travel into the inner realm of the Faerie Court, a universe of matriarchy, queerness, mysterious beauty, tolerance, inclusion, sensuality and collaboration with spiritual forces.
“The Fey Wild is a mythical realm, of which stories can be found throughout folklore and Olde Religion. In the theatre of Shakespeare, he casts the characters of Titania, Oberon, Puck and their faerie courtiers against the human world of the Athenians. This contrasts the universes of our societal norm as the land of day with its expected rationality, patriarchy and hierarchy, with the twilight of a magic liminal space in which down may be up, passion trumps politesse, frolick, pleasure, and the overthrow of the status quo can be predicted. In the Fey Wild, one can expect disorientation and anarchistic egalitarianism that values pleasure, mystery, the delights of entertainment, and the overthrow of business as usual. It is a land of contradictions, bright yet dark, beautiful yet deadly, and full of endless wonder. In this realm, Titania rules as Queen, eschewing power-over and prioritizing community, love, beauty, and freedom.
“By offering a narrative tied to a mythic setting, the work creates an experience of visual art in a theatrical dimension that invites viewers to consider the place of the imagination to transform our ideas about the possibilities of the world into reality.”
Exhibition Details:
“The Fey Wild”
Equity Gallery
New York, New York
November 6 – December 6, 2025
www.nyartistsequity.org
From the gallery:
Christopher Wood writes in Fairies in Victorian Art that “Victorians desperately wanted to believe in fairies.” Prior to their appearance in nursery rhymes, fairies, along with ghosts and ghouls, offered an expressive outlet for the subconscious and an escape from the reality of a repressed, unromantic, and materialistic age. We too yearn for enchantment. Disconnected and uninspired, our existence a somnambulant stroll (or a numbing scroll) wrought by a parallel and equally disorienting break from the past, in this instance a digital revolution, rather than the rapid industrialism that plagued the Victorians.
Shifting the locus of action from a corrupted world ruled by fear and loathing to the imagined world of enchantment has long been the artist’s métier for enacting cultural shifts. Like fairytale jaunts to grandma’s house, waking dreams and Watwood’s nocturnes, our inner lives play host to disorienting, and at times bizarre, happenings. Erratic and volatile, our minds and bodies fall prey to unruly passions, absurd infatuations and self-induced illusions. Yet, paradoxically, within this psychic space, where illusion and reality collide and mad imaginings run amuck, conflicts can be resolved and one can return, realigned and restored, to a new world view.
Hence, to reorder the outside world, we commence a journey within that traverses the fringe world of musings and prowling impossibilities conjured up in dreams, fairytales and the subconscious. Watwood, a classically trained figurative painter, maps this journey with multi-figure narrative oil paintings, large-scale drawings and a theatrical forest installation (extending out to the gallery courtyard) that quotes Fragonard’s Frick murals and the shadowy woods surrounding the artist’s rural Pennsylvania property. The resulting installation is a fantastical, disbelief-dispelling, queer world chock full of psychedelic viruses, gender-bending fawns, damsel/daemons, and gorgeous dudes all offering a respite from the fear-spawned rigidity of our sorely troubled world.
Alas, the caveat informing the success of this bait-and-switch caper hinges on the quality of the disruption and whether it’s defining qualities suffice to lure a receptive audience into questioning the status quo and considering the alternative views presented. Pictorial art, trafficking symbolic imagery that borrows heavily from dreams and memories (and thereby touching the subconscious), is the ideal communicator of novel, and at times radical, solutions to seeming insurmountable problems that evade head-on attacks fueled by the ego.
Watwood, adept at creating irresistibly enticing tableaus, rises to the call. With “The Fey Wild” she presents imagery that reimagines Shakespeare’s daemon-infested midsummer forest as a theatrical conceit, a willful contrivance whereby pictorial logic, and any reference to the natural world, takes full flight in favor of a startling dream space where anything can happen ⎯ and does. And in this place of seeming chaos visited by homo sprites, trans fairies and archetypal changelings, Watwood leads her viewers to reconsider what is reality, what is illusion and what matters most.
Lastly, love and beauty, evinced both as content and form, and so combined creates a madness most poignant, threads a course through Watwood’s work. Fearless, and without a scent of irony, Watwood pushes right past the modernist tolerance for beauty with lascivious figures, starry-eyed portraits, jeweled toned backdrops and decorative line work. And that’s the most radical and refreshing thing you’ll see all year.
Fine Art Collection Profile >
Carl B. Bedell is an attorney based in central Virginia. He traces his first meaningful encounters with art back to when his family was stationed in Germany with the U.S. Army. “My parents took my brothers and me to incredible museums throughout Europe,” he recalls, and later he revisited them as a U.S. Army officer himself, while living in the Dutch city of Maastricht, renowned for its annual art fair.
When he resided in Washington, D.C., Bedell became active with groups of young professionals supporting such local museums as the Corcoran Gallery, Phillips Collection, and Smithsonian Institution. After joining the Arlington County (Virginia) Commission for the Arts, he rose to chair its public art committee. (He maintains a second home in Arlington today.)
These volunteer activities brought Bedell into regular contact with talented artists, and so he began collecting in earnest. Today his paintings and sculptures include works by Guy Bell, Tim Conlon, Max Ferguson, Kit King, Roberto Lugo, Sebastian Martorana, Matt Moulthrop, Peter Olson, Andy Paiko, Mario Andres Robinson, Remington Robinson, Martin Swift, Tigran Tsitoghdzyan, Adam Vinson, and Helen Zughaib, and he owns photographs by Binh Dahn, Tim Hyde, Esko Männikkö, Jamie Johnson, and E. Brady Robinson.
The collection’s throughline, he explains, is technical virtuosity, certainly evident in Bedell’s first acquisition, made just over a decade ago. Though he had admired Adam Vinson’s paintings as early as 2008, Bedell fell for “Card Sharks” after it won the People’s Choice Award at a 2014 gallery show in Sarasota. He bought it and now owns five more Vinsons, his favorite of which is “Steeped in Irony,” illustrated here. Vinson had exhibited this still life in an alumni show at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; he made it in homage to another Academy graduate, the trompe l’oeil master John F. Peto (1854–1907), many of whose scenes were unscrupulously resigned by another artist after his death. In tribute, Vinson added Peto’s “signature” alongside his own.
Bedell is deeply interested in artists’ processes and often asks them for preparatory pieces related to his acquisitions. Vinson gave him the vintage photograph that appears in “Card Sharks,” plus two props depicted in another scene. On the back of his painting “Popcorn (Study),” Max Ferguson added song lyrics, quotations, and even a photograph of his son. Touchingly, Bedell has also assembled a collection of exhausted brushes: “I offer the artists gift certificates for new brushes in exchange for ones they can no longer use.”
Bedell recalls a watershed moment a few years ago: “I was set to bid on a 19th-century trompe l’oeil painting at auction, but this happened to coincide with final preparations to host another of my week-long retreats for 5–10 artists at my family’s river house in Arkansas’s Ozark mountains. Instead of bidding, I decided I would rather collect works by living artists, with whom I could build relationships and develop a deeper understanding of the art that I have the privilege to live with.” The retreats in Arkansas don’t involve artmaking as much as inspiration: all Bedell asks is that each artist give a talk about their work; some, he notes, “haven’t enjoyed such stimulating dialogues since they finished their formal education.”
Separately, Bedell offers the artists career advice and introduces them to other collectors. The latter is especially easy when he deinstalls his own collection at home and invites a favored artist to mount an impromptu selling show.
As for buying art, Bedell says, “My friendships with artists and other collectors are the primary source for identifying new artists.” Of course he also follows galleries, museums, magazines, and social media (“I went through a phase of only collecting artists I found on Instagram”), and he scouts talent while exploring the big fairs in Miami and New York. “When I travel,” he adds, “I try to identify artists in those places and schedule studio visits.”
The result of all this activity is a web of connections that give Bedell joy: “For any work, I can tell you a story of how I met that artist and how our relationship developed.” He cites the Armenian-born, New York-based artist Tigran Tsitoghdzyan, from whom he acquired a large, untitled painting in 2023: “Facebook had recommended his art, so I began following him. Soon I visited his studio and found we have much in common. I helped him prepare his application for U.S. citizenship, and it was incredible to be with him at his naturalization ceremony.”
It was Tsitoghdzyan who introduced Bedell to the work of Kit King at a moment when “I was trying to push what I was comfortable with, to collect art that not only displayed incredible technical ability, but also said and meant something. I was blown away by the photorealism of Kit’s large self-portrait, “The Tangible Manifestation of Change” [illustrated above], and also by the novelty of her having cut the image into strips and reassembled them.” He points with pride to King’s own statement about this powerful image: “Painted and sliced up as though it has gone through a shredder, this piece serves as a visual commentary of living in a disposable society, and the consequence in how this destructive behavior is now entering and affecting the relationships we form, and in turn how this begins to shape our own identities.” Bedell continues, “If a viewer can ask ‘Why would King cut it up?’ then perhaps that leads to deeper introspection to, as she does, question why it’s acceptable to tear one another down in real life.”
Bedell also feels strongly about Sebastian Martorana’s marble sculpture “Glove: Engineer.” After admiring the artist’s work at the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery, Bedell visited his studio and was impressed by the sculpture of a glove already sold. “Sebastian told me about the glove series he wanted to make, so I promptly commissioned the second one. I love how he took a classical subject [the hand] and added a modern twist by showing it encased in a heavy-duty work glove. And because I am so fascinated by process, I also obtained Sebastian’s study [drawn with grease pen on cardboard] plus the actual glove he studied, coated with marble dust!”
Like many collectors, Bedell worries a bit as a new artwork arrives, as this often means having to put something into storage. But he enjoys rotating the collection: “It allows for new perspectives: the light changes, and the relationship to artworks nearby might help me appreciate some aspect I hadn’t noticed before.” Clearly this is a collection that keeps giving, long after the initial thrill of acquisition.
View more artist and fine art collection profiles here at FineArtConnoisseur.com.
The Huntsville Museum of Art’s “New Realism” exhibition explores the enduring relevance of representational art in an age often defined by abstraction and conceptualism. Featuring works from the museum’s own collection, it highlights a diverse group of skillful American artists who have embraced traditional genres like landscape, portraiture, and still life as a powerful language with distinctly contemporary sensibilities.
Detail at a Glance:
“New Realism”
On view through November 20, 2025
The Huntsville Museum of Art
Huntsville, Alabama
hsvmuseum.org
Windows to the Divine (WD) is a Colorado-based nonprofit foundation that promotes human flourishing through collaborative community educational programs and outreach events. During Denver Arts Week this November, the foundation will launch its Flourishing through the Arts & Science initiative.
After hosting a successful 2024 pilot program regarding the health benefits of engaging in the arts, it established the Flourishing through the Arts & Science Council. Chaired by WD president Shannon Robinson, the council’s members include representatives from the Art Students League of Denver, Colorado Ballet, Denver Art Museum, Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Gallery 1261, CU Anschutz Center for Bioethics and Humanities, Visit Denver, and WD itself.
Robinson notes, “We are standing at the forefront of a growing worldwide movement that is recognizing the importance of the arts to healthy living. By educating the public and policy makers about the highly credible research confirming the benefits of the arts, whether it be through beauty-enriched environments or experiences such as viewing or collecting art, engaging in music, dance, painting, drawing, or writing, we will witness an explosive demand for the arts that will lead to a new and modern renaissance like no other in human history.”
The council has organized a series of events that begin on November 6, when the CU Center for Bioethics & Humanities on the Anschutz Medical Campus will host a tour of Do You See Me?, an exhibition of art created by S. Abbas Shobeiri, M.D. (b. 1964). This will be followed by a panel discussion titled Harnessing the Arts to Promote Wellness. Participants will include Andrea Camp (NeuroArts Blueprint Initiative); Marc Moss, M.D. (CU School of Medicine); and Don Ruggles, author of Beauty, Neuroscience & Architecture: Timeless Patterns & Their Impact on Our Well-Being (2019). Their conversation will be moderated by Shannon Robinson with Kathryn A. Rhine, Ph.D., director of the Arts & Humanities in Healthcare Program at CU Anschutz.
Later, the WD group will tour the Benson Hotel Art Collection, then attend events at the Denver Art Museum including a presentation by Andrea Camp and a creative arts therapy storytelling demonstration led by Katherine Reed, co-investigator of CU’s Colorado Resiliency Arts Lab. The day will conclude with a reception celebrating the Flourishing through Beauty exhibition at Gallery 1261. On view will be works by more than 40 leading artists, most represented by Gallery 1261 & Abend Gallery.
The week’s finale is set for November 16 at the Denver Art Museum, where everyone is invited to an interdisciplinary performance and audience interactive experience. To register for these programs, visit the foundation’s website.
Details:
Windows to the Divine: windowstothedivine.org
Gallery 1261: gallery1261.com
Denver, Colorado
November 6–16, 2025
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As part of our effort to continue to help artists and art galleries thrive, we’re proud to bring you this week’s “Virtual Gallery Walk.” Browse the artwork below and click the image itself to learn more about it, including how to contact the gallery.
***
Want to see your gallery featured in an upcoming Virtual Gallery Walk? Contact us at [email protected] to advertise today. Don’t delay, as spaces are first come, first served, and availability is limited.
Christopher Bishop Fine Art has announced the first-ever exhibition of “The Triumph of Night” (ca. 1765), a newly rediscovered masterwork by Neapolitan painter Fedele Fischetti (1732–1792).
On view from October 30 to December 12, 2025, via the exhibition “Alchemy and the Painter,” this singular painting offers a rare visual record of hidden Enlightenment-era Naples, where alchemy, Masonic philosophy, and artistic experimentation intertwined.
More from the gallery:
Discovered by Bishop at auction and hidden from scholarship until now, “The Triumph of Night” sheds new light on occultism and progressive thought, revealing the complex interplay of secrecy, ritual, and knowledge that defined Enlightenment Naples.
Research suggests that the work was commissioned by Raimondo di Sangro (1710-1771), a practicing alchemist and Prince of Sansevero—Naples’s most extravagant patron. A philosopher, Freemason, and necromancer later excommunicated by the church, di Sangro cultivated an intellectual circle for which alchemy represented the synthesis of all knowledge, a spiritual initiation, and a quest for immortality.
The painting is at once a Baroque spectacle and an Enlightenment puzzle. “The Triumph of Night dazzles” with silks, golds, and silvery light, staging a scene of near-chaos that resolves into a sophisticated allegory of alchemy. Embodying painting as science, a transformative process with the power to create new realities, Fischetti maps a path from ignorance to illumination through iconography drawn from Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Hebrew and Christian traditions.
Within this context, Fischetti’s painting emerges as both talisman and ritual object: a visual map of secrecy, heresy, and transformation, offering a rare confirmation of these rites whose material traces have largely vanished.
Accompanying the painting will be a selection of objects and ephemera—including a Roman gnostic gem, a Victorian Masonic gold orb pendant, and an Egyptian gold amulet of the eye of Horus (Wedjat), among others—that deepen its symbolic web, pointing toward a worldview rooted in the conviction that the more ancient the source, the closer to truth. For contemporary viewers, “The Triumph of Night” resonates an alternative creation myth: the dark forces of night giving birth to a golden promise of renewal.
“Alchemy and the Painter” will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Christopher Bishop. The gallery will also host an academic talk on the presentation in November.
About Fedele Fischetti
Fedele Fischetti (Italian, 1732 – 1792), one of the most important painters working in eighteenth-century Naples, was celebrated for his sophisticated frescoes that merged classical themes with Baroque illusionism and wit.
A master of both sacred and secular fresco cycles, Fischetti brought together the grandeur of late Baroque illusionism with the emerging clarity of Neoclassicism. He quickly rose to prominence with his refined decorative schemes for churches and palaces. His early works—such as “The Fall of Simon Magus” and “Presentation at the Temple” (ca. 1759–60) in Naples’ Basilica dello Spirito Santo—already displayed a refined classicist orientation inspired by Pompeo Batoni (Italian, 1708 – 1787).
The artist played a central role in shaping the city’s Neoclassical aesthetic working for Naples’ most elite patrons, including the Bourbon court of Ferdinand IV. Between 1778 and 1781, Fischetti painted a celebrated cycle of frescoes—The Four Seasons and The Golden Age—for the Royal Palace of Caserta, marking his peak as a court decorator.
Over the course of his career, Fischetti was increasingly interested in the most recondite and complex of allegories, drawing on the contemporary advances in archeology to depict the most gilded, most fantastical visions of antiquity. Though often overlooked in favor of his contemporaries in Rome, Florence, Bologna, and Venice, the works of Fischetti are a vivid efflorescence of Naples’ decadent yet intellectually serious late Baroque culture.
For more details about this unveiling and exhibition, please visit the website of Christopher Bishop Fine Art: www.christopherbishopfineart.com.
Fine Art Exhibition
Allied Artists of America
Reading Public Museum Reading, Pennsylvania
alliedartistsofamerica.org
Through January 11, 2026
Founded in 1914, the nonprofit organization Allied Artists of America (AAA) is running its 112th Annual Juried Exhibition at the Reading Public Museum.
On view are 100 works selected by the AAA board from entries submitted by artists all over the world. Those selected are eligible for more than $45,000 in prizes, including the $6,000 Gold Medal of Honor. Specific awards will be presented for oil painting, water media, pastel, graphics and mixed media, and sculpture. The exhibition can be seen on AAA’s website from this September through September 2026.
The magical development of a work of art, from basic concept to finished masterpiece, is the focus of the newest exhibition coming to the Booth Western Art Museum. “Concept to Canvas: Six Contemporary Artists” features the different processes that artists go through to create their work.
Details at a Glance:
“Concept to Canvas: Six Contemporary Artists”
Booth Western Art Museum
Cartersville, Georgia
www.boothmuseum.org
October 25 – March 15, 2026
November 8: Lecture about the exhibition in the Bergman Theatre (registration is required)
More from the museum:
“We are excited to welcome this new exhibition, showcasing the work of six great artists from around the country, known for their landscape and wildlife paintings,” said Booth Museum Executive Director Seth Hopkins. “We were very selective in picking the artists we asked to share their work and processes in this exhibition. We are proud to have Jane Hunt, Michelle Usibelli, Lori Putnam, Brent Cotton, Jay Moore and Randal Dutra participating. These individuals are not only great artists, but also great people.”
“We often see beautiful works of art in Museum exhibitions, but do you ever wonder what steps the artists go through to produce that painting?” asks Lisa Wheeler, director of curatorial services at the Booth Museum. “The concept behind this exhibition is to give our visitors an opportunity to see the steps involved in getting to that finished work of art.”
Each artist was asked to paint three major paintings and to provide evidence of their process, which could include photographs, thumbnail sketches, drawings, plein air studies and other techniques. In the exhibition, these smaller works showing their progression of thought and inspiration will be paired with the completed final works.
“It is our hope that visitors will come away from this exhibition with a new sense of the ways in which artists create major paintings, and realize that process can be quite different from artist to artist,” said Hopkins.
As part of our effort to continue to help artists and art galleries thrive, we’re proud to bring you this week’s “Virtual Gallery Walk.” Browse the artwork below and click the image itself to learn more about it, including how to contact the gallery.
***
Want to see your gallery featured in an upcoming Virtual Gallery Walk? Contact us at [email protected] to advertise today. Don’t delay, as spaces are first come, first served, and availability is limited.
