Beyond the double-door entrance of Picture Theory on 28th Street, a grouping of fantastical, bright paintings bursts out from the gallery walls in Have our hands ever left the soil?, Tuere Nicole Lawton’s debut solo exhibition. The gallery’s warm, dark wooden floors and its giant exposed, supporting beam with evident patina fittingly frame Lawton’s works. Pulling from family archival photographs and oral histories, her imagination, Nollywood cinema, Motown record sleeves, and art historical influences including Manet, Sorolla, and Sargent, Lawton mines both her own lived experience of Black girlhood and womanhood and the legacies of the long line of matriarchs—her mother, aunts, grandmother, and great-grandmother—that she comes from and lovingly portrays in the show.
The exhibition title pays homage to the labor of these women who have gardened for both survival in earlier generations and more recently, pleasure. Although her mother is an avid and talented gardener, Lawton has had little luck with plants. Instead, she nurtures life through her painting by imaginatively weaving the narratives of stories told and yet to be told. The artist’s virtuosic mastery of paint yields a mixture of abstract washes and drips, rich, bold form, and touches of playful whimsy that nod to her background in illustration and the early influence of Disney animation. Yet, these paintings resonate beyond fantastical beauty and respite pleasure. Growing up in a very religious Christian family, Lawton could never quite understand the fidelity inherent to worship and the church. Ardently devoted to paint and the figure, Lawton finds devoutness within her artistic practice—the act of painting her ritual, the canvas her altar, and the figure her literal icons. As often found in many stories of unconditional devotion, here, pain and unease exist side by side with joy and celebration.
Flanking the entryway, paintings What I Gave You (2024) and To be a Girl (2024) face each other, one a portrait of girlhood and the other of womanhood. Hung next to the title wall text, What I Gave You introduces a voluptuous woman with luminous, warm, dark chestnut skin ornamented with a pink and yellow sash of flowers around her waist and delicate white flowers scattered in a halo around her head. She kneels on a bed of large green leaves and is surrounded by the tracing of a female figure tending the soil in both the foreground and background. This central figure serves as a goddess-like personification of the women who came before Lawton and prepared the way for her independent life as an artist.
In To Be a Girl, two pre-adolescent girls embrace each other and look out with bright eyes and wide grins beaming through a coating of bright yellow liquid that covers their long braids and bare bodies. The girls stand in the center of a flower with long, white petals surrounding them, suggesting that the liquid is the natural and organic sticky fluid that accompanies pollinating flowers. Tiny ants scatter across each girl’s body, evoking a visceral sense of bugs crawling on one’s skin. Here, Lawton emphasizes the tension between the nostalgic sweetness and purity of girlhood and the complicated transition out of that girlhood when society at large begins to sexualize girls.
In Teacher, Teacher (2024) and The Babysitter (2025), the artist continues to explore the impact that impossible double standards packed into conceptions of successful femininity-championing virginal purity while obsessively glamorizing exaggerated sexuality-has on Black girls in particular.
Adjacent to To Be a Girl, a much smaller and intimate painting, The Rite (2024), depicts three young girls carrying a long-stemmed flower and dressed in white dresses with matching veils, gloves, socks, and shoes, with their faces blurred. This style of dress evokes associations with confirmation ceremonies but also traditional bridal wear. A thin, expressive wash of light pink paint surrounds the girls, suggesting an all-encompassing gendered backdrop. The anonymous yet specific quality of the faces communicates the shared experience of Black girlhood as intersecting with institutionalized, contradictory expectations of girls and women.
In Birthplace (2024), a restful and resplendent scene of two nude women lounging in a lush bed of grass and strange blue flower cherub-like fairies, Lawton mediates her concerns surrounding the very real danger of the hypersexualization of Black girls and women by building a world where her young women hold space and are self-possessed in their bodies. Inspired by Edouard Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass (1862), the woman on the right stares out at the viewer with her hand touched to her exquisitely rendered face, confidently accentuated by bright highlights on her mouth and the tip of her nose while the figure on the left peacefully rests her eyes.
Reconciling pain with joy—what to carry forward and what to leave behind, Have our hands ever left the soil? manifests a familial understanding of Black femme experiences that resonates individually and collectively while also overlapping with the strange and violent construction of society overall. Lawton’s figures engage with the viewer directly, offering a surreal yet concrete world that advocates for the cultivation of potential and possibility in narratives reimagined.
