Acmanoro Niles, photo by Frank Rothenberg.
Tickets
General Ticket: $10
Members: Free, RSVP Required
Arcmanoro Niles, esteemed East End visual artist and visionary, joins us as our August Insight Sunday speaker. Included in This Land: Considering The American Landscape, Niles has created a unique painting specifically for the exhibition. Niles invites audiences to see deeply into the work, learn about his process, and gain insight into the wellspring of his creativity. Following the discussion there will be a Q&A and the audience will then be led upstairs into the gallery to view the work in person.
A painter known for working with vivid and bright hues, Niles’s new painting is reflective of how much landscape has become a part of his practice. He says, “I began to realize how important my relationship to nature was. In this painting I wanted to capture the feeling of the day ending looking out into the fading sky, an attempt to connect and reset watching the sunset, contemplating what tomorrow might bring.”
As a visual artist, Niles creates paintings that expand our understanding of traditional genre painting and portraiture. His work he offers a window into seemingly mundane moments of daily life—a child seated at the table for breakfast, a man about to get into his car, a couple in their bedroom—with subjects drawn from photographs of friends and relatives and from memories of his past.
Niles’s work included in This Land offers viewers a window into a present day reflection and the hope of what lies in the future. Stop by during our exhibition hours, Thursday – Monday, 11 AM – 5 PM to view the work in person.
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ARCMANORO NILES (b. 1989, Washington, D.C.) lives and works in New York. He makes vivid brightly hued paintings that expand our understanding of traditional genre painting and portraiture. Initially working in more traditional realist modes, in 2015 the artist began to create paintings with highly vivid color as a response to his frustration at not being able to achieve the depth of tonality he saw in the skin tones of his family and friends. Once he began to incorporate oranges and pinks into the background scene, he was able to achieve a depth and energy in his work that solidified his methods and shifted the way every painting has looked since.
Niles received a B.F.A. from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA in 2013 and an M.F.A. from New York Academy of Art, New York, NY in 2015. Solo exhibitions of his work have recently been organized at Guild Hall, East Hampton, NY (2026); Lehmann Maupin, New York, NY (2023, 2024, 2025); Lehmann Maupin, London, United Kingdom (2022); UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles, CA (2020); Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York, NY (2019); Long Gallery, New York, NY (2017); and Guild Hall, East Hampton, NY (2016). His work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including A Nation of Artists, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA (2026); The Outwin 2025: American Portraiture Today, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D. C. (2026); Black Melancholia, Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2022); A Place for Me: Figurative Painting Now, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2022); Fire Figure Fantasy: Selections from ICA Miami’s Collection, Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; From The Limitations Of Now, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK (2021); Young, Gifted and Black: The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection of Contemporary Art, Lehman College Art Gallery, Bronx, NY (2020), Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois, Chicago, IL (2021), Lehigh University Art Galleries, Bethlehem, PA (2022), and Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, Davis, CA (2022); Afrocosmologies: American Reflections, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT (2019); Punch, Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, CA (2019); On Refusal: Representation & Resistance in Contemporary American Art, The MAC Belfast, Northern Ireland (2019); Problem Solving: Highlights from the Experimental Printmaking Institute, Mechanical Hall Gallery, University of Delaware, Newark, DE (2018); Portraits of Who We Are, David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD (2018); and Mutual Interest No. 3, Shanghai University, Shanghai, China (2014).
His work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Aishti Foundation, Jal El Dib, Lebanon; Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art, Asbury, NJ; Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL; Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ; Pond Society, Shanghai, China; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China; and Zabludowicz Collection, London, United Kingdom.