Kindred Spirits: Debra Cartwright and Kellie Romany

McBride / Dillman is pleased to present Kindred Spirits, a two-person exhibition of new work by Debra Cartwright and Kellie Romany, on view from September 11 through November 1, 2026. Landscape is never simply landscape, and color is never merely color. In the work of Debra Cartwright and Kellie Romany, abstraction becomes a means of excavating the histories embedded within both. At a moment when the histories of race, gender, and the nation itself are increasingly contested, Kindred Spirits brings together two artists who insist that painting remains a powerful site for examining what has been erased, obscured, or deliberately forgotten. Though working through distinct visual languages, Cartwright and Romany each explore how histories of race, embodiment, and place can be carried through abstraction, transforming landscape, color, and material into sites of memory, resistance, and repair.

For Debra Cartwright, the American landscape is neither neutral nor empty. Her new paintings begin with compositions borrowed from the nineteenth-century landscapes of Robert S. Duncanson, the first internationally celebrated Black American landscape painter, whose seemingly idyllic scenes have long been understood to contain subtle meditations on freedom, slavery, and the contradictions of the American project. Cartwright reimagines these landscapes through the luminous chromatic language of Richard Mayhew, whose work reclaimed the genre from its association with Manifest Destiny and colonial expansion, asserting the land as a repository of Black and Indigenous histories rather than white possession. Into these spaces, Cartwright introduces fragmented and abstracted Black female bodies sourced from nineteenth-century gynecological and medical illustrations, exposing the long history of Black women's bodies as sites of scientific scrutiny, reproductive exploitation, and state-sanctioned control. The resulting paintings refuse the historical separation of landscape and body, revealing both as terrains shaped by conquest, extraction, memory, and survival.

Kellie Romany approaches many of these questions through the physical behavior of paint itself. Eschewing the brush, she manipulates pigment by tilting and moving her surfaces, allowing gravity, viscosity, and time to determine the work's evolving forms. Bleeds, clots, rings, fissures, and stains produce cell-like structures that evoke both biological processes and geological formations. Romany uses a palette of skin tones to construct abstractions that reflect bodies traversing through systems and landscapes. Each painting records a history of accumulation, movement, and interruption, suggesting that belonging is neither singular nor static but continuously formed through migration, exchange, and transformation. In a cultural moment increasingly defined by rigid boundaries and essentialist thinking, her work in this exhibition serves as a timely reminder of the importance of fluidity, interdependence, and relation.

Together, Cartwright and Romany present abstraction not as an escape but as a language capable of holding historical complexity. Rather than illustrating Black experience, both artists embed it within systems of color, material, and place, asking viewers to reconsider the landscapes we inherit, the bodies we occupy, and the histories that continue to shape both. The exhibition proposes that memory is itself a political terrain—and that painting remains one of its most compelling forms of resistance.

Debra Cartwright holds an MFA from Rutgers University, NJ and a BA in Art History from the University of Virginia, VA. Her works have been exhibited at Welancora, New York, BODE Projects, Berlin, Sotheby’s New York, Fridman Gallery, NY, Wesbeth Gallery, NY, Allouche Gallery, NY, CFHILL, Stockholm and the New York Academy of Art.

Kellie Romany received a Masters of Fine Arts in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011 and a Bachelors of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2008. Romany has exhibited both nationally and internationally, including museum shows at the High Museum of Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and DePaul Art Museum.