The New Social Environment #1301
The View from Inside
Henni Alftan, Tom Burckhardt, Lois Dodd, Josephine Halvorson, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Catherine Murphy, and Eleanor Heartney
Tuesday, January 6, 2026, 1 pm EST
Artists Henni Alftan, Tom Burckhardt, Lois Dodd, Josephine Halvorson, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, and Catherine Murphy join Brooklyn Rail Editor-at-Large Eleanor Heartney for a virtual conversation.
Henni Alftan is a Paris-based painter who creates pictures through a complex process of observation and deduction. Working in figuration while rejecting narrative, Alftan employs tight framing to examine the relationship between painting and image-making, foregrounding questions of perception, translation, and pictorial construction. Alftan’s exhibition ABC will be on view at Karma, Los Angeles, from January 17 to February 14, 2026. Her work is on view in Copistes at Centre Pompidou-Metz (through February 2, 2026) and in the solo exhibition Immobile at the Artothèque de Caen (through February 14, 2026).
Tom Burckhardt was born in New York City in 1964 and has spent his entire life living there. He graduated with a BFA in painting from SUNY Purchase in 1986 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture that same year. He has been exhibiting since 1992 at various NYC galleries such as High Noon Gallery, George Adams Gallery, Tibor De Nagy Gallery, Pierogi and Caren Golden Fine Art, and the Gregory Lind Gallery, San Francisco CA. His most recent solo show of paintings was at High Noon Gallery NYC Sept 5- Oct 25, 2025. He participated in the 2016 Kochi Muziris Bienalle in Kerala, India and that installation piece, Studio Flood was shown at the Pierogi Gallery, NYC in September 2017 and CMCA in Maine during Summer 2018. He currently teaches part time at SUNY Purchase.
For over fifty years, Lois Dodd has painted her immediate everyday surroundings at the places she has chosen to live and work—the Lower East Side, rural Mid-Coast Maine and the Delaware Water Gap. After studying at the Cooper Union in the late 1940s, Dodd was one of the five founding members of the legendary Tanager Gallery, among the first artist-run cooperative galleries in New York. Since 1954, her work has been the subject of over sixty one-person exhibitions. Dodd’s first European retrospective is on view at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag through April 6, 2026.
Josephine Halvorson makes art that foregrounds firsthand experience and takes the form of painting, sculpture, and printmaking. Born in Brewster, Massachusetts, she studied at The Cooper Union (BFA 2003), Yale Norfolk (2002), and Columbia University (MFA 2007). In 2021, she was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Halvorson is the recipient of major international residencies and fellowships such as the Harriet Hale Woolley at the Fondation des États-Unis in Paris, France (2007–08), and was the first American pensionnaire at the French Academy in Rome at the Villa Medici (2014–15). She is a subject of Art21’s documentary series New York Close Up. She is Professor of Art and Chair of Graduate Studies in Painting at Boston University.
Catherine Murphy lives and works in Poughkeepsie, New York. She studied at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine and earned a BFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1967. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Murphy’s work is in the permanent collections of numerous museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; and Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.
Sylvia Plimack Mangold is an American painter and teacher. She was born in 1938 in New York City and studied at Yale after receiving a certificate from the Cooper Union. She began exhibiting her paintings in the late 1960’s. In the 1980’s the primary focus of her work became landscapes of the Hudson River Valley, where she lives. A 1993 retrospective of her works on paper traveled to six university art museums. Plimack Mangold has been included in many group exhibitions, including WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution and Building and Breaking the Grid: 1962-2002, among others. Sylvia Plimack Mangold received the 2007 CU President’s Citation and was inducted into The Cooper Union Hall of Fame in 2009.
Eleanor Heartney has been writing about art since 1981. She is a longtime contributor to Art in America, Contributing Editor to Artpress, Editor-at-Large for the Brooklyn Rail, and has written extensively on contemporary art issues for Artnews, Artnet, Art and Auction, the Washington Post and the New York Times. Heartney was the 1992 recipient of the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinction in art criticism and was honored in 2008 by the French government as a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Her most recent book is the co-authored Mothers of Invention: the Feminist Roots of Contemporary Art.
