Artist: Lucy Sallick

Stellarhighway presents Familiar Traces by Lucy Sallick, the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York City in over twenty-five years. Featuring domestically-scaled works that traverse her career, the paintings, prints, and artist books in this exhibition range from gestural landscapes and intimate still lifes to playful compositions that reference the artist’s childhood.

Sallick finds meaning in the complexity of family history and first hand experience. Her idea of self as a web of associations built through time, as descendant and ancestor, is core to her making.

The title of the exhibition is an attempt to enunciate the genealogical underpinnings of Sallick’s studio, both in concept and form. While dealing directly with ideas of ancestry and descent, her work also recaptures materials and finished pieces through various methodologies. In her paintings, Sallick will produce pictures within pictures—recreating extant works within a still life of her studio floor, or combining views of shorelines or hills in uneven grids across giant sheets of paper. Often, genres of still life and landscape interweave with images from home and studio: clay sculptures by the children; groceries on the table; stacks of books; yarn and half-finished needlepoints; paint tubes, brushes, and sketches of landscapes on the studio floor, sometimes arranged, sometimes not. Sallick’s printmaking, which explores the freedom and surprise of the monotype as well as the precise technique of producing editions of prints, treats the same subjects and imagery. Her artist books and sculptures explore the materiality of these connections with an inquisitive authenticity, using scraps from the studio, digital drawings, photocopied photographs, found materials, and cherished objects like her grandfather’s handkerchief.

Ultimately an exploration of the self as an entity constructed from myriad parts across time and space, Sallick’s studio records actions and thoughts as the past moves into the present.

Lucy Sallick (b. 1937; US) studied at the Art Students League and Corcoran School of Art in the 1960s. Recent exhibitions include Stellarhighway, Brooklyn, NY; Fortnight Institute, New York, NY; and, Fairfield University Art Museum, Fairfield, CT. Historical exhibitions include solo shows at Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockport, ME; SOHO2O Gallery, New York, NY; G.W. Einstein Co., Inc., New York, NY; and Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ; and, group shows at American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, New York, NY; The Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Ogunquit, ME; ARTSPACE, New Haven, CT; Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT; Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT; Museu de Arte Contemporanea da Universidade de Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil; and, Bronx Museum of Art, Bronx, NY. She has received awards from Connecticut Commission on the Arts, Silvermine Guild, and the Hazen Foundation, completed a residency at Weir Farm, and has been written about in Art in America and The New York Times. Public collections include Bank of America Corporation, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Bruce Museum, General Mills, Inc., Housatonic Museum of Art, Norwalk Hospital, Prudential Insurance Corporation, Rahr West Museum, University of Michigan Museum of Art, and United States Department of State. Sallick will be included in the upcoming survey exhibition "The Aldrich Decennial: I am what is around me,” opening at The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in June 2026. The artist maintains studios in Connecticut and Maine.