Cristin Tierney Gallery is pleased to participate in the 2025 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach. Visit us in Booth E27 of the Galleries sector to see works by Julian V.L. Gaines, Malia Jensen, Dread Scott, Roger Shimomura, Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos), Jorge Tacla, and a live performance by Tim Youd. This is the gallery's first time participating in the Galleries sector of the fair, which opens with preview days on December 3rd and 4th, and continues through Sunday, December 7th.
As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, the gallery’s presentation explores what it means to be an American within our current political climate. The booth turns its gaze inward—toward America itself, its ideals, contradictions, and interpretations of freedom. In a moment of political division and renewed retrospection, we hark back to the role art can, and should, play in encouraging civic discourse.
Dread Scott’s Imagine A World Without America (2025) anchors this inquiry. A re-envisioning of his iconic screenprint once featured on the cover of Artforum, the work decouples the United States from its familiar dominant position on the world map, proposing a geography unbound by Western hierarchies. Jorge Tacla’s BREAKING NEWS 5 (2025), depicting the Pentagon rendered in oil and marble powder, continues this examination of institutional power. Its blurred architecture and atmospheric surface dissolve the monumentality of political structures into something fragile and uncertain, echoing the instability of authority in the present era. Roger Shimomura’s SAILOR MOON (2004) adds a pop-inflected counterpoint, confronting racial stereotype through wit and artifice. Blending comic aesthetics with self-portraiture, the artist reveals how identity in America is manufactured and misunderstood through the lens of mass culture.
The nation’s entanglement of nationalism, violence, and personal memory finds physical expression in Julian V.L. Gaines’ Emmett’s Last Ride (2022), composed of a pickup truck tailgate mounted with two American flags. Both elegy and indictment, the sculpture memorialized the murder of Emmett Till while exposing the visual language of patriotic mythmaking. A related concern with inherited trauma animates Sara Siestreem’s (Hanis Coos) painting. Composed of forty interlocking panels, the work merges the artist’s geometric abstraction marks with ancestral weaving patterns to create a visual language that interlaces Indigenous histories and ecological realities.
Malia Jensen’s bronze Sock Fight (2011) introduces an allegorical perspective. The sculpture—two coiled snakes wrestling over a limp sock—is both elegant and absurd, a metaphor for conflict without resolution. In its quiet irony, Sock Fight mirrors the cyclical arguments of a polarized culture where opposition too often becomes an end in itself.
Throughout the fair, Tim Youd will perform a retyping of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 as part of his ongoing 100 Novels Project. Using an IBM Selectric—the same model typewriter employed by Hunter S. Thompson—Youd will retype the entire book at the Miami Beach Convention Center, site of both the 1972 Democratic and Republican National Conventions. Thompson’s acerbic chronicle of political theater, often cited as a precursor to contemporary polarization, finds renewed resonance in Youd’s durational act—an astute reflection of the struggles that continue within our bipartisan system. Each keystroke overlays the last, compressing language into a dense, ink-saturated diptych that transforms reportage into abstraction and critique into endurance.
Taken together, the artists in this presentation approach America as both subject and metaphor—a shifting terrain where ideology, memory, and myth converge. Their works invite sustained reflection on what endures, and what must be reimagined, as the country nears its next defining milestone.
Julian V.L. Gaines (b. 1991, Chicago, IL) is a conceptual, multidisciplinary, installation artist. Drawing from multiple references, ranging from life in Oregon to music and books, Gaines’ artistic practice reinterprets history in oil and house paint, embodying the social mores and principles he preaches daily. His work has evolved to a larger scale, incorporating greater depth and social commentary, aiming to be both critical and constructive. This is best exemplified through projects released under Gaines’ independent creative company, “Ju Working on Projects™️.” His “For Creatives, By Creatives” initiative and “Game Worn” campaign produced four signature shoes with Nike Sportswear, whose 2018 release in Chicago and subsequent proceeds funded 500 scholarships for creatives in his childhood Chicago community. Gaines' work has been exhibited in Portland, New York, Miami, and Chicago, among other cities. His work is in numerous private and corporate collections, including the Portland Art Museum, the Schultz Family Foundation, Nike World Headquarters, and Soho House. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, HYPEBEAST, and The New Yorker, leading to notable brand partnerships with Nike, NFL, Jordan, Maker’s Mark, McDonald’s, Jet Life Recordings, Kiwi, Levi Strauss & Co., and more. His studio is located outside of Portland, OR.
Malia Jensen (b. 1966, Honolulu, HI) is known for her work in sculpture and video. The artist draws inspiration from the natural world and the complex relationships we negotiate within it. Her technically accomplished work marries the tactile authority of the handmade with complex psychological narratives and a genuine quest for harmony and understanding. She has exhibited at The Schneider Museum of Art, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Tacoma Art Museum, Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, Holter Museum of Art, Portland Art Museum, and Mesa Arts Center. Her work can be found in numerous public and private collections nationwide and throughout the Northwest, including the Portland Art Museum, Schneider Museum of Art, 21C Museum & Hotels, JPMorgan Chase Art Collection, and the Jordan D. Schnitzer Family Foundation. She has been an Artist in Residence at the Headland Center for the Arts, the Ucross Foundation, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, the Yucca Valley Materials Lab, and the Portland Garment Factory. Jensen has been a visiting artist at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Whitman College, and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and has mentored students at the Oregon College of Arts and Crafts and the Pacific Northwest College of Art. Jensen’s studio is located in Portland, OR.
Dread Scott (b. 1965, Chicago, IL) is an interdisciplinary artist who, for three decades, has made work that encourages viewers to re-examine cohering ideals of American society. In 1989, the US Senate outlawed his artwork, and President Bush declared it "disgraceful" because of its transgressive use of the American flag. Scott became part of a landmark Supreme Court case when he and others burned flags on the steps of the Capitol. He has presented a TED talk on this subject. In 2024, Scott presented the conceptual artwork the All African People’s Consulate as a Collateral Event of the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. This functioned as a consulate for an imaginary Pan-African, Afrofuturist union of countries, promoting cultural and diplomatic relations. Scott’s work has been exhibited at MoMA PS1, The Walker Art Center, Brooklyn Museum, CAM St. Louis, Whitney Museum of American Art, African American Museum, Bruce Museum, CAM Houston, Worcester Art Museum, Pratt Munson, Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Copenhagen Contemporary, and Kunsthal KAdE, among others. It is included in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery, Whitney Museum of American Art, Hirshhorn Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Ackland Art Museum, Pratt Munson, Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Akron Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and Worcester Art Museum. He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the prestigious Abigail Cohen Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome, the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, Frieze Impact Prize, Purchase Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Open Society Foundations Soros Equality Fellowship, United States Artists Fellowship, and Creative Capital Foundation Grant. His studio is in Brooklyn, NY.
Roger Shimomura’s (b. 1939, Seattle, WA) paintings, prints, and theater pieces address sociopolitical Japanese American issues of ethnicity. He spent more than two years of his early childhood in internment camps for Japanese Americans during WWII. In 1962, Shimomura was a distinguished military graduate from the University of Washington in Seattle and then served as a field artillery officer with the First Cavalry Division in Korea. He received his M.F.A. from Syracuse University in New York in 1969 and began teaching at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, KS, that same year. He has had over 150 solo exhibitions of his paintings and prints. He has presented his experimental theater pieces at venues such as the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, and Franklin Furnace in New York. Shimomura is the recipient of more than 30 grants, of which four are National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in Painting and Performance Art. In 1990, he held the appointment of Dayton Hudson Distinguished Visiting Professor at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. Shimomura has been a visiting artist and lectured on his work at more than 200 universities, art schools, and museums across the country. In 2004, he retired from teaching and established the Shimomura Faculty Research Support Fund, an endowment designed to support faculty research in the Department of Art. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of the Arts degree from the University of Kansas in 2021. His work is in the permanent collections of over 125 museums nationwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; and the National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC. The artist lives and works in Lawrence, KS.
Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos, b. 1976, Springfield, OR) is a multidisciplinary artist from the Umpqua River Valley on the South Coast of Oregon, working in painting, photography, printmaking, weaving, and large-scale installation. Coming from a family of professional artists and educators, Siestreem began her training at home. She graduated Phi Kappa Phi with a BS from Portland State University in 2005 and earned an MFA with distinction from Pratt Art Institute in 2007. Siestreem created a self-sustaining weaving program for the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw people. She was awarded the University of Oregon’s 2022-23 CFAR Fellowship and the 2022 Forge Project Fellowship, which recognized her as one of six Indigenous individuals representing a broad diversity of cultural practices, participatory research, organizing models, and geographic contexts that honor Indigenous pasts and build Native futures. Her work, which has been exhibited internationally, is in numerous collections, including those of the Gochman Family Foundation, Forge Project, Missoula Art Museum, Museum of Fine Arts, and the Portland Art Museum. Siestreem’s work was recently included in the landmark 2023 book An Indigenous Present, conceived and edited by Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee). In 2026, she will have solo exhibitions at the Parrish Art Museum and the Missoula Art Museum. The artist lives and works in Portland, OR.
Jorge Tacla (b. 1958, Santiago, Chile) studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes, Universidad de Chile in Santiago and moved to New York in 1981. Since then, Tacla’s paintings have been exhibited internationally in museums, biennials, and galleries. Notable exhibitions include: Jorge Tacla: Historia Natural de la Destrucción, Il Posto; El Cuarto Mundo, 14 Bienal de Artes Mediales de Chile, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago; The Visible Turn: Contemporary Artists Confront Political Invisibility, USF Contemporary Art Museum; Jorge Tacla: Todo lo sólido se desvanece, CorpArtes; Upheaval, Tufts University Art Gallery; Hidden Identities: Paintings and Drawings by Jorge Tacla, Art Museum of the Americas; Jorge Tacla: Identidades Ocultas, Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos; The Emergency Pavilion, 55 Biennale di Venezia; Jorge Tacla: Drawings, Milwaukee Art Museum, Jorge Tacla: Epicentro, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago; Jorge Tacla: Epicentro, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires; Jorge Tacla: Art at the Edge, High Museum of Art; The New Portrait, MoMA PS1. He has also completed several permanent installations, including a mixed-media mural at the Museo de la Memoria y Los Derechos Humanos in Santiago, Chile, and murals for the Bronx Housing Court, a division of the New York City Civil Court. Tacla’s work is held in, among others, the collections of Tufts University, Wake Forest University, the High Museum of Art, the Museo de Arte Moderno, the Blanton Museum of Art, the California Center for the Arts, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. The Smithsonian's Archives of American Art acquired the papers of Jorge Tacla, including his drawings, correspondence, photographs, notebooks, and clippings. His holdings span nearly forty years and provide a look into the fluctuating histories of the New York and Santiago art worlds. Tacla lives and works in New York City and Santiago, Chile.
Tim Youd (b. 1967, Worcester, MA) is a performance and visual artist working in painting, sculpture, and video. To date, he has retyped 85 novels at various locations in the United States and Europe. Residencies at historic writers' homes have included William Faulkner's Rowan Oak with the University of Mississippi Art Museum (Oxford, MS), Flannery O'Connor's Andalusia with SCAD (Milledgeville and Savannah, GA), Carson McCullers' Childhood Home (Columbus, GA), and Virginia Woolf's Monk's House (Rodmell, Sussex). His work has been the subject of numerous museum exhibitions, including Atlanta Contemporary, CAMSTL, The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, Hanes Art Gallery at Wake Forest University, Emory University, The New Orleans Museum of Art, Monterey Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and the Lancaster Museum of Art and History. He has presented and performed his 100 Novels Project at the Ackland Art Museum, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Art Omi, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), and LAXART, and retyped Joe Orton's Collected Plays at The Queen's Theatre with MOCA London. Youd’s performances have been reviewed by The New York Times, Artforum, Artnet News, Hyperallergic, The Village Voice, The Art Newspaper, Interview, and a variety of other national and international publications. He lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
Founded in 2010, Cristin Tierney Gallery is a contemporary art gallery with a deep commitment to the presentation, development, and support of a roster of both established and emerging artists. Its program emphasizes artists engaged with critical theory and art history, with an emphasis on conceptual, video, and performance art. Education and audience engagement is central to our mission. Cristin Tierney Gallery is a member of the ADAA (Art Dealers Association of America).