Cristin Tierney Gallery is pleased to participate in the 2026 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach. Visit us in Booth B4 to see works by Diane Burko, Ellen Harvey, Malia Jensen, Joan Linder, Maureen O’Leary, David Opdyke, Judy Pfaff, Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos), and John Wood and Paul Harrison. The fair opens with preview days on December 2nd and 3rd and continues through Sunday, December 6th.
Against the backdrop of an increasingly uncertain future for American climate policy, the gallery’s presentation considers the relationship between human activity and the natural world. Environmental protections are being rolled back even as the effects of climate change become more visible. Within this tension, the artists address threatened landscapes, questions of consumption, and our dependence on finite natural resources.
The works do not present environmental crisis as a single condition. Some begin with close observation; others turn to allegory or speculation to consider the consequences of ecological change. Taken as a whole, the presentation asks what our surroundings can tell us about the present, while leaving open a more difficult question: what can still be preserved?
Diane Burko’s (b. 1945, New York, NY) work in painting, photography, and time-based media considers the marks that human conversations make on the landscape. A Professor Emerita of the Community College of Philadelphia with additional teaching experience at Princeton University, Burko has received multiple grants from the NEA, the Pennsylvania Arts Council, the Leeway Foundation, and the Independence Foundation. She has received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus for Art.
After focusing for several decades on monumental geological formations and waterways through landscape painting, Burko has shifted in the past 20 years to analyze the impact of industrial and colonial activity on those same landscapes. The artist’s practice seeks to visually emulsify interconnected subjects–extraction, deforestation, extinction, environmental justice, Indigenous genocide, ecological degradation, and climate collapse—so viewers might feel their connection viscerally through the beauty of her work. While her work deals with impending climate catastrophe, rather than lingering in dystopia, it celebrates the landscape's sublimity by honoring the intricate geological and political webs that shape the identity of a place.
Burko has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally, including shows at London’s Royal Academy of Art, Minneapolis Art Institute, National Academy of Sciences, Phillips Collection, RISD Museum, Tang Museum, and Wesleyan University Center for the Arts. She has been awarded residencies in Giverny, Bellagio, the Arctic Circle, and the Amazon Rainforest. In 2021, her solo exhibition Seeing Climate Change at the American University Museum was cited in the New York Times as one of the best shows of 2021. Her work is held in 40 public collections nationwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Denver Art Museum, Everson Museum of Art, Hood Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Phillips Collection, and The Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others. Burko’s studio is located in Philadelphia, PA.
Ellen Harvey (b. 1967, Farnborough, UK ) is a British-born, Brooklyn-based conceptual artist whose work spans painting, installation, public art, and participatory projects. Her practice explores the social and ecological implications of the picturesque, the revolutionary potential of nostalgia, the relationship between art and tourism, and the role of art and the artist in society. Harvey frequently centers the viewer through participatory works such as The Disappointed Tourist (2019–ongoing), for which she paints lost or vanished sites suggested by members of the public, and The Utopia Machine, which transforms submitted visions of utopia into fictional patent drawings.
Harvey has exhibited extensively in the United States and internationally. Her work was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Recent presentations of The Disappointed Tourist have included the Butler Gallery, Ireland; Łaźnia Centre for Contemporary Art, Poland; Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Austria; Turner Contemporary, UK; Rowan University Art Museum; Chicago Architecture Center; and MoCA\CT. A survey of her work, PICTURE(SQUE): Ellen Harvey, Works 1999–2026, is on view at the USF Contemporary Art Museum. Other solo museum exhibitions have been held at the Barnes Foundation, Groening Museum, Corcoran Gallery of Art, The Bass, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and Whitney Museum at Altria, among others. Her work has also appeared in exhibitions at the Vienna Secession, Gwangju Biennial, Brooklyn Museum, MoMA PS1, Seattle Art Museum, Sculpture Center, Queens Museum, and Princeton University Art Museum.
Harvey has completed major public artworks for the Miami Beach Convention Center, Metro-North’s Yankee Stadium station, New York’s Queens Plaza subway station, Boston’s South Station, San Francisco International Airport, and Philadelphia International Airport, among other sites. She is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program, Yale Law School, and Harvard College, and is the recipient of numerous honors, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, and NYSCA grant. Her work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Bass, S.M.A.K., Berkeley Art Museum, Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Princeton University Art Museum, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Gwangju Art Museum, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, and the National Gallery of Art, among others.
Malia Jensen (b. 1966, Honolulu, HI) is a Portland-based artist known primarily for her work in sculpture and video. Jensen draws inspiration from the natural world and the complex relationships we negotiate within it. Her technically accomplished work marries the tactile authority of the hand-made 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 many public and private collections nationally and throughout the Northwest, including the Portland Art Museum, Schneider Museum of Art, 21C Museum & Hotels, JPMorgan Chase Art Collection, and Jordan D. Schnitzer Family Foundation. She has been Artist in Residence at the Headland Center for the Arts, Ucross Foundation, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, 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 Massachusetts College of Art and Design and has mentored students at Oregon College of Arts and Crafts and Pacific Northwest College of Art.
Joan Linder (b. 1970, Ossining, NY) is known for her labor-intensive drawings that contain thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of tiny lines. She has exhibited at Albright College, Faulconer Gallery at Grinnell College, Queens Museum of Art at Bulova Corporate Center, Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Omi International Art Center, Institute of the Humanities at University of Michigan, Sun Valley Art Center, University of the Arts, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, Handwerker Gallery at Ithaca College and more.
Linder’s work is held in the collections of Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Davis Museum, Bank of America, Fidelity Investments, Progressive Corporation, The New York Department of Education, Ewing Gallery of Art at University of Tennessee, The West Collection, Orange County Museum of Art, The Gwangju Art Museum, and the Zabludowicz Collection. She studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and holds an MFA from Columbia University and a BFA from Tufts University. Among her many awards and fellowships are residencies at MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Smack Mellon, Ucross Foundation, Art Omi, and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, plus a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant. The artist maintains a studio in Buffalo, NY.
Maureen O'Leary's (b. 1965, Washington, DC) paintings hover between figuration and abstraction. Her mundane scenes become substrates for experimentation with the application of paint and the evolving notion of what is real. O'Leary's work has been exhibited at the Custom House in Westport, Ireland, Fondation des États-Unis, Ely Center of Contemporary Art, Art Lab Tokyo, Midwest Center for Photography, Artspace, Power Plant Gallery at Duke University, Valdosta State University Fine Arts Gallery, Staten Island Museum, Meadows Gallery - University of Texas at Tyler, and more. She is the recipient of the Brooklyn Arts Council - Brooklyn Arts Fund Grant and the Harriet Hale Woolley Fellowship from the Fondation des États-Unis.
O'Leary has published six books: The Linden Trees (2026), ROMA (2024), By The Same Sea, Homes of The Irish Diaspora (2023), Record (2021), Belle Mort (2013, Paper Chase Press) and Look/Listen (2010, Look/Listen Press). Her work has been written about in Galerie Magazine, Hyperallergic, FAD Magazine, Whitehot Magazine, and Hypebeast, among others. O’Leary’s work is held in the collections of the Fondation des États-Unis, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, Fidelity Investments Corporate Art Collection, and JP Morgan Chase Art Collection. She has studios in Long Island, NY, and Puerto Rico.
David Opdyke (b. 1969, Schenectady, NY) makes art that explores globalization, consumerism, and civilization’s abusive relationship with the environment. His hand-modified landscape postcards offer a bracing commentary on the impact of the climate crisis on the American landscape. The works explore the themes of climate displacement and migration and bring humanity to the center. In Opdyke’s hands, these postcards are transformed from snapshots of early twentieth-century leisure into emissaries from different futures—visions of spectacular manifestations of the climate crisis.
His work is held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, and The Washington Convention Center in DC. This year, WNET Public Media has commissioned him to produce a 30-minute animated film for broadcast in 2025. In 2022, he collaborated with the Climate Museum in its first pop-up exhibition in Soho. Pairing his work Someday, All This with a community engagement space, the pop-up hosted extensive public programming exploring the intersection of climate change with the arts, justice, science, human migration, philosophy, activism, comedy, and more. In 2020, Phaidon published a book based on his large-scale postcard project, This Land, including essays by Lawrence Weschler and Maya Wiley. He lives and works in Ridgewood, Queens.
Judy Pfaff (b. 1946, London, UK) received a BFA from Washington University Saint Louis (1971), and an MFA from Yale University (1973) where she studied with Al Held. Referenced by critics as a pioneer of installation art, this oft-cited label for the sprawling career of Pfaff provides an introductory sense of her legacy but proves limiting to the ever-changing work she has been making for decades and still today. Her work spans across disciplines from painting to printmaking to sculpture to installation, but is perhaps best described as painting in space. These spatial paintings inhabit and transform their environments, becoming ad hoc homes for viewers and the artist.
Drawing upon a wealth of spiritual, botanical, and art historical imagery, Pfaff’s installations simultaneously and without contradiction reference the austerity of a cathedral and the temporality of a mandala. Like a mandala, the life of Pfaff’s work is brief and burning, deconstructed and sections discarded after a show comes down. Each installation considers the specific spatial geometries of the room, the ceiling, the street out the window, so that no two shows are ever alike. This tenacious generosity Pfaff offers her viewers, in which she and her crew labor for months or years for shows that last days or weeks, sets Pfaff apart from colleagues in other disciplines who can rely on sales of discrete objects. Refusing to give narrative meaning to her work, this urgent and ferocious need to labor for the visual and tactile is remarkable in an era where language dominates artistic activity.
Pfaff has exhibited work in the Whitney Biennials of 1975, 1981, and 1987, and represented the United States in the 1998 São Paulo Bienal. Her pieces reside in the permanent collections of MOMA, the Whitney Museum of Art, the Tate Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Detroit Institute of Arts, among others. She is the recipient of many awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center (2014), the MacArthur Foundation Award (2004), and the Guggenheim Fellowship (1983). Pfaff lives and works in Tivoli, New York.
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. She was recently selected as a National Academician by the National Academy of Design in 2025. She has also been awarded the 2024 Hallie Ford Fellowship, 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 many collections, including the Gochman Family Foundation (Miami, FL), Brooklyn Museum (NY), Forge Project (Mahicannituck [Hudson River] Valley, NY), Missoula Art Museum (MT), Museum of Fine Art (Boston, MA), Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (CA), and the Portland Art Museum (OR).
Siestreem's work was included in the landmark 2023 book An Indigenous Present, as well as the 2025 book, the space in which to place me, both conceived and edited by Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee). Coming from a family of professional artists and educators, she began her training at home. Her lifelong mentor is Lillian Pitt (Wasco, Warm Springs, Yakama), and my weaving teachers are Greg Archuleta (Grand Ronde) and Greg A. Robinson (Chinook Nation). Siestreem graduated Phi Kappa Phi with a BS from Portland State University in 2005. She earned an MFA with distinction from Pratt Art Institute in 2007. She created a self-sustaining weaving program for her tribe, the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw people. She lives and works in Portland, Oregon.
John Wood (b. 1969, Hong Kong) and Paul Harrison (b. 1966, Wolverhampton, UK) make single-channel videos, multi-screen video installations, paintings, prints, drawings, and sculptures that elegantly fuse advanced aesthetic research with existential comedy. They met in 1989 at the Bath College of Higher Education and have worked together since 1993. Their work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, the Kunstmuseum Thun, Mori Art Museum, the Ludwig Museum, the Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum, the Kunstmuseum Luzern, the Marc Fassiaty Video Foundation, the Harris Museum and Art Gallery, the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, the Ulster Museum, and the Carnegie Museum, among others. Numerous institutions hold their work in their collections, including The Tate, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Albertina Museum in Vienna, the UK Arts Council Collection, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the UK Government Art Collection, the Kadist Foundation in Paris, the Mudam Museum of Modern Art, the Tel Aviv Museum, the Ludwig Collection, the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Languedoc-Roussillon, and the Museo de Antioquia, Medellín, among others. The artists’ studio is located in Bristol, UK.