Cristin Tierney Gallery is pleased to participate in the Dallas Art Fair. Visit us in booth D2 to see works by Diane Burko, Malia Jensen, Debbi Kenote, Maureen O'Leary, and Judy Pfaff. This is the gallery’s third participation at the fair, which opens with a preview day on Thursday, April 16th, and continues through Sunday, April 19th.
This presentation brings together a multigenerational group of women artists whose practices are grounded in material exploration and a sustained engagement with process. Working across painting and sculpture, each artist approaches her medium as both structure and surface—foregrounding decisions around color, composition, and form while allowing meaning to emerge through making. Rather than adhering to a single theme, the works collectively emphasize how artists build visual languages over time, shaped by observation, intuition, and lived experience.
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.
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.
Debbi Kenote (b. 1991, Anacortes, WA) is an abstract painter who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her upbringing on the West Coast of the United States exposed her to craft traditions such as woodworking and quilting, which remain influential to her process today. Having studied both painting and sculpture, she blends both traditions into her approach, threading the needle between shaped painting and painted sculpture. Kenote handcrafts stretchers, transforming the conventional rectangular canvas into complex forms. Her shaped canvases are similarly inspired by nostalgia, childhood memories, and her poetry practice.
Kenote holds an MFA in Sculpture from Brooklyn College and a BFA in Painting from Western Washington University. Her recent solo exhibitions include Cristin Tierney Gallery in New York, Baker-Hall in Miami, Duran Contemporain in Montreal, and My Pet Ram in New York. Selected group exhibitions include Kate Werble in New York, Fir Gallery in Beijing, Cob Gallery in London, Hawkins Headquarters in Atlanta, and SOIL Gallery in Seattle. She has been an artist-in-residence at Stove Works, the Ucross Foundation, PLOP, the Saltonstall Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, DNA, Nes, CAI Projects, and the Mineral School. Her work is part of the permanent OZ Art Collection and has been featured in The Art Newspaper, Art Fuse, Maake Magazine, Suboart, Art of Choice, Two Coats of Paint, and Hyperallergic. In 2026, she will be an artist-in- residence at the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency.
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 four books: 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 is held in the collections of the Fondation des États-Unis and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. She has studios in Long Island, NY and Puerto Rico.
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 Pfaff's sprawling career provides an introductory sense of her legacy but proves limiting to the ever-changing work she has been making for decades and continues to make 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 that 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.