Name: New American Gothic artist panel
Start: 2026-10-24T14:00:00-05:00
End: 2026-10-24T15:00:00-05:00
Location: Bardin Gallery

Few paintings have been borrowed as often as Grant Wood’s American Gothic. The farmer with his pitchfork, the woman beside him, the pointed window of the farmhouse behind them: the image has been parodied so many times that it has almost stopped being looked at. New American Gothic, the group exhibition at Bardin Gallery in Dallas, takes Wood’s canvas as its point of departure and asks a harder question than the parodies do. What if the Gothic is not a costume but a condition, the moment when something ordinary starts to feel slightly wrong?

Denise Brown answers with material before she answers with ideas. Her sculpture The Horse and the Stag stands more than six feet tall, built from carved wood and carved, painted tarpaper, the humble black sheet used to waterproof roofs. It reads at first like a narrow door or a shuttered cabinet: slatted planks, a coiled rope hanging down its center, small painted panels of flowers and riders, and a stag’s antlers crowning the top. Tarpaper belongs to the barn and the shed, to the working architecture behind Wood’s farmhouse, and Brown carves it as if it were precious.

Denise Brown beside her carved wood and painted tarpaper sculpture The Horse and the Stag — Image: Bardin Gallery

Brown is one of three artists from the exhibition who will sit down together at the gallery for a public conversation about how they work. With Heather Gorham and Carolyn Zacharias McAdams, she will discuss the ideas and influences behind her pieces and how each practice connects to the show’s territory of the familiar, the mysterious and the unexpected. According to the gallery, Brown builds layered narratives out of history, symbolism and human behavior, moving between painting, printmaking and carved surfaces.

Gorham works in a lighter register that does not stay light for long. Her bronze Dreaming in a Bird’s World, from 2011, sets a sleeping infant’s head on the green-patinated body of a bird, perched on a slender cone above a nest of eggs. It is funny, and then it is not. The gallery describes her imagery as a blend of humor, imagination and personal experience, a world where the familiar meets the unexpected.

Heather Gorham beside her bronze Dreaming in a Birds World, a sleeping infant head on a bird body above a nest — Image: Bardin Gallery

McAdams starts from the opposite end of the process. Her paintings, the gallery says, begin with intuition and unfold without preliminary sketches or plans, drawing on dreams, emotions and personal experience. A detail from her small oil on panel Watershed Moments shows what that produces: a deep blue night under a scarred moon, clouds that drip, a bare tree on a green hill, a small fire burning on a floating island and a black cat watching from the grass.

The three share the walls with Marcos Alvarado, Ian Grieve, Justin Penov and Tom Pribyl, in a show that mixes the gallery’s own artists with invited independents. It is also one of the first programs under the Bardin name for the Design District space long known as Craighead Green.

The artist panel takes place on Saturday, October 24, from 2 to 3 p.m. at Bardin Gallery, 167 Parkhouse Street, Dallas. New American Gothic remains on view through November 14, and admission is free.

Tags: art exhibitions, Bardin Gallery, Carolyn Zacharias McAdams, Denise Brown, Grant Wood, Heather Gorham