NADA New York 2025
Meris Drew
May 7 - 11, 2025
Booth C221
The Starrett-Lehigh Building
601 W 26th Street, 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10001
(Enter on 11th Avenue)
Open to the Public:
Wednesday, May 7, 4–7pm
Thursday, May 8, 11am–7pm
Friday, May 9, 11am–7pm
Saturday, May 10, 11am–7pm
Sunday, May 11, 11am–5pm
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I went to the summit and stood in the high nakedness:
the wind tore about this
way and that in confusion and its speech could not
get through to me nor could I address it:
still I said as if to the alien in myselfwe
I do not speak to the wind now:
for having been brought this far by nature I have been
brought out of nature
and nothing here shows me the image of myself:
for the word tree I have been shown a tree
and for the word rock I have been shown a rock,
for stream, for cloud, for star
this place has provided firm implication and answering
but where here is the image for longing:
so I touched the rocks, their interesting crusts:
I flaked the bark of stunt-fir:
I looked into space and into the sun
and nothing answered my word longing:
goodbye, I said, goodbye nature so grand and
reticent, your tongues are healed up into their own element
and as you have shut up you have shut me out: I am
as foreign here as if I had landed, a visitor:
so I went back down and gathered mud
and with my hands made an image for longing:
I took the image to the summit: first
I set it here, on the rock, but it completed
nothing: then I set it there among the tiny firs
but it would not fit:
so I returned to the city and built a house to set
the image in
and men came into my house and said
that is an image for longing
and nothing will ever be the same again
—A. R. Ammons, I Went to the Summit
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Meris Drew (b. 1995) was born and raised in southeast Florida and holds an MFA in Painting from Indiana University. Her work is an inquiry into how the earth appears, the potential that lies within it, what it means and what we will make of it. The paintings, like the swampy Floridian landscape where she grew up, are places where volatile organic systems intersect, and are full of science, storytelling and magical thinking. Through nested cycles of painting and unpainting, each canvas is a reenactment of the structures of nature flourishing and decaying from micro- to macrocosm.
For NADA NYC 2025, Drew reflects on her deep engagement with nature and beauty, probing an energy in the landscape that binds and complicates ecological, supernatural, and anthropocentric perspectives. Through the works presented the artist seeks an impossible reconciliation between the individuality of human experience and the broader, leveling forces of the universe.
Drew’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Stellarhighway, Brooklyn, NY; Bottom Feeder Books in Pittsburgh, PA, Racecar Factory in Indianapolis, IN and Grunwald Gallery of Art in Bloomington, IN. Group presentations include those with Whisper in the Roots, My Pet Ram, New York, NY, Platform x David Zwirner; John Waldron Arts Center, Bloomington, IN; The Lodge, Los Angeles, CA; Schwitzer Gallery, Indianapolis, IN; Manifest Gallery, Cincinnati, OH; Del Mar College, Corpus Christi, TX; University of Texas, Tyler, TX; University of North Carolina, Asheville, NC; Betty Isermann Gallery, Sarasota, FL; Artspace 111, Fort Worth, TX; and, Project Moné, New York, NY. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, residencies and grants, among them a Dedalus Foundation MFA Fellowship nomination, the Bloomington Emerging Artist Grant, grants from the Rauschenberg Foundation and the Ringholz Foundation, a residency through the Indiana University Center for Rural Engagement, and multiple awards from the National Society of Arts and Letters. Her work was recently published in Warm Milk, Saw Palm, and New American Paintings. Drew has taught painting and drawing at Indiana University and University of North Carolina.
Please contact Stellarhighway for more information.