Jenkins Johnson Gallery presents Trade winds, a new group exhibition opening Friday, June 26, 2026. Featuring a multigenerational selection of artists with wildly divergent practices, Trade winds explores how contemporary art discourse is moving away from singular overwhelming trends and is instead fragmenting into a large number of concurrent and codominant threads which have their own space to succeed on their own terms.

Throughout contemporary art history, grand statements like Painting is dead dominated critical discourse: a single major narrative overwhelming the field, with a large number of artists either participating in, orbiting around, or explicitly reacting to that monolithic center. This same structure was pervasive throughout cultural production, whether in the prevailing fads of fashion, or the Top 40 on the radio.

In our digital age with vast accessibility to any option at any time, the post-pandemic “New Normal” has shifted towards a more granular and personalized engagement with art. We can access our interests at a moment’s notice, rather than being subject to the whims of larger industrial choice making.