Posted on
2025-11-10
Borrowing its title from Alice Walker’s 1974 essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” recent portraits, landscapes and vignettes muse on the artist’s garden in the Hudson Valley as a reservoir for acts of resilience and vulnerability. Buds are transformed into bounties and personal reflection into a communal experience.
Casteel’s hand clasps a heap of zinnias, dahlias, and amaranth in Offering (2025). In a self-referential portrait, the artist points to an abundant bouquet, hand-grown and in full bloom, revealing the acts of cultivation made in autumn that reverberate into spring. Serving as a sanctuary for Casteel, the garden–a site of growth and decay, of turning dirt into life–embodies a creative endurance in the ebb and flow of seasonal and cultural rhythms. To paraphrase Walker, the garden’s resilience of imaginative spirit endures societal, daily hardship. Growth is willed from nothingness. Inherited fertile ground cycles through generations, and gestures of strength, beauty and defiance that came before echo in tomorrow’s blooms.
Opposite – Jordan, 2025
Exhibition runs through to January 10th, 2026
Casey Kaplan
121 West 27th Street
10001
New York
caseykaplangallery.com
