“In the Studio: New York Academy of Art Faculty Exhibition” presents 42 works of art from the Senior Critics, Full-Time Faculty, and Adjunct Faculty at the New York Academy of Art. This exhibition displays the breadth and complexity of the work produced by the creative community of the Academy’s faculty. From the meticulous and melancholy renderings of Michael Grimaldi to the mind-boggling bas reliefs of Jiannan Wu and the poetic abstractions of Sharon Butler, this display puts beyond question the value of studying with the world’s artistic masters.

Butler’s approach is an open embrace of rule breaking and the mismatched. The large four-panel piece, Four Days (2019–21) that takes up most of the first wall on the right when you enter the gallery, manages to appear simultaneously as a multi-panel piece and as four independent works. It’s possible to just appreciate the rich colors and nuanced paint handling, the monumentality of simple forms against atmospheric grounds. But it’s hard not to wonder if Butler isn’t also testing how strong the mental, perceptual glue is that binds paintings whenever two are contiguous. Is the glue strong enough that we assume the four panels were painted at the same time and were intended as one piece, or do we wonder instead if any or all the four could have been swapped out for different works?