Rising artist Emily Weiner has opened her first solo exhibition in New York City, marking a significant milestone in her artistic journey that began with harsh criticism during her graduate studies. The show, titled "Now Eve, We're Here, We've Won," is currently on display at Miles McEnery Gallery in Chelsea, showcasing her distinctive hypnotic paintings that blend cosmic imagery with spiritual symbolism.
Weiner's path to artistic recognition wasn't smooth. During her second year pursuing an MFA at New York's School of Visual Arts (SVA), she received devastating feedback from acclaimed photorealistic painter Marilyn Minter, who was her instructor at the time. "You need to learn how to paint," Minter told her, criticism that Weiner recalls as heartbreaking. At that point, she had been working in the alla prima style, completing paintings in single sessions by applying wet paint to wet paint, following the approach of her artistic hero, Belgian painter Luc Tuymans.
Minter's critique pushed Weiner to abandon her previous technique and instead focus on building layers gradually over time, a method that hadn't been emphasized in her earlier training. "When I was in school, it was very out of vogue to make a technical painting," Weiner explained, referring to the early 2000s when interdisciplinary and neo-conceptual practices dominated art education. This technical foundation would prove crucial to her later success.
Today, Weiner's work demonstrates masterful technical control, featuring tightly rendered paintings with nearly invisible brushstrokes that create mesmerizing illusions of depth. Her recent surge in popularity includes solo exhibitions in Mexico City, Berlin, and Nashville over the past year, along with participation in group shows and art fair presentations from Chicago to Seoul. However, her New York debut holds special significance as her hometown, where she was born, attended college, and worked before relocating to Nashville in 2018.
Weiner's educational background reflects her unconventional journey to becoming a professional artist. As a teenager, she harbored ambitions to paint but lacked family support for art school. Instead, she pursued liberal arts at Barnard College, studying art history and environmental science while supplementing her coursework with painting classes that emphasized concepts over technical skills. "When I was in undergrad, I was so full of it," she recalled with amusement. "I really thought I was great, and nobody had ever told me otherwise."
After graduating from Barnard in 2003, reality hit hard with a series of rejections from residencies and graduate programs. Eventually accepted to SVA, she completed her MFA in 2011 and cobbled together teaching positions to support herself while continuing to paint. When she and her musician husband became parents in 2017, the financial pressures of living in New York became unsustainable. On their son's first birthday, they moved to Nashville, where Weiner took a curatorial position at Vanderbilt University.
The move to Nashville proved transformative for Weiner's career, providing both physical space and mental freedom from economic anxiety. "I physically have a lot more space," she said of her adopted home. "But the economic worries are also not taking up so much mental space anymore." Paradoxically, leaving the world's art capital accelerated her artistic development. Around this time, she also shifted from muted tones to the vibrant palette that now defines her work, as if her relaxed circumstances allowed more color to flow onto her canvases.
In Nashville, Weiner developed a productive relationship with local gallery Red Arrow, which invited her to curate a group exhibition in 2022 before formally representing her the following year. Her success stems from paintings that immediately capture attention with smooth, highly saturated gradients and compositional devices like spirals, curtains, and atmospheric perspective that draw viewers deeper into the work.
Weiner's symbolic vocabulary includes recurring motifs of moons, instruments, amphoras, and hands folded in blessing, creating associations with the divine, cyclical, and spiritual realms. Her work is heavily influenced by Swiss psychologist Carl Jung and his theory of the collective unconscious, which suggests humans share a universal symbolic language across time and cultures. According to Jung, the artist's role is to translate these symbols into contemporary visual language, a concept that underpins Weiner's entire artistic approach.
This translation work takes place in her studio within a historic Victorian house built in 1899 in East Nashville, previously owned by the daughter of country music star Barbara Mandrell. Since quitting her day job in 2020, Weiner treats painting like a structured nine-to-five job, though her creative process remains highly intuitive. She works on multiple paintings simultaneously, filling every available wall space, and often doesn't understand the significance of what she's depicted until after completion. She compares this experience to reading tarot cards, where the image presents itself fully formed before she projects meaning onto it.
While mysticism plays a significant role in Weiner's practice, science is equally important. For her current exhibition, she collaborated with her sister's partner, a woodworker, using 3D modeling software to create custom wooden panels. One resulting work, "Interference," mimics wave interference patterns on its surface, while "Guidance" takes the shape of a Fibonacci spiral. These scientifically-informed structures support her ethereal painted motifs of celestial bodies, prayer hands, and vivid sunsets.
Weiner's fascination with physics stems from her teenage obsession with Stephen Hawking, which she describes as her "nerdy dirty secret." For her, physics and spirituality represent different approaches to the same fundamental question about what lies behind our perceived reality. This mystery provides comfort rather than anxiety, reflected in works like "Guidance," where a black keyhole contains a tiny section of galactic imagery lifted from James Webb Telescope findings, suggesting that universal secrets remain locked beyond human reach.
Most paintings in the exhibition are human-scale at approximately five feet tall, matching the vastness of their cosmic themes with substantial physical presence. However, one work stands apart as more personal: "Magicians Assistant," a smaller canvas with a custom ceramic frame depicting a white rabbit in profile. Weiner reveals this rabbit as her avatar, representing her years working in art-adjacent positions while dreaming of becoming a full-time artist. "For all the years that she worked in art-adjacent jobs before becoming a full-time artist, she felt like the white rabbit in a magic show—the supporting actor who does the work, but doesn't get any of the credit," she explained.
The rabbit symbol carries additional meaning as an emblem of curiosity and adventure, referencing Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, where the white rabbit serves as Alice's guide into a world of wonder and mystery. Now Weiner sees herself as that rabbit, using her paintings to lead viewers down their own rabbit hole into the mysterious depths of cosmic reality, transforming from supporting player to main attraction in her own artistic narrative.
