Our opening season
2026–27

01 · Nov 26, 2026 – Feb 28, 2027

Seis años en Mérida

Beth Woronoff Brown · Living and improvising: paintings and ceramics, 2020–2026

Artist and architect; co-designer and co-director of CalleOuvert · bethworonoffbrown.com

Beth Woronoff Brown and David Brown moved to Mérida six years ago. This show features the work of the artist Beth Woronoff Brown, gathering the paintings and ceramics that six years in Mérida have produced, filling both gallery rooms, the hallway and the dining room.

Improbable Outcomes, Gallery Room 1. A series about the movements that bring us to where we are: everything that has happened, to the artist and to the world, as a chain of improbable events. The paintings are improbable too, improvised with nothing planned beyond an evolving palette, each one the product of hundreds of choices that could have gone slightly or radically differently, colors set vibrating against one another. The series holds both wonder and disturbance. Each painting is completed through performance, activated with the body and an improvised soundscape. At the opening, every visitor receives a postcard with a close-up of one painting and searches the rooms for its match.

Obliteration, Gallery Room 2. Large oil paintings made over older canvases, painted with short, rapid, heavily loaded strokes until the original image is gone. The earlier paintings remain underneath, the layers that made the new work possible.

Ceramics in the gallery gardens. Portraits of Women, abstract busts in torus shapes; Fruiting Bodies, masks with faces as mushroom caps; and Estela, the wake a body leaves as it passes.

Dog Portraits, dining room. Oil portraits of dogs, each seen from above, from its person’s point of view, on the patterned pasta tile floor where it lives. The series began two years ago with the dogs of the artist’s family and her own Mérida dogs, Paloma and Allman; Finger Toes and Dora were painted for friends and are on loan for the exhibition.

Shown with smaller paintings from Improbable Outcomes and Obliteration.

Smaller Obliteration paintings hang in the casitas all season.

Gallery Rooms 1 and 2, the hallway and the dining room through Jan 3; the ceramics in the gardens and paintings in the dining room through Feb 28

Opening: Thursday, November 26, 7:30–10 pm

02 · Jan 8, 2027 – Feb 28, 2027

Bob Parent: Jazz y protesta

Bob Parent-photographs

Bob Parent (1923–1987) photographed New York’s jazz world in the 1950s, working by available light in clubs and recording studios. His 1953 picture of Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus and Roy Haynes at the Open Door in Greenwich Village has been called the greatest photograph in jazz history, and his work ran in Life, DownBeat and Metronome and on album covers.

In the 1960s he turned to the civil rights movement and the protests of the era, including the 1963 March on Washington. The exhibition also includes his portraits of Mexican leaders.

Parent trained as an engineer; photography had been his hobby since 1937. In December 1945 he bought a used Speed Graphic and left engineering to photograph jazz, which he did for more than 35 years. He moved the flash away from the camera to light musicians the way the bandstand did, and from the 1950s worked almost entirely by existing light. In 1986 the Fotografiska Museet at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm showed his jazz photographs (April 12 – August 3, 1986).

“The personal photograph is my preference. I like to listen to jazz, so whenever I’m on the scene, I’m usually shooting, too.”

Bob Parent, “Some thoughts on jazz and photography,” Stockholm, 1986

Parent’s nephew, Dale Parent, has archived his uncle’s entire body of work, and this exhibition comes from that archive. Dale is also a lifelong friend of Beth Woronoff Brown; they met when they were eleven years old at the original Sky Rink in New York in the 1980s, where his mother was Beth’s skating teacher. He is bringing the prints to Mérida himself to install the show.

Prints courtesy of Dale Parent, from the archive of Bob Parent’s work.

Gallery Rooms 1 and 2 and the hallway through Jan 31; the hallway from Feb 1

Opening: Friday, January 8, 7:30–10 pm

03 · Feb 5, 2027 – Feb 28, 2027

Los Elementos de la Vida

Erik Slutsky-Paintings

erikslutsky.ca

Recent paintings by the Canadian artist: sun-drenched sanctuaries built from stone walls, open sky and moving water. Nude figures swim, bathe and rest, merging with the pools and walls around them, while borders of hot orange, yellow and pink carry the heat of the sun. The work evokes freedom, release and the joy of being alive.

Each painting begins as a small watercolor study, where the composition is settled: the leaves, the stone wall, the roofline, the color of the light. The study is then painted at full scale on unstretched canvas pinned to the studio wall, worked from a ladder, the big shapes laid in first and the figures last. The paintings in the show are being made now, for February.

Gallery Rooms 1 and 2

Opening: Friday, February 5, 7:30–10 pm