2025-2026 virtual Cohort
Fall 2025 | Winter 2026 | Spring 2026
Tuesdays via Zoom
With Canopy Mentor
Sharon Butler
Artist, Writer
Based in New York
Cohort Artists
The artists featured below were accepted to the 2025-2026 year of The Canopy Program. Together, with the guidance of their Faculty Mentor, Sharon Butler, the artists will develop their studio practice through critiques, Artist Talks + Q&As, seminars, and workshops. The Canopy Program is a year-long commitment, this Cohort will meet via Zoom for three consecutive semesters. Their experience will culminate with a pop-up Group Show in Chelsea (NYC).
Maya Ballen
DJ Barrett
Scott Bowen
Jennifer Chadwick
Élan Chardin
JBH Scholarship Recipient
Samantha Eckert
Ellen Goldschmidt
Jamie Madison
Michelle Tommasi
Cohort Exhibition
Each Canopy Cohort presents a culminating pop-up group exhibition.
Volcano Garden
Canopy Studio, 508 W. 26th St. #6E
June 25-27, 2026
Volcano Garden is a pop-up Group Exhibition celebrating the work of 10 artists who worked together for one year with their Canopy Mentor, Sharon Butler, as part of the 2025-26 Canopy Program. Breakthroughs big and small contribute to the vibrant group exhibition, Volcano Garden, featuring paintings, drawings, and plaster reliefs. What happens when artists embrace the challenge of creating something new by reimagining old habits of thinking, feeling and making? A year of intensive critiques, conversations, and studio work gave birth to ten separate answers. Each artist has made significant, sometimes hard-fought, changes to their oeuvre, which underscore the organic nature of growth and creation that erupts out of upheaval.
Guest Speakers + Visiting Critics
Each semester, Sharon Butler's Cohort received Artist Talks, Lectures, Workshops
and Visiting Critiques from an esteemed roster of Guest Artists + Speakers.
Mark Tribe
Guest Artist
Whitney Claflin
Guest Artist
Eric Hibit
Color Theory Lecture
Jennifer Coates
Art History Lecture
Kari Cholnoky
Artist Lecture + Visiting Critic
Tommy White
Artist Lecture + Visiting Critic
Adrienne Elise Tarver
Materials Workshop
Andrew Prayzner
Techincal Drawing Workshop
Amanda Nedham
Artist Statement Edits
Elyse DeRosia
Visiting Critic
Founder and Director of Derosia Gallery
Alec Petty
Visiting Critic
Founder and Director of King's Leap Projects
Will Hutnick
Professional Practices Speaker
Photo Credit: Walker Esner
Amir H. Fallah
Professional Practices Speaker
Canopy Mentor Sharon Butler
Drawing and writing form the backbone of Sharon Butler’s painting practice.
In 2007, fascinated by art, writing, and the possibility of new digital platforms, Sharon founded Two Coats of Paint, a blogazine that focuses primarily on painting in NYC. From 2016-20, she became intrigued with drawing on her phone, posting one digital drawing each day on Instagram. The visual language developed in these tiny digital images eventually became the basis for the paintings and drawings she continues to make today. Although the drawings are no longer posted on Instagram, a selection can be seen here.
Her solo exhibitions in New York at Jennifer Baahng Gallery, Theodore Art, and Pocket Utopia have been written about in The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, artcritical, The New Criterion, Time Out New York, Tussle, and New York Magazine. She has received awards and residencies from Creative Capital and the Warhol Foundation, Connecticut Commission on the Arts, Connecticut State University, Pollock Krasner Foundation, Yaddo, Blue Mountain Center, Pocket Utopia, and Counterproof Press at the University of Connecticut. In 2024 she had solo shows at the Sarah Moody Gallery of Art at the University of Alabama and Furnace Art on Paper Archive in Connecticut.
In 2007, fascinated by art, writing, and the possibility of new digital platforms, Sharon founded Two Coats of Paint, a blogazine that focuses primarily on painting in NYC. From 2016-20, she became intrigued with drawing on her phone, posting one digital drawing each day on Instagram. The visual language developed in these tiny digital images eventually became the basis for the paintings and drawings she continues to make today. Although the drawings are no longer posted on Instagram, a selection can be seen here.
Her solo exhibitions in New York at Jennifer Baahng Gallery, Theodore Art, and Pocket Utopia have been written about in The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, artcritical, The New Criterion, Time Out New York, Tussle, and New York Magazine. She has received awards and residencies from Creative Capital and the Warhol Foundation, Connecticut Commission on the Arts, Connecticut State University, Pollock Krasner Foundation, Yaddo, Blue Mountain Center, Pocket Utopia, and Counterproof Press at the University of Connecticut. In 2024 she had solo shows at the Sarah Moody Gallery of Art at the University of Alabama and Furnace Art on Paper Archive in Connecticut.
