Flushing Town Hall presents Portraits of America, a group photography exhibition bringing together portraits of individuals whose distinct histories, cultural backgrounds, and lived experiences reflect the complex and continually evolving idea of American identity.

Through photography, the exhibition considers a question that is at once personal and collective: What does it mean to be American today?

Rather than offering a singular image or definition, Portraits of America presents a multiplicity of faces and experiences. The individuals depicted come from different generations, communities, cultural backgrounds, and personal histories, yet each occupies a place within the larger American landscape.

Portraiture has long functioned as both a personal record and a social document. In this exhibition, the camera becomes a space of encounter—inviting viewers to pause before another person, to observe a face, gesture, posture, or surrounding, and to consider the assumptions we carry about identity and belonging.

Here, “American” is not presented as a fixed or easily defined identity. It emerges through migration and ancestry, memory and family, geography and community, as well as through the everyday experiences that shape how individuals understand themselves and how they are perceived by others.

Presented in Queens—a borough shaped by generations of migration and cultural coexistence—the exhibition takes on particular resonance. These individual portraits collectively suggest a broader portrait of America: layered, varied, continually changing, and impossible to contain within a single image.

Portraits of America does not attempt to define what an American looks like. Instead, it asks us to look more closely at the people who make up the country—and at the many different stories contained within the word American.

This exhibition grows from an artist’s book of cyanotype photograms that explores time across human, botanical, and geologic scales. Recurring forms—a house, phases of the moon, and common garden plants—trace cycles of growth, memory, transformation, and return.

Expanding on the visual and conceptual language first developed in the book, the exhibition brings together cyanotype, monotype, and collage works that consider how individual experience exists within much larger natural rhythms. Moving between the intimate and the expansive, the works invite viewers to reflect on the interconnectedness of humans and the natural world, and on the ways our lives are shaped by cycles of time that extend far beyond our immediate perception.

This exhibition brings together works from Ann Cofta’s ongoing exploration of the relationship between architecture, time, and memory. Moving across textiles, relief sculpture, and artist books, Cofta reinterprets the cityscape through a range of materials, forms, and visual approaches.

Soft patterned fabrics become clusters of buildings through hand embroidery and quilting, while sculptural smokestacks and billowing clouds take shape as solid papier-mâché reliefs. The imagery appears again in miniature painted tunnel and accordion books, where the city is compressed into intimate, unfolding structures.

Through repetition and material transformation, Cofta reflects on how familiar urban forms become embedded in memory, shifting between the architectural, the tactile, and the personal.

For In the Shadow of the Red Sun, Weihui Lu brings together a series of installation residues—hand-bound artist books, photographs, and vessels containing gathered and preserved water. Each work carries the trace of a past ephemeral action while taking on a new presence within the exhibition.

Through these quiet, minimal gestures, Lu draws distant landscapes into the gallery, from her embodied engagements with Sawkill Creek to her research into New York City’s reservoir system. Water, image, object, and archive become interconnected records of place, movement, and memory.

Together, the works resist the demands of fixed outcomes and continuous production, moving instead toward a more organic and ongoing sense of time. Process and finished work intermingle, while the boundaries between past and present, memory and lived experience, gradually become more porous.

Chris’s solo exhibition explores the evanescence of memory—the way a thought, person, place, or experience can briefly consume our attention before gradually receding, only to resurface when unexpectedly triggered. Inspired by landscape, the works are not representations of specific locations but meditations on the residual memories, sensations, and emotions that remain after encountering them. Each image becomes a space where memory shifts between presence and absence, clarity and disappearance.

Working intuitively, Chris often begins with an idea or intention but allows the process itself to guide the work toward an uncertain outcome. This openness is central to the exhibition, which brings together a series of Solarplate etchings and wet cyanotypes, two processes shaped by sunlight, water, time, and chance.

Solarplate etching offers a less-toxic approach to printmaking, using sunlight or UV light to expose and develop the printing plate. Chris works with non-toxic inks and frequently incorporates hand-dyed papers, adding layers of color, texture, and material variation. Wet cyanotype, a camera-less photographic process, allows for an even more spontaneous and expressive approach. Natural materials, spices, and everyday household elements interact with sensitized paper, sunlight, and water to produce unpredictable traces, washes, and impressions.

This exhibition presents a series of oil paintings on three-dimensional panels accompanied by site-responsive installation elements. Drawing from Kelly Olshan’s ongoing exploration of aspiration, anxiety, and the pursuit of an idealized elsewhere, the works create imagined landscapes in which abstracted staircases, shifting horizons, and impossible pathways suggest destinations that remain just out of reach.

Extending beyond the traditional picture plane, the dimensional paintings and installation elements invite viewers to physically navigate the space while considering the tension between striving and arrival. Through these fragmented yet interconnected environments, Olshan reflects on our tendency to project fulfillment into the future—and on the elusive nature of the places, goals, and versions of ourselves we continually pursue.