Lines are marked, yet we are all outsiders

Natessa Amin - Kathleen Eastwood-Riaño - Leslie Friedman - Vincent Hron - Jody Joyner - Henry Morales - Cobi Moules - Tania Qurashi - Peter Sparber - Jonathan Wahl

JUNE 26 - JULY 24, 2026 

Opening Reception, Friday, June 26 | 6 - 8 PM. 

Pentimenti presents Lines are marked, yet we are all outsiders, a group exhibition featuring 10 artists from across Pennsylvania. As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, the exhibition celebrates the Commonwealth's artistic community while reflecting on Pennsylvania's cultural landscape through a contemporary lens.

Bringing together artists from diverse backgrounds and across generations, Lines are marked, yet we are all outsiders explores the boundaries- geographic, social, political and personal, that shape our understanding of place and belonging today. While Pennsylvania occupies a central place in the nation's history, the exhibition reflects on how identity is continually formed through individual experience. Collectively, these works present a multifaceted portrait of contemporary artists living in Pennsylvania, revealing the many perspectives that coexist within a shared region.

To accompany the exhibition, each artist has been invited to contribute a written reflection on their work, providing insight into the ideas, experiences, and questions that inform their artistic practice.

NATESSA AMIN 

“These works move between painting, textile logic, and drawing in space. The two  paintings draw from early American coverlets alongside South Asian ornamental traditions, using repeated floral and geometric motifs to think through inheritance, migration, and memory. Line Dance extends those rhythms into sculpture, translating pattern into a tactile, haptic register where painting enters space and line becomes bodily. Across the works, ornament functions as a language of orientation, care, and continuity carried across generations, materials, and forms.”

— Natessa Amin

KATHLEEN EASTWOOD-RIAÑO 

“The two paintings in this exhibition represent parallel practices that inform on another. Suegritos explores psychology, family relationships, and memory through layered compositions. May is part of an observational series I work on during a specific time period. If the work is not finished within that season, I wait until the following year to complete it. Though one body of work is more conceptually focused and the other more observational, both investigate color, relationships, spatial complexity.”

— Kathleen Eastwood-Riaño

LESLIE FRIEDMAN 

“Smoked Whitefish and Yaddah Floor use silkscreen, laser-cut acrylic, and printed vinyl tile to drift between printmaking and sculpture. Glittering fish hang in suspended formation, at once humorous, seductive, and faintly uncanny, drawing from Jewish food traditions, drag vernacular, and the uneasy choreography of belonging. Repeating stars, nuts, and bolts spread across the floor like traces of a fictional social order. Built through accumulation and pattern, the works use shine, excess, and multiplicity to ask how identities are performed, shared, consumed, and kept at the edges of community.”

— Leslie Friedman

VINCENT HRON

“My training emphasized the importance of form, as well as the philosophy and history of art. The painting Common Ground reflects on our increasingly divided culture. In it, I synthesize two subjects that I have been working with for many years – playgrounds and skyscapes to encourage viewers to appreciate that though we may be looking in opposing directions we are essentially standing in the same place sharing common interests.”

— Vincent Hron 

JODY JOYNER

“I make sculptures from infrastructural objects like shipping pallets and storage crates. Produced as a byproduct of the global supply chain, packaging is fascinating to me in the way it’s been relegated to a secondary status– only existing to support and protect more precious objects, rarely the thing to be beheld itself. Through a kind of pseudo-alchemy, I transform discarded infrastructural objects with processes like casting, flocking, and UV printing to create novel forms.”

— Jody Joyner 

HENRY MORALES 

“The painting Peekaboo captures an everyday moment in my relatives’ kitchen, a space filled with warmth, routine, and play. It reflects the ways my extended family, living in different parts of the U.S., create comfort and connection through shared meals and laughter. I combine dirt with oil and acrylic paint to reference the land my loved ones inhabit, along with fragments of newspaper clippings attached along the sides of the work. These clippings echo the current political climate surrounding immigration, ICE raids, birthright citizenship, and racial profiling in the U.S. Through these layers, a familiar domestic scene becomes a meditation on care, resilience, and the act of sustaining joy and belonging within a country that often questions our right to be here.”

— Henry Morales

COBI MOULES

“We are living in a world reminiscent of a 1980s horror film, where the trans figure is cast as an alien presence to be surveilled, legislated, and erased. What we are experiencing today is just one example within a long history of the “other” being represented through fear and degradation. My work draws on this history and utilizes the visual language of horror and science fiction to reframe the queer body as one that, under constant threat, adapts, endures, and is insistently alive.”

— Cobi Moules

TANIA QURASHI

“This series of drawings and a painting focuses on objects from my parents' homelands, Pakistan and Guatemala, that carry layered histories of place and memory. The compositions draw from manuscript painting and still life traditions, allowing me to explore the relationship between space and object. I am particularly interested in how objects can be subtly personified, and become placeholders for diasporic experiences.”

— Tania Qurashi

PETER SPARBER

“The drawings are part of a series exploring the theater of celebrity through a recurring structure: the celebrity, their protectors, the press, and the audience...visible or implied. The celebrity may be political, cultural, or criminal, but the dynamics remain constant. We, the audience, are both observers and participants, drawn by proximity to power, glamour, or notoriety. In this ecosystem, attention becomes currency: our gaze, clicks, and fascination feed a system in which fame is produced, consumed, and monetized.”

— Peter Sparber

JONATHAN WAHL 

“Jonathan Wahl’s current work is the result of his ongoing fascination with American Tinware. Tin objects of the colonial period were not just functional objects but tools that enabled our ‘Manifest Density” and the establishment of the United States. The tin lantern like the Conestoga wagon were the means that allowed the spread the ideals of “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” and the creation of the American Republic. Utilizing the same means of manufacture and inspired by the original forms from the colonial period Wahl creates contemporary pieces to recontextualize the past in the present.

The work parallels the current political and cultural currents in the United States where Democratic, Revolutionary and Humanist ideals are morphed, subverted and evolve as our nation does. The function of the objects Wahl creates is not always clear, too many handles, too small a spout, an odd color but a familiar form, text that seems misleading or incomplete. The objects evoke familiarity, humble tools from a bygone past yet still recognizable. Wahl hopes these pieces illicit the same strange experience he feels today as an American, that things seem in flux, changing without a definitive direction, that cultural forces are beyond our control, or with outcome that is vaguely associated with the ideals explicit in our founding documents.” 

— Jonathan Wahl

For all inquiries, please contact us at mail@pentimenti.com or +1 (215) 625-9990.

ADDITIONAL EVENT | First Friday/Gallery Walk: Friday, July 3, 5 - 8 PM.

SUMMER HOURS: Tuesday – Friday, 10 AM – 5 PM; Saturday by appointment.