Go, Figure!

Go, Figure!

A special exhibition developed for the Gallery of the WaterFire Arts Center, curated by Judith Tolnick Champa

October 15-November 8, 2026

Go, Figure! brings together six contemporary artists—Gabrielle Barzaghi, Leslie Fry, Claudia Olds Goldie, Zhexing Huang, Jazzmen Lee-Johnson, and Entang Wiharso—who share a fascination with the human figure as a way of thinking through identity, memory, and unease. Working across pastel, stoneware, ceramic, mixed media, and layered silkscreen, each artist treats the body less as a subject to depict than as a question to investigate.

Lee-Johnson excavates the layered history of the African diaspora and its bearing on Black communities today; Wiharso’s figures move mythically between his homelands of Java and Rhode Island; Barzaghi conjures invented characters rooted in her family’s White Russian heritage, and Fry’s fragmented ceramic limbs and Olds Goldie’s fragile, crack-prone forms both explore how bodies hold up under pressure — natural, constructed, and otherwise. Huang’s seated figures round out the show with quiet studies of resistance and defeat.

Together, the six artists don’t offer a single conclusion about what it means to be embodied right now — they’d rather contemplate uncanny tensions and, as the curator puts it, provoke you to debate, wonder, ponder and ultimately to “go figure.”

Opening Reception: Thursday, October 15, 6:00–9:00 PM
Performance-Lecture: 8:00 PM — A Speculative Jurisdiction (Part I), a performance-lecture by Hyperion Yvaire lo Saga, appearing in the invented persona of “Prof. Omeros Quinn”

Go, Figure! is the first half of a two-part project: the same six artists return this fall with an entirely different body of work in The Body Politic: Defiant Figuration Today, on view at the Nancy Devine Gallery in Warren, RI, November 21, 2026 – January 3, 2027, also curated by Tolnick Champa.
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 21, 4:00–7:00 PM
Performance-Lecture: 6:00 PM — A Speculative Jurisdiction (Part II)

Artist Statements