Mother and Son Olive Ayhens and Ezra Johnson Share the Walls in Bookstein Projects' 'Call Mom'

Bookstein Projects in New York is showing "Call Mom: Olive Ayhens and Ezra Johnson," a two-person exhibition of paintings and works on paper by a mother and her son, through October 23, 2026. The show opened with a reception on Thursday, September 17.

Ayhens presents recent paintings and watercolors that continue to draw on her travels, among them a recent residency in New Orleans. Swamp creatures, antebellum architecture and Indigenous ceremonial costume appear within imagined landscapes in intense color, as in "Saint Joseph's Indians and a Swamp" (2025), an oil on canvas. Three new watercolors offer kaleidoscopic city views packed with invented detail. According to the gallery, color and form in her work serve to shape an underlying formal structure rather than to record a scene directly.

Johnson's new paintings share that saturated, dreamlike palette but turn to the artist's studio, domestic life and immediate family. In "The Mirror" (2026), painted in Flashe, acrylic and oil on linen, the image contains another picture: a reflection that appears to show the artist painting his son, who sits at a table strewn with paint, tape and other materials. Seen alongside his mother's work, the gallery suggests, the painting raises the idea of a family's artistic legacy passing to a new generation.

Ayhens was born in Oakland, California, and earned her BFA and MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Joan Mitchell grant, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation award and an Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation grant. She has held residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, the Djerassi and Roswell programs and the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, among others, most recently at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans. She lives and works in New York.

Johnson was born in 1975 in Wenatchee, Washington, received his BFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 2000 and his MFA from Hunter College in 2006. His work has appeared in exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, SITE Santa Fe, the Institute for Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, the Tampa Museum of Art and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Querétaro / Fundación AMMA, and is held in collections including the Hammer Museum, the Fondation Louis Vuitton and the Rubell Museum. He lives and works in Tampa, Florida.