KATE BARBEE, MEGHAN BRADY, SUSAN CLASSEN SULLIVAN,
NICKOLA POTTINGER
NADA New York
The Starrett-Lehigh Building
New York, New York
Booth B11
May 13 - 17, 2026
Press Release
Mrs. is pleased to announce its participation in NADA New York, presenting works by Kate Barbee, Meghan Brady, Nickola Pottinger, and Susan Classen Sullivan.
This presentation highlights four individual practices united by a focus on layering, accumulation, and transformative processes. Spanning sculpture and painting, the participating artists employ additive techniques to build their compositions, integrating images, materials, and references over time. Each body of work emerges from a dialogue between personal experience and broader cultural frameworks.
Integrating hand embroidery with mixed media painting, collage, and drawing, Kate Barbee maintains an interdisciplinary approach. She constructs densely layered compositions through cycles of revision and rebuilding, allowing figures to surface from tactile, vibrant foundations of thread, paint, and fabric. These intuitive works are guided by a balance of material exploration and emotional immediacy.
Meghan Brady similarly approaches painting as a process of gathering and recombination. Her compositions feature a recurring vocabulary: tulips, crowns, suns, serpentine forms, and geometric shapes - that shifts and reconfigures across canvases. Built through bold color and gestural mark-making, her paintings feel assembled and improvisational, balancing structure with spontaneity.
Nickola Pottinger expands this additive methodology through her sculptural practice. Using handmade paper pulp, salvaged materials, and fragments of earlier works, she constructs richly textured forms that merge elements of drawing, collage, and object-making. Her process is defined by a continual interplay of building and removal, with surfaces that simultaneously conceal and reveal.
Working primarily in ceramic sculpture, Susan Classen Sullivan explores systems of growth, decay, and renewal through an equally iterative process. Her forms reference organic structures and unseen networks, built up through careful layering and material sensitivity. The resulting works evoke quiet, internal processes shaped by both environment and time.
Together, these artists foreground layering as a generative process, drawing from lived experience, cultural memory, and material exploration. Their works position the surface as a site of continuous construction, response, and transformation.
Kate Barbee (b. 1994) received her BFA in Studio Art from the University of Texas in 2017. She has exhibited at Albertz Benda and Sargent’s Daughters, New York, NY; Kohn Gallery and The Golden Gate Parlor, Los Angeles, CA; San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, San Luis Obispo, CA;, UQBAR Gallery, Berlin, Germany; Saatchi Gallery, London, U.K.; Royal Co-op, Visual Arts Center, Co-Lab Gallery, and Activation Gallery, Austin, TX; and Dollhouse Space, Chicago, IL. Barbee was an Artist-in-Residence at the Bed Stuy Art (Brooklyn, NY) in 2021. Her work is in the permanent collection at the Hill Art Foundation (New York, NY), Andrew Xue Collection (Singapore), and Danjuma Collection (London, UK). Her work has been reviewed in Arte Fuse, Mercer Contemporary, ODDA Magazine, Whitehot Magazine, Artnet, KCRW, Flaunt, Metal Magazine, Art and Cake, Art of Choice, L’Officiel Art, Harper’s Bazaar, VoyageLA, amongst others. She lives and works in New York, NY.
Meghan Brady (b. 1975) received her BA from Smith College and her MFA from Boston University. She was the 2017 recipient of the Ellis Beauregard Foundation Grant, a 2018 Hewnoaks Summer Fellow, as well as a MacDowell Fellow in 2019. Recent group exhibitions include The University of Tulsa, Tulsa, OK; Steel House Projects, Rockland, Perimeter Gallery, Belfast and Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, New York, Anderson Gallery, Buffalo, Foreland, Catskill, Mrs., Maspeth, and a residency/exhibition at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Brooklyn, NY. Recent solo exhibitions include The Pit, Los Angeles; Caldbeck Gallery, Rockland, ME; NADA House, Governors Island; Independent, NY, and Mrs., Maspeth, NY, which was reviewed by the New York Times. Her work resides in the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME, the U.S. Department of State, Arlington, VA, the Fidelity Investments Art Collection, Boston, MA, SoHo House Art Collection, Brooklyn, Collection Francis J. Greenburger, New York and New York Presbyterian Hospital Collection, New York, NY. Brady lives and works in Camden, ME.
Susan Classen Sullivan (b. 1958) earned a BA in Fine Art and Literature from Eastern Connecticut State University in 1979 and an MA from Wesleyan University in 1994. She has held solo exhibitions at A.D., New York, NY; The New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT; and Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT. Classen Sullivan’s work has been included in group exhibitions at The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Contemporary Art and Pump House Gallery, Hartford, CT; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; The Housatonic Museum of Art, Bridgeport, CT; The New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT; Ely Center of Contemporary Art and Yale Haskins Laboratories, New Haven, CT; Helena Anrather Gallery and Harkawik, New York, NY; Mrs. and Catbox Contemporary, Queens, NY; and Mill Pond Gallery, Saint James, NY. She received a Connecticut Commission on Arts Grant and was selected as a fellowship artist for The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. Her work is part of the collection of the New Britain Museum of American Art. The artist continues to live and work in Connecticut.
Nickola Pottinger (b. 1986) was raised in Brooklyn and went on to earn her BFA from The Cooper Union in 2008. Recent group exhibitions include P·P·O·W, Nicola Vassell, Chapter NY, Sergeant’s Daughters, New Museum, and CANADA, New York, NY; Ortega y Gasset Projects and Swivel Gallery, Brooklyn, New York, NY; Rebecca Camacho, San Francisco, CA; Cooper Cole, Toronto, CN; Galerie Julien Cadet, Paris, FR; and the Galveston Artist Residency, TX. Previous solo exhibitions include Parker Gallery, Los Angeles; Deanna Evans Projects, New York and The Armory Show, New York, NY. She had her first solo exhibition with Mrs. in January 2024 (reviewed by the New York Times) which was preceded by a solo presentation at Art Basel Miami Beach, 2023. Pottinger was the subject of a solo exhibition at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT in 2025. Pottinger is included in the group exhibition Greater New York at MoMA PS1, on view through August 2026. The artist continues to live and work in Brooklyn, NY. She has been represented by Mrs. since 2025.
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